Organizational Encounters With Risk

by Edited by Bridget Hutter , Michael Power

• ISBN13: 9780521609289
• ISBN10: 0521609283
• Format: Paperback
• Copyright: 2006-01-09
• Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Summary

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.

Table of Contents

List of tables	vii
Notes on contributors	viii
Acknowledgements	xii
List of abbreviations and acronyms	xiii
1 Organizational encounters with risk: an introduction
Bridget Hutter and Michael Power	1	(32)
2 Organizational rituals of risk and error
Diane Vaughan	33	(34)
3 'Ways of seeing': understandings of risk in organizational settings
Bridget M. Hutter	67	(25)
4 Risk and rules: the 'legalization' of medicine
Carol A. Hemmer, JuLeigh Coleman Petty and Rebecca J. Culyba	92	(40)
5 Organizational responses to risk: the rise of the chief risk officer
Michael Power	132	(17)
6 Incentives, risk and accountability in organizations
Timothy Besley and Maitreesh Ghatak	149	(18)
7 Mathematizing risk: models, arbitrage and crises
Donald MacKenzie	167	(23)
8 Interdependencies within an organization
Howard Kunreuther and Geoffrey Heal	190	(19)
9 Restoring reason: causal narratives and political culture
Sheila Jasanoff	209	(24)
Bibliography	233	(24)
Name index	257	(5)
Subject index	262