300032 Risk Governance and Organisations (S) (SoSe 2008)

The emergence of risk as an organising concept for regulation and governance has been the subject of considerable debate in recent sociological and political publications; most notably in relation to Beck's Risk Society. However, contemporary preoccupations with risk are driven less by a changing distribution of real, or imagined, ills in society, than by a changing distribution of ills in governance. The inevitable difficulties of managing threats to society create threats to organisations managing those institutional risks and hence shape organisations accordingly.
Potential for failure has always been part of governance, but contemporary pressures towards greater coherence, transparency and accountability have amplified institutional risks by exposing the practical limits of governance. Framing the objects of governance in terms of risk, however, provides a way of reflexively managing the associated institutional threats by explicitly anticipating the practical limits of governance within probabilistic calculations of success and failure (Rothstein et al. 2006).

The seminar discusses how the institutional dynamics of contemporary governance can lead to a phenomenon of risk colonisation, whereby risk increasingly defines the object, methods and rationale of governance. An aspect of risk governance frequently overlooked concerns the effects risk governance has on organisations, in particular regulatory agencies (Everson et al 1996). After a general introduction in theories and empirical studies on risk governance, case studies on regulatory agencies such as the Financial Services Authority, the Food Standard Agencies and international agencies illustrate how institutional risks shape and alter the organisational structures and lead to an innovative design of organisational risk management (e.g. Black 2005).

Bibliography

Black, J. (2005) Managing regulatory risk. The development of risk based regulation. In Public Law: 512 - 549
Everson M. , Majone, G. et al. (1996) The role of specialised agencies in decentralising EU governance. See: http://ec.europa.eu/governance/areas/group6/index_en.htm
Rothstein, H., Huber, M, und Gaskell, G. (2006) A Theory of Risk Colonisation: the spiralling logics of societal and institutional risk. In: Economy and Society 35 (1)