Making Sense of Risk—A Sociological Perspective on the Management of Risk

This article describes how risk has been conceptualized in the business and organizational literature through four distinct transformations: from the techno‐scientific perspective to the cognitive, the social‐cultural, and, finally, to the constructionist perspective. Each domain conceptualizes risk in different ways, as organizations have found it difficult to understand and mitigate using the risk management tools available. Conceptualizing risk as sensemaking becomes relevant due to the complexity of information available to the risk manager, and, coupled with time constraints, this means that risk managers increasingly rely on making sense of possible threats rather than on the accuracy of the information received. This shift presents four contributions to the current literature. First, it suggests that the role of risk management is shifting from being technical in nature to being about risk sensemaking, where the manager engages with the social and physical environment with the aim of acquiring cues that could indicate how future events will unfold. Second, a sensemaking perspective implies a shift in the use of risk management systems from being “containers” of knowledge about past risk events to lending legitimacy to the plausibility of the success of future decisions. Third, the role of the risk manager in managing individual risks changes and becomes one of managing everything using the social networks and systems available as indicators of future risk events. Finally, the risk manager and the systems he or she relies upon are regarded as a source of risk in themselves as both act as gatekeepers for organizational risk decision making.