Ulrich Beck: exploring and contesting risk

Abstract

While risk research normally understands risk as an entity that can be calculated using statistics and probabilities – and which therefore also can become the object of insurance technology – it is the production of new, non-calculable risks and therefore also risks that cannot be insured against, which is at the centre of Ulrich Beck’s risk society theory. The article examines Beck’s conceptualization of risk and discusses how he has clarified and further refined the concept since publishing Risk Society in 1986. The article shows, first, how Beck understands risk as an entity that is neither danger nor risk in the traditional sense but rather something in between, which he refers to as ‘man-made disasters’ and ‘new risks’. The discussion then addresses Beck’s position in relation to the ontological status of risk, which is an intermediate position between realism and constructivism. The non-calculability and non-insurability of the new risks are also examined. The article discusses what it means that the new risks are not visible and the significance of non-knowledge for how we understand them. Finally, the new conditions of existence for politics, states and individuals are outlined in the aftermath of Beck’s risk society theory. The article concludes with a discussion of the analytical potential of the theory.     

Engineered nanomaterials: risk perception,regulation and insurance

Concerns surrounding the health risk of engineered nanomaterials, effective regulation and the lack of specifically tailored insurance products for the nanotechnology sector are putting the industry’s long-term economic viability at risk. From the perspective of the underwriter, this article speculates on the relationship between risk perception, regulation and insurability. In the nanotechnology sector, regulators are currently failing to keep pace with innovation, and insurers generally lack guiding principles for underwriting occupational risk from nanomaterial exposure. Such vulnerabilities when combined with misguided risk perceptions can lead to the overpricing of risk transfer and ill-conceived regulatory initiatives, thus potentially exhausting resources and stifling innovation in the sector. In the absence of well-developed regulatory protocols, the insurance industry has, and will continue, to occupy a key role as an effective lobby in terms of improved risk management practice. We suggest that the insurance industry will increasingly rely on control banding frameworks and ‘risk mitigation at source’ methods developed in conjunction with their clients to manage severe acute diversifiable risks. Long tail risk will continue to represent a serious challenge to insurers and regulators. In the meantime, insurers will have to bridge their current needs with improvised solutions. As an example of one possible solution, we outline a framework that utilizes financial instruments to hedge an insurer’s exposure to uncertain estimates of these long-term risks.     

次贷危机后的保险业风险管理问题

2007年美国发生的次级贷危机再次将风险与风险管理的问题摆在了全球金融业面前,而以风险为主营业务的保险业更需要系统思考风险管理对于本行业健康运营的内在意义。本文从风险管理行为动机、非系统性风险的分散、系统性风险的控制三个方面分析了保险业影响危机发生及受到危机冲击的原因,进一步明确了今后保险业风险管理的发展方向,并提出通过建立合理目标、完善信息沟通机制和治理结构等为风险管理提供有效内部支持。     

Under threat. Lay thinking about terrorism and the three‐dimensional model of personal involvement: a social psychological analysis

Global ‘standards’ in social security are set by the UN Specialist Agency, the International Labour Organization (ILO). The ILO ‘Standards’ prioritize one model of social security system in particular; namely, contributions‐financed social insurance. Specifically, social insurance systems are designed to mitigate the negative impacts of formal labour market risks. Accordingly, social security systems typically fail to address adequately many informal labour market and nonlabour market risks. The inherently limited focus of social protection provided by many social security systems is recognized to be of major concern for least developed countries (LDCs) in particular for whom western‐centric definitions of life‐cycle risk remain largely inappropriate for the majority. This realization has led the World Bank to experiment with a reconceptualized definition of social protection; Social Risk Management (SRM). Seeking to encourage wider debate across the multidisciplinary field of risk management research, this article outlines critically the tenets underpinning SRM and highlights the policy limitations of this innovative World Bank venture in two key respects. First, by outlining the likely policy implications of World Bank approaches to social protection for global social security standards and practice. Second, by questioning the short‐term contribution that SRM can make to poverty reduction, not least amongst the elderly poor.     

