Organizational Encounters with Risk

Organizational encounters with risk range from errors and anomalies to outright disasters. This collection of essays addresses the varied ways in which modern organisations understand, process and deal with risk. Contributions by leading experts on risk management illustrate the complex organisational and social dimension of risk management, reminding the readers that it is much more than the application of technique.

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 range from errors and anomalies to outright disasters. This 2005 collection of essays addresses the varied ways in which modern organisations process and deal with risk. Contributions by leading experts on risk management raise critical questions about how risk can be understood and conceived by organisations.

Bridget Hutter is Peacock Chair of Risk Management at the LSE and Director of the Centre for Analysis of Risk and Regulation (CARR) at the London School of Economics.
Michael Power is Professor of Accounting and a Director of the ESRC Centre for the Analysis of Risk and Regulations (CARR) at the London School of Economics.