Riskwork: Essays on the Organizational Life of Risk Management

This collection of essays deals with the situated management of risk in a wide variety of organizational settings - aviation, mental health, railway project management, energy, toy manufacture, financial services, chemicals regulation, and NGOs. Each chapter connects the analysis of risk studies with critical themes in organization studies more generally based on access to, and observations of, actors in the field. The emphasis in these contributions is upon the variety of ways in which organizational actors, in combination with a range of material technologies and artefacts, 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 whole is focused on the situationally specific character of routine risk management work. It emerges that this riskwork is highly varied, entangled with material artefacts 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. Contributors to this volume - Asa Boholm is Professor of Social Anthropology at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden Herve Corvellec is Professor of Business Administration, Department of Service Management and Service Studies, Lund University, Sweden David Demortain is an INRA researcher at LISIS (Laboratoire Interdiscipinaire Sciences Innovations Societe), a joint centre of the French Institut National de la Recherche Agronomique (INRA), Universite Paris-Est Marne-la-Vallee (UPEM) and Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS). Renuka Fernando obtained a PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science, and is Head of Financial Governance at the British Council, London, UK Michael D Fischer is Senior Research Fellow in Organisational Behaviour and Leadership, University of Melbourne, Australia, and University of Oxford, UK. Matthew Hall is Associate Professor in Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Cynthia Hardy is Professor of Management at the University of Melbourne, Australia Silvia Jordan is Associate Professor of Accounting, University of Innsbruck, Austria Lene Jorgensen is a PhD candidate at the University of Stavanger, Norway Veronique Labelle is a PhD candidate at HEC Montreal, Canada Steve Maguire is Professor of Strategy and Organization at McGill University, Canada Gerry McGivern is Professor of Organisational Analysis at Warwick Business School, UK Anette Mikes is Professor of Accounting at HEC Lausanne, Switzerland Tommaso Palermo is Lecturer in Accounting, London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Brian Pentland is Professor of Accounting and Information Systems at Michigan State University, USA Michael Power is Professor of Accounting at the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK Linda Rouleau is Professor in the Department of Management, HEC Montreal, Canada Zsuzsanna Vargha is Lecturer in Accounting and Organization at the University of Leicester, UK Maria Zhivitskaya obtained her PhD from the London School of Economics and Political Science and joined Goldman Sachs in 2016.