Risk Management

Volume I: Theories, Cases, Policies and Politics

Gerald Mars, David T. H. Weir

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2020
• Print ISBN: 9781138739857
• eBook ISBN: 9781000008357
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Social Sciences

First published in 2000, Risk Management is a two volume set, comprised of the most significant and influential articles by the leading authorities in the studies of risk management. The volumes includes a full-length introduction from the editor, an internationally recognized expert, and provides an authoritative guide to the selection of essays chosen, and to the wider field itself. The collections of essays are both international and interdisciplinary in scope and provide an entry point for investigating the myriad of study within the discipline.

Part I
Theories and Background

[1]
Risk as a Forensic Resource

Mary Douglas

Mary Douglas is Retired Professor of Anthropology at University College, London.

FROM “CHANCE” TO “DANGER”

THE WORD RISK HAS ACQUIRED NEW PROMINENCE. One popular explanation is that risks from technology have greatly increased. They have indeed, in all the industrial world. But some other risks have decreased, at least if the figures for mortality and morbidity mean anything. So perhaps what needs to be explained is the greater political awareness from technology in America, greater awareness than in France,¹ and presumably greater than in Russia before Chernobyl. Some would explain the new use of the vocabulary of risk in American politics by the revival of laissez-faire liberal economics. In this volume Theodore Lowi shows how the nineteenth-century idea of the merits of individual risk taking have been reintroduced into American politics. Praise of risk taking invokes the virtues of frontier morality to interrupt the long, slow move to establish collective responsibility for accidents. However, this ideological change itself needs to be explained. American political history does not account for the market ideology renascent in Britain, and in China, and more recently in Russia and Eastern Europe. The question is why a changed political debate goes across national boundaries, couched in terms of risk. The answer here suggested is that a culture needs a common forensic vocabulary with which to hold persons accountable and further that risk is a word that admirably serves the forensic needs of the new global culture.

The object of this essay is to situate the notion of risk by comparing its current usage with similar concepts in other times and places. In becoming a central cultural construct in America, the word has changed its meaning. It has entered politics and in doing so has weakened its old connection with technical calculations of probability. In the nineteenth century, when the theory of risk taking became important in economics, humans were thought to be risk averse, because they were supposed to be making their choices according to the hedonic calculus. The owner of a firm needed a special profit incentive for risk taking or he would not invest. Going further back, in the eighteenth century the analysis of risk had important uses in marine insurance. The chances of a ship coming safely home and making the fortune of its owner were set against the chances of its being lost at sea, bringing ruin. The idea of risk in itself was neutral; it took account of the probability of losses and gains. Going further back still, the concept originally emerged in the seventeenth century in the context of gambling. For this purpose a specialized mathematical analysis of chances was developed. Risk then meant the probability of an event occurring, combined with the magnitude of the losses or gains that would be entailed. Since the seventeenth century the analysis of probabilities has become the basis of scientific knowledge, transforming the nature of evidence, of knowledge, of authority, and of logic.² Any process or any activity has its probabilities of success or failure. The calculation of risk is deeply entrenched in science and manufacturing and as a theoretical base for decision making. Clearly, probability theory has provided a modern way of thinking.

According to Ernest Gellner, the course of transition to modern industrial society imposes cultural homogeneity “by objective, inescapable imperative”:

Culture is no longer merely the adornment, confirmation and legitimation of a social order which was also sustained by harsher and coercive constraints; culture is now the necessary shared medium, the lifeblood or perhaps the minimal shared atmosphere, within which alone the members of the society can breathe and survive and produce. For a given society it must be one in which they can all breathe and speak and produce; so it must be the same culture… it can no longer be a diversified, locality-tied, illiterate little culture or tradition.³

On this line of argument the risk concept would have come to the fore in politics because probabilistic thinking is pervasive in industry, modern science, and philosophy. Risk would have become the idiom of politics as part of the homogenizing process of moving to a new world level of interaction. However, the risk that is a central concept for our policy debates has not got much to do with probability calculations. The original connection is only indicated by arm waving in the direction of possible science: the word risk now means danger; high risk means a lot of danger.

In this essay Gellner writes particularly about the role of education and shared culture as part of the necessary infrastructure of nationalism. He does not say how the “inescapable imperative” imposes its commands, or where it finds its authority: the homogenizing process results in the production of key words which cover agreed concepts. But why should this process prize risk away from its original meaning to become one of the key words?

The answer is that the fulcrum of change is a debate about accountability that is carried out incessantly in any community. This dialogue, the cultural process itself, is a contest to muster support for one kind of action rather than another. Decisions to invest in more technology, or less, are the result of the cultural dialogue. Decisions to invade, to refuse immigration, to license, to withhold consent, all these responses to claims need support from institutions of law and justice. The cultural dialogue is therefore best studied in its forensic moments. The concept of risk emerges as a key idea for modern times because of its uses as a forensic resource.

To perform well in a new culture, a word must have a meaning consistent with the political claims in vogue. When the direction of change is the shift from little local communities to a larger world community, the key words need to justify leaving the old constraints and commitments. The new sense of the word risk works because it can be strongly biased toward emancipation. The context of a shared commitment to emancipation bends its meaning to refer only to danger. Whereas originally a high risk meant a game in which a throw of the die had a strong probability of bringing great pain or great loss, now risk refers only to negative outcomes. The word has been preempted to mean bad risks. The promise of good things in contemporary political discourse is couched in other terms. The language of risk is reserved as a specialized lexical register for political talk about the undesirable outcomes. Risk is invoked for a modern-style riposte against abuse of power. The charge of causing risk is a stick to beat authority, to make lazy bureaucrats sit up, to exact restitution for victims. For those purposes danger would once have been the right word, but plain danger does not have the aura of science or afford the pretension of a possible precise calculation.

SINS AND TABOOS

All historical cultures are in transition. Cultural stability is short lived, homogeneity achieved with difficulty and always about to dissolve. Staying within his own culture, a person is apt to see no culturally standardized forms around him: transgression against the norm is more visible than conformity. The inside experience of culture is an experience of choice and decision, scrutinized and judged by neighbors and press. The local view obscures regularities, but as soon as the local moves abroad, he is forcibly struck by the standardized behavior of foreigners. The innocent view of culture is that we don’t have it at home; it is only abroad that people are culturally hidebound. A special effort of sophistication is necessary to see our own culture. We normally operate within its unnoticed intellectual confines as we ourselves intervene passionately in the dialogue about justice and what the world is likely to do to people if they disregard its real conditions. One way to overcome culture blindness is to be attentive to the way that claims of authority and solidarity are being treated. In the regular ongoing cultural debate about justice and the world, some idea of danger is usually invoked. The debate sways between pressures for emancipation from the old institutional constraints and pressures to sustain the institutions in which authority and solidarity reside. The claims of justice and danger are rhetorical resources for all parties. On this fulcrum concepts of liability and tort are continuously at stake, always in process of revision. In this respect moderns should not think themselves different from anyone else. They are inescapably in a cultural debate and pressuring one another to cultural conformity.

Most little local cultures develop some common term that runs across the gamut of social life to moralize and politicize dangers. In the preindustrial West, Christianity used the word sin. The fact that a word like sin would be commonly understood is a sign of the cultural homogeneity achieved. A major sin would be expected to unleash dangers on the community at large, or to afflict the sinