Organizational Encounters with Risk [Paperback]

'Organizational Encounters with Risk addresses the paradox of the 21st century: how organizations that enhance our capacity to govern uncertainty simultaneously produce new uncertainties that demand innovative approaches to risk and regulation. While grounding their analyses in real-world organizational encounters with risk, the distinguished contributors to this volume also significantly advance theories of uncertainty, risk and regulation.' Richard Ericson, University of Toronto

'These remarkably insightful essays freshen and deepen our grasp of the ways in which organizations manufacture risk. These perspectives represent a much needed corrective to stylized, narrowly drawn risk analysis. Risk is recast as an encounter shaped by the organizing of attention, sense-making, and structuring. This volume will have a profound resonance for scholars and practitioners alike and represents a milestone in efforts to understand an increasingly significant issue.' University of Michigan and co-author of Managing The Unexpected

'A crucial point about the risks that we face today is that technological disasters and major financial failures are often caused by systematic organisational factors rather than mere chance events. In this sense institutions themselves are the incubators of risk in the modern world. This collection of essays is a thoroughly valuable addition to our analytic understanding of this important phenomenon, and should be read by managers, risk and safety professionals and academics alike.' Nick Pidgeon, School of Environmental Sciences, University of East Anglia

'An original collection of the latest thinking by some of the finest scholars of risk. The book documents in revealing ways the increasing importance of risk management in organizational life, as in the new phenomenon of multinational firms with a Chief Risk Officer. This collection throws out a challenge to existing paradigms of organizational theory with evocative risk paradigms.' John Braithwaite, Regulatory Institutions Network, Australian National University

'Bridget Hutter and Michael Power have put together an all-star cast that both advances knowledge and sets an ambitious research agenda.' James Short, Department of Sociology, Washington State University

Organizational encounters with risk range from errors and anomalies to outright disasters. This 2005 collection of essays addresses the varied ways in which modern organisations process and deal with risk. Contributions by leading experts on risk management raise critical questions about how risk can be understood and conceived by organisations.