Political–security risk in the oil and gas industry: the impact of terrorism on risk management and mitigation

Oil and gas companies are experiencing an increase in terrorist attacks. The industry became a legitimate target for terrorist groups in the 1990s and the number of attacks have increased yearly, with a spike after the 9/11 attacks. In today’s interconnected world, political risk is not only about the relationship between the host government and the company. Oil and gas companies may experience risks on a transnational, national and human security level. The success of new investments often depends on the successful utilization of risk management strategies. This study focuses on the importance of political–security risk in the oil and gas industry. In January 2013, the oil and gas industry experienced one of its deadliest attacks at the In Amenas gas facility in Algeria, forcing firms to reconsider its focus on security management. Statoil undertook a thorough analysis of security at the site as well as of the company′s corporate security risk management. The report revealed a lack of focus on political–security risk. This study argues that political–security risk has not been used to its full potential in the oil and gas industry. The oil and gas industry has always focused on site security, but a broader more holistic approach to risk management has been lacking. As a result of the In Amenas incident, the industry has become more willing to have a new discussion on security and this has resulted in changes in the way companies operate.     

Risk association: towards a linguistically informed framework for analysing risk in discourse

This article addresses a fundamental feature of risk discourse, namely, risk association, defined as the process whereby an agent establishes a connection between something, x, and the notion of risk. In addition, risk association can be defined as the result of such a process, i.e. an established connection between x and risk. A special case of risk association is when x is linked to harmful properties and thus is represented as a risk. Although fundamental to any analysis of socio-cognitive attention to risks, the process of risk association is often taken for granted in risk research. A layered model of risk association is presented taking linguistic practices, i.e. the use of words, as the point of departure. Accordingly, there are both central and more peripheral means of risk association. The central means include the morpheme ‘risk’. More peripheral means of risk association are close synonyms and antonyms of risk (e.g. ‘hazard’, ‘danger’, ‘safety’ and ‘security’) and other related words (e.g. ‘crisis’, ‘protection’ and ‘threat’). For an illustration, the model is applied to an empirical example: the instructions for Swedish government agencies. The example illustrates how the exact vocabulary considered for operationalization in analysis has important consequences for the conclusions that follow with respect to the extent to which government agencies are associated with risk.     

The social amplification of risk on Twitter: the case of ash dieback disease in the United Kingdom

It has long been recognised that the traditional media play a key role in representing risk and are a significant source of information which can shape how people perceive and respond to hazard events. Early work utilising the social amplification of risk framework (SARF) sought to understand the discrepancy between expert and lay perceptions of risk and patterns of risk intensification and attenuation with reference to the media. However, the advent of Web 2.0 challenges traditional models of communication. To date there has been limited consideration of social media within the SARF and its role in mediating processes of risk perception and communication. Against this backdrop, we focus on the social media platform Twitter to consider the social amplification of risk in relation to ash dieback disease (Hymenoscyphus fraxineus); a tree health issue that attracted intense media attention when it was first identified in the UK in 2012. We present an empirical analysis of 25,600 tweets in order to explore what people were saying about ash dieback on Twitter, who was talking about it and how they talked about it. Our discussion outlines the themes around which talk about ash dieback was orientated, the significance of users’ environmental ‘affiliations’ and the role of including links (URLs) to traditional media coverage. We utilise the notion of ‘piggybacking’ to demonstrate how information is customised in line with group/individual identities and interests and introduce the concept of the ‘frame fragment’ to illustrate how information is selected and moved around Twitter emphasising certain features of the messages. The paper affords a detailed consideration of the way in which people and organisations simultaneously appropriate, construct and pass on risk-relevant information. A conclusion is that social media has the potential to transform the media landscape within which the SARF was originally conceived, presenting renewed challenges for risk communication.     

