Organizational Encounters With Risk

by Edited by Bridget Hutter , Michael Power

• ISBN13: 9780521846806
• ISBN10: 0521846803
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2005-12-26
• 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
Organizational encounters with risk: an introduction	1	(32)
Bridget Hutter
Michael Power
Organizational rituals of risk and error	33	(34)
Diane Vaughan
`Ways of seeing': understandings of risk in organizational settings	67	(25)
Bridget M. Hutter
Risk and rules: the `legalization' of medicine	92	(40)
Carol A. Heimer
JuLeigh Coleman Petty
Rebecca J. Culyba
Organizational responses to risk: the rise of the chief risk officer	132	(17)
Michael Power
Incentives, risk and accountability in organizations	149	(18)
Timothy Besley
Maitreesh Ghatak
Mathematizing risk: models, arbitrage and crises	167	(23)
Donald MacKenzie
Interdependencies within an organization	190	(19)
Howard Kunreuther
Geoffrey Heal
Restoring reason: causal narratives and political culture	209	(24)
Sheila Jasanoff
Bibliography	233	(24)
Name index	257	(5)
Subject index	262