Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management

This collection of essays deals with the situated management of risk in a wide variety of organizational settings – aviation, mental health, railway project management, energy, toy manufacture, financial services, chemicals regulation, and NGOs. Each chapter connects the analysis of risk studies with critical themes in organization studies more generally based on access to, and observations of, actors in the field. The emphasis in these contributions is upon the variety of ways in which organizational actors, in combination with a range of material technologies and artefacts, such as safety reporting systems, risk maps and key risk indicators, accomplish and make sense of the normal work of managing risk – riskwork.

In contrast to a preoccupation with disasters and accidents after the event, the volume as whole is focused on the situationally specific character of routine risk management work. It emerges that this riskwork is highly varied, entangled with material artefacts which represent and construct risks and, importantly, is not confined to formal risk management departments or personnel. Each chapter suggest that the distributed nature of this riskwork lives uneasily with formalized risk management protocols and accountability requirements. In addition, riskwork as an organizational process makes contested issues of identity and values readily visible. These ‘back stage/back office’ encounters with risk are revealed as being as much emotional as they are rationally calculative. Overall, the collection combines constructivist sensibilities about risk objects with a micro-sociological orientation to the study of organizations.

Table of Contents

Chapter 1: The Work Of Making Risk Frameworks
Chapter 2: Risk Mapping: Day-To-Day Riskwork In Inter-Organizational Project Management
Chapter 3: Beyond The Headlines: Day-To-Day Practices Of Risk Measurement And Management In A Non-Governmental Organization
Chapter 4: The Work Of Risk Oversight
Chapter 5: The Role Of Valuation Practices For Risk Identification
Chapter 6: Riskwork: Three Scenarios From A Study Of Industrial Chemicals In Canada
Chapter 7: Technoculture: Risk Reporting And Analysis At A Large Airline
Chapter 8: Conversation Stoppers: Constructing Consumer Attitudes To Risk In Uk Wealth Management
Chapter 9: Risk And Routine In The Digitized World
Chapter 10: Doing Institutional Riskwork In A Mental Health Hospital
Chapter 11: Affective Overflows In Clinical Riskwork
Chapter 12: The Triumph Of The Humble Chief Risk Officer