Performing risk and the project: Risk maps as mediating instruments

In this paper, we analyze the relationship between management control and risk management by investigating the use of risk maps in an inter-organizational project collaboration in the Norwegian petroleum industry. The various ways in which risk maps are drawn upon in the course of the project reveal sources of perceived ‘usefulness’ that are not primarily to do with increased attention toward early warning signals and the defensive production of audit trails, as suggested by previous research. Rather, the study shows how risk maps act as mediating instruments which allow distributed actors to adjudicate interests, build confidence in and associate with ‘the project’ and its progress over time. Drawing on social studies of science and technology, the study shows how the graphical representations of risk maps manage to engage the user and act as mediating platforms where ‘performances’ around the notion of risk can happen. The paper thus extends and complements existing explanations of the pervasiveness of enterprise risk management technology and discusses its interrelation with project management and inter-organizational controls. More broadly, the paper illustrates how the government of risk is related to mediating instruments and how such mediation happens in the interplay between text and conversation.     

Sociocultural vectors of effective risk communication

Kasperson’s reflections on the ‘state of the art’ in risk communication thinking and practice set out an ambitious programmatic vision of how future progress in effective risk communication might be achieved. In this critical but supportive response, I first outline two perspectives on how progress in risk communication might be evaluated. This is followed by some discussion relating these issues to the sociocultural nature of risk communication thinking and practice, and the normative basis of underlying assumptions and ideas of effectiveness. It is suggested that inasmuch as the practical application of effective risk communication requires knowledge of human thinking and behaviour, then further considerations of some sociocultural regularities, contingencies and varieties in risk communication thinking and behaviour within particular contexts should also have practical applications.     

论建立我国网络信息安全保险体系

互联网的广泛应用在促进世界交流与发展的同时也给信息资产安全带来隐患,我国网络信息安全保险体系尚未建立。本文首先从信息资产重要性和国外相关实践等方面分析了建立我国网络信息安全保险体系的必要性,对网络信息安全保险风险管理的特点和步骤进行构思,探讨如何在当前的市场环境中从政策、监管、法律、人才培养、技术合作和产品研发创新等角度推进我国网络信息安全保险体系的建立。     

A characterisation of the methodology of qualitative research on the nature of perceived risk: trends and omissions

The issue of how risk is ‘perceived’ is one of significant research interest and immense practical importance. In spite of this wide interest, however, it is probably fair to say that most emerging ‘risk’ crises – whether related to natural or technological phenomena – come as a surprise to researchers and to society as a whole. Prediction of human responses to novel potential hazards (or novel manifestations of old hazards) is neither reliable nor complete; strategies to ameliorate inappropriate concerns when they arise (or to make realistic inappropriate absences of concern) do not appear totally effective. It therefore seems apt to ask the question: just what have we learned about ‘risk perception’? In this paper we conduct a structured review of qualitative research on perceived risk – to be followed by a subsequent analysis of quantitative research in a later paper – focusing upon methodological issues. Qualitative research often precedes quantitative research, and ideally informs it; it seeks depth and meaning from few subjects rather than identifying patterns within larger samples and populations. Without adequate qualitative research, quantitative research risks misanalysis of the target phenomenon, at the very least by the omission of relevant factors and inclusion of irrelevant ones. Our analysis here – of qualitative studies conducted across a range of disciplines, not all of which will be familiar to the readers of this journal – suggests that this research suffers from an incomplete coverage of the ‘risk perception universe’, typified by a focus on atypical hazards and study samples. We summarise the results of this research, while pointing out its limitations, and draw conclusions about future priorities for research of this type.     

关于建立中国农业保险政策支持体系的思考

农业是国民经济的基础性产业,也是带有风险性的弱质产业,它发展的优劣直接制约着国民经济的发展。中国是农业灾害发生最为严重的国家之一,而农业保险是农业风险重要的控制方式,农业保险作为一项风险转嫁、损失分摊的经济补偿制度,己成为国际上主要的非价格农业保护工具之一,对保证农业生产的持续稳定发展有着十分重要的意义。面对国内外农业保险发展的新形势,如何开展政策性农业保险工作,建立一套具有较高保障能力和运转效率的农业保险支持体系,是摆在政府面前的一项重要的任务。     

Rhetorical accounts of risk: interprofessional risk assessment in operational planning meetings

