Abstract: The recent years' safety accidents in chain-style industrial clusters highlight the seriousness of unsafe production behaviours, and governing the problem is a complex systems engineering that needs to take account of the particularity of production safety in chain-style industrial clusters, so the first step is to clarify the mechanism of how the unsafe production behaviours occur. Based on in-depth interviews, grounded theory research method and behavioural decision theory, this study builds a mechanism model to show how the unsafe production behaviours occur in a chain-style industrial cluster that multi-agents participate, and discusses the responsibilities of each agent and the underlying influence mechanism. The model covers such main participants as safety-supervising government departments, safety service agencies, the public and media, management committee of cluster, SMEs and leading enterprises. Results show that, based on their own behavioural intention, each agent is affected by different individual factors and environmental factors. They all end up choosing negative behavioural strategies and their interactions with each other finally result in the unsafe production behaviours across the industrial cluster. According to the forming mechanism model, this paper puts forward a governance solution, which relies on strengthened supervision by safety-supervising government departments and all participants' safety motivations stimulated through various efforts to promote the transformation the governance only by the government to the governance by multi-agents, thus achieving constructive interactions.

Key words: chain-style industrial cluster, production safety, unsafe behaviour, forming mechanism, grounded theory