Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management

Summary

This collection of essays deals with the situated management of risk in a wide variety of organizational settings. The emphasis in these contributions is upon the variety of ways in which organizational actors, in combination with a range of material technologies and artifacts, 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 a whole is focused on the situationally specific character of routine risk management work. It emerges that this riskwork is highly varied, entangled with material artifacts which represent and construct risks and, importantly, is not confined to formal risk management departments or personnel. Each chapter suggests 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.