Organizational Encounters with Risk

Cambridge University Press, 12/1/2005
EAN 9780521846806, ISBN10: 0521846803

Hardcover, 284 pages, 22.9 x 15.2 x 1.9 cm
Language: English
Originally published in English

Organizational encounters with risk range from errors and anomalies to outright disasters. In a world of increasing interdependence and technological sophistication, the problem of understanding and managing such risks has grown ever more complex. Organizations and their participants must often reform and reorganise themselves in response to major events and crises, dealing with the paradox of managing the potentially unmanageable. Organizational responses are influenced by many factors, such as the representational capacity of information systems and concerns with legal liability. In this collection, leading experts on risk management from a variety of disciplines address these complex features of organizational encounters with risk. They raise critical questions about how risk can be understood and conceived by organizations, and whether it can be 'managed' in any realistic sense at all. This book is an important reminder that the organisational management of risk involves much more than the cool application of statistical method.

Acknowledgements
1. Organizational encounters with risk
an introduction Bridget Hutter and Michael Power
2. Organizational rituals of risk and error Diane Vaughan
3. 'Ways of seeing'
understandings of risk in organisational settings Bridget Hutter
4. Risk and rules
the 'legalization' of medicine Carol A. Heimer, Juleigh Coleman Petty and Rebecca J. Culyba
5. Organizational responses to risk
the rise of the Chief Risk Officer Michael Power
6. Incentives, risk and accountability in organizations Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak
7. Mathematizing risk
models, arbitrage and crises Donald MacKenzie
8. Interdependencies within an organization Howard Kunreuther and Geoffrey Heal
9. Restoring reason
causal narratives and political culture Sheila Jasanoff
Bibliography
Index.

'Organizational Encounters with Risk addresses the paradox of the 21st century: how organizations that enhance our capacity to govern uncertainty simultaneously produce new uncertainties that demand innovative approaches to risk and regulation. While grounding their analyses in real-world organizational encounters with risk, the distinguished contributors to this volume also significantly advance theories of uncertainty, risk and regulation.' Richard Ericson, University of Toronto