In the context of high-risk industries, risk assessment takes place not only through standardized methods for risk analysis, but is frequently negotiated and discussed as an integral part of operational decision-making. This is not least the case in the context of operational planning. Frequent changes in operations require ongoing assessment of risk as tasks are rescheduled and resources reallocated. The current study explores how professionals account for the presence or absence of risk in a setting in which risk analysis is not the primary objective. With data from the offshore petroleum industry, the rhetorical aspects of risk assessments are examined. A series of interprofessional planning meetings were video recorded, transcribed, and analyzed using a rhetorical discourse analytic framework. The data are analyzed at a micro-interactional level in order to study how accounts of risk are presented and negotiated in this particular setting. The meaning and consequences of operational plan changes, and their implications for safety, are seen as negotiated discursively through interprofessional meeting talk. The analysis shows that accounts of risk are characterized by shifting rhetorical strategies that can be heard to echo established risk discourses often referred to as ‘technico-scientific’ and ‘contextualized’ conceptions of risk. Rhetorical devices are used interchangeably and strategically by the participants as they account for risk from their respective institutional positions and their specific areas of expertise and responsibility. The accounts are found to be increasingly persuasive and rhetorical in style as disagreements over risk and prioritizations surface. Accounts of risk, then, are not simply objective presentations of probability and consequence, but rather powerful tools for achieving specific professional outcomes. The study contributes to the understanding of risk assessment at its most concrete and practical level; as it takes place through professional interaction in an operational setting.     

The institutional work of hospital risk managers: democratizing and professionalizing risk management

The growing importance of risk management programs and policies in health care organizations has given rise to a new organizational figure, the risk managers. This paper seeks to better understand their role by looking at their risk work as a form of institutional work. From an inductive study of hospital risk managers in the Quebec health care sector, we provide a situated account of the risk work or ‘the effortful pattern of practices’ accomplished by hospital risk managers at the intra- and extra-organizational levels. The results show that they engage in two broader recursive forms of institutional work. At the intra-organizational level, it is by building bridges, autonomizing teams, legitimizing risk work, and pragmatizing interventions that hospital risk managers contribute to democratizing the risk management practices in their organization. At the extra-organizational level, it is by networking with colleagues, hybridizing knowledge, shaping identity, and debating solutions that they contribute to articulating a professionalization project. We argue that the recursive relationship between these two forms of institutional work, namely democratizing and professionalizing risk management, demonstrates how the risk work done at one level facilitates the risk work accomplished at the other. The paper provides three contributions. First, it opens the black box of the hospital risk managers’ roles by showing the complexity of their risk work, instead of formalizing expectations about their role in a normative way, as is generally the case. Second, this research provides evidence about how actors with limited collective power and resources such as hospital risk managers participate in disseminating risk management programs and policies. Third, the paper offers a multi-level understanding of the ways by which hospital risk managers work to institutionalize risk management program and policies. The paper ends by discussing the importance of gaining a better understanding of the risk managers’ role and their institutional work.     

保险业完善风险管理、提高偿付能力的演进研究

2008年金融危机袭击全球,影响着各国的经济发展。专门从事风险集中与分散的保险业也难以独善其身,加强保险业的风险防范和控制能力,已经刻不容缓。本文介绍了我国保险业风险管理的演进历程及现阶段的风险趋势,并论述了加强风险管理、提高偿付能力的路径前瞻。     

Optimal investment of an insurer with regime-switching and risk constraint

We investigate an optimal investment problem of an insurance company in the presence of risk constraint and regime-switching using a game theoretic approach. A dynamic risk constraint is considered where we constrain the uncertainty aversion to the ‘true’ model for financial risk at a given level. We describe the surplus of an insurance company using a general jump process, namely, a Markov-modulated random measure. The insurance company invests the surplus in a risky financial asset whose dynamics are modeled by a regime-switching geometric Brownian motion. To incorporate model uncertainty, we consider a robust approach, where a family of probability measures is cosidered and the insurance company maximizes the expected utility of terminal wealth in the ‘worst-case’ probability scenario. The optimal investment problem is then formulated as a constrained two-player, zero-sum, stochastic differential game between the insurance company and the market. Different from the other works in the literature, our technique is to transform the problem into a deterministic differential game first, in order to obtain the optimal strategy of the game problem explicitly.     

数字经济时代网络安全保险创新发展研究

中国数字经济发展日新月异,在其快速发展中也暴露出各种网络安全风险。网络风险呈现出频繁性、隐蔽性以及高度破坏性特点,给数字经济发展带来了巨大隐患。国家"十四五"规划纲要中明确提出,将网络安全列为营造良好数字经济生态的重要一环。本文分析了数字经济时代的网络安全风险、网络安全保险的发展现状,以及中国网络安全保险市场的发展机遇、存在的问题,挖掘了国外网络安全保险的先进发展经验,并从保险公司、网络安全企业以及政府监管部门三方面,提出了网络安全保险创新发展的政策建议,以期化解网络安全保险风险,促进我国数字经济的良性发展。     

Travelling risks: How did nanotechnology become a risk in India and South Africa?

India and South Africa have invested in nanotechnology since the early 2000s and have identified risks to human health and the environment as an important issue for governance. This is exemplary for a wider trend in which ‘developing countries’ play an increasingly prominent role in the development, production and use of emerging technologies. This validates the claim of the world risk society thesis that countries around the world are now confronted with the risks of emerging technologies. Little is known, however, about the way developing countries deal with the potential risks of emerging technologies. Starting from the observation that the risk colonization of nanotechnology in developing countries cannot be taken for granted, this article draws upon the relational theory of risk in order to investigate how nanotechnology became understood as an object of risk in South Africa and India. The article shows that nanotechnology was constituted as an object of risk in rather different ways in India and South Africa, demonstrating that the spread of risk discourses – and the emergence of a world risk society – cannot be understood without attending to the local context. The article shows that way risk is understood and dealt with changes as risk discourses travel around the world, giving many different faces to the world risk society.     

A Relational Theory of Risk: a Case Study of the Asian Longhorned Beetle Infestation in Worcester,MA

Abstract

The rise of globalization and global increases in temperature have prompted the spread of invasive species, which poses a major threat to the ecosystem benefits provided by urban forests. Stakeholders such as urban residents, policy-makers, and forestry industry professionals deem these risks differently because they place value on threatened goods and services at different spatial and temporal scales. This article will use the frameworks of relational risk theory and relational place-making to connect ‘risk objects’ and ‘objects at risk’ to better understand how relationships of risk shape responses to threats to the environment. The data in this study comes from Worcester, MA, where discovery of the Asian Longhorned Beetle prompted the United States Department of Agriculture to remove 35,000 trees from streets and backyards in the quarantine zone. The three different stakeholder groups that were targeted for data collection were green industry representatives, government decision makers, and residents. Green industry representatives, decision makers, and residents were interviewed while additional residents responded to a survey. The results showed that greater understanding of the different objects and places at risk removed misconceptions between different stakeholders. Understanding is increased when each stakeholder recognizes the different spatial scales of the objects at risk. This improvement of transparency can lead to better communication of the variety of risks posed by invasive species and a faster and more unified response to the threats from invasive species or other natural disasters.     

From objective to constituted risk: an alternative approach to safety in strategic technological innovation in the European Union

Safety is a legitimate means of limiting technological innovation in our societies. However, the potential socio-economic impact of curtailing techno-industrial progress on the grounds of safety means that risk governance policies tend to restrict the range of legitimate approaches to safety on the principle that it can only be discussed in the frame of an allegedly objective scientific representation of risk. In European risk governance, socio-economic factors such as the underlying innovation rationales and goals are not openly considered to be related to the constitution of safety, but tend largely to be treated as factors of subjective reaction towards risk and technology. This paper seeks to overcome that approach by proposing a ‘constitutive’ understanding of how risk and socio-economic factors and dynamics relate, focusing in particular on the ‘safe and responsible’ development of nanotechnology in the European Union (EU). I argue that risk is constituted according to socio-economic considerations, and that the controllability of the environmental and health risks of nanotechnology in the EU is assumed on principle in the very strong institutional commitment to the industrial exploitation of nanotechnology R&D. Using a constitutive approach, we may legitimately conceive a broader set of potential safety scenarios, while at the same time highlighting major obstacles to implementing more critical constitutions of techno-industrial risk in the framework of a highly competitive knowledge-based global economy.