The interdiscursive appeal of risk matrices: Collective symbols, flexibility normalism and the interplay of ‘risk’ and ‘uncertainty’

In this paper, we investigate risk matrices as an increasingly popular technology of risk assessment and visualization. Drawing on governmentality studies and Jürgen Link's interdiscourse analysis, we analyze the interdiscursive character of risk matrices, the ways in which they appeal to a variety of users in different organizational contexts and disciplines and act as technologies that mediate between specialized and everyday discourses. We illustrate the interdiscursive appeal of risk matrices in terms of the ways in which they have been promoted as functional in different disciplines and application contexts, and we analyze the specific symbolism engaged by risk matrices in these different discursive contexts. Based on Link's interdiscourse theory, we argue that risk matrices ‘speak to’ the user and work as application templates for processes of identification through semantic connotations and analogies that go far beyond concerns with precise measurement and mathematically correct manipulation of risk-related data. Risk matrices become ‘understood’ and are powerful precisely because they point beyond the specific events and processes represented on the matrix. As such, the widespread appeal of risk matrices is fundamentally constituted through their symbolic connotations by means of which complex and potentially not well understood processes come to appear simple, imaginable and ‘manageable’. More broadly, Link's interdiscourse theory contributes a semantic analysis to governmentality studies in accounting. It draws attention to the semantic connotations and analogies by means of which visual technologies of government mediate between broader programmatic ideas and the practices of local users. Furthermore, this analysis contributes to the debate on the visual nature of calculative inscriptions, illustrating how specific visual elements of risk matrix inscriptions relate to their (inter-)discursive promotion and proliferation, and it discusses how ideals of ‘judgment’, in combination with ideals of algorithmic formulation, are at play in the promotion of calculative inscription devices.