On ‘risk work’: Professional discourse, accountability, and everyday action

Abstract

In recent years a technical discourse of risk has assumed the status of a universal basis for governance and administrative practice in both private and public sector organizations within Britain, the United States, and a number of other Western countries. The re-framing of pre-existing organizational concerns in terms of risk categories reflects an underlying bureaucratic concern with the accountable and cost-effective management of contingency. This paper examines some of the diversity of real-world features of the penetration of spheres of professional practice by this new discourse of risk. While risk-based practice is advocated by rhetorics that stress the promotion of administrative efficiency, in the real world it is possible to observe a wide variety of situationally-specific risk-related practices. This paper argues that ‘risk work’ in organizational settings offers especially useful resources that allow actors to pursue such diverse agendas, while also providing an accounting mechanism that allows them to legitimate such activity.

Keywords:

• Contingency
• organizations
• micro-politics
• informal logics
• corporate governance
• risk-based regulation

Acknowledgements

As noted in the endnotes, this paper draws on research supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (ESRC) and the Leverhulme Trust. It additionally draws on work supported by ESRC award L211252044. Earlier versions of parts of the paper were presented to the ESRC Risk and Human Behaviour Programme conferences in 1999 and 2000, Sociolinguistics Symposium 14 in Gent in April 2002, and to the Society for Risk Analysis World Risk Congress in Brussels in June 2003. I am most grateful for the help and advice of numerous ‘risk professionals’, who have been generous with their time, and I wish to express special thanks to Nick Chown, Adrian Cohen, David Gamble, Shelagh Molloy, Lucy Neville-Rolfe, Andrew Sharpe, Sir Frederick Warner, and Andy Weyman. Others, who provided access to the data cited in this paper, have not been named here, but I am of course enormously grateful for their help. Needless to say, I absolve them all of any responsibility for my conclusions. Many colleagues have provided useful comments and conversations during the extended gestation of this paper, and I am pleased to thank in particular Hazel Kemshall, Jöerg Niewöhner, Lindsay Prior, Mike Reed, Jonathan Rosenhead, the late Jonathan Sime, and Colin Young. I am particularly indebted to Tim O'Riordan and John Walls for helpful discussions of this material, and to Mick Bloor, William Housley, and Anne Murcott, who kindly provided detailed comments on an earlier version of the text. Finally, I am most grateful to the referees for their observations.

Notes

1 Towards a Non-Reductionist Risk Analysis, supported by the Economic and Social Research Council (award L211272006). More details may be obtained from the author.

2 The Understanding Risk programme, supported by the Leverhulme Trust. More details may be found at http://www.uea.ac.uk/env/pur.