The risk management of nothing
Abstract
This essay challenges core elements of enterprise risk management (ERM) and suggests that an impoverished conception of 'risk appetite' is part of the 'intellectual failure' at the heart of the financial crisis. Regulators, senior management and boards must understand risk appetite more as the consequence of a dynamic organizational process involving values as much as metrics. In addition, ERM has operated as a boundary preserving model of risk management subject to the 'logic of the audit trail', rather than a boundary challenging practice which confronts and addresses the complex realities of interconnectedness. The security provided by ERM is at best limited to certain states of the world and at worst it is illusory - the risk management of nothing. In contrast, Business continuity management (BCM) may provide clues about how risk management might be reconstructed.Download Info
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Bibliographic Info
Article provided by Elsevier in its journal Accounting, Organizations and Society.
Volume (Year): 34 (2009)
Issue (Month): 6-7 (August)
Pages: 849-855
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Web page: http://www.elsevier.com/locate/aos
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- Whitley, Richard, 1986. "The transformation of business finance into financial economics: The roles of academic expansion and changes in U.S. capital markets," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 11(2), pages 171-192, March.
- Pentland, Brian T., 1993. "Getting comfortable with the numbers: Auditing and the micro-production of macro-order," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 18(7-8), pages 605-620.
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Citations
Citations are extracted by the CitEc Project, subscribe to its RSS feed for this item.Cited by:
- Arena, Marika & Arnaboldi, Michela & Azzone, Giovanni, 2010. "The organizational dynamics of Enterprise Risk Management," Accounting, Organizations and Society, Elsevier, vol. 35(7), pages 659-675, October.
- Blome, Constantin & Schoenherr, Tobias, 2011. "Supply chain risk management in financial crises--A multiple case-study approach," International Journal of Production Economics, Elsevier, vol. 134(1), pages 43-57, November.
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