300312 Risk and Organisation (S) (WiSe 2012/2013)

Over the last decade the ideas, concepts and tools of risk management have come to colonise the way that organisations across the private and public sectors increasingly manage an ever-expanding range of potential adverse outcomes associated with their activities. No longer confined to managing harms to human health and safety or financial loss, there now seems to be no limit to the range of adverse outcomes that are now explicitly conceived as risks to be managed, be they operational risks, security risks, legal risks, reputational risks and ethical risks to name just a few.

The management of potential adverse outcomes is nothing new for organisations. What is new, however, is the way in which risk management has emerged as a distinctive discipline with a particular set of normative assumptions for framing, analysing and responding to information about potential adverse events. Risk management is premised on the simple idea that it is sub-optimal to seek to eliminate all potential adverse outcomes. It sets out to define optimal levels of adverse outcomes, based on an assessment of their probability and impact, and then focuses management efforts on those risks that are judged unacceptable.

Risk management methods are widely promulgated as efficient, rational and universally applicable means for challenging organisational practices in ways that manage their inevitable downsides without stifling entrepreneurialism. However, relatively little attention (with a number of notable exceptions) has been paid to the extent to which risk ideas are able to challenge organisational practice. Yet there are good reasons to expect that risk management as a means of organisational challenge may have only limited impact. Therefore, in this seminar we discuss that gap by examining the literature on risk management and their impacts on organisations.

Bibliography

Perrow C. (1984) Normal Accidents. Living with High-Risk Technologies. New York: Basic Books
Luhmann, Niklas (2008) Risk A sociological Theory. New Brunswick. Aldine Transcation (chapter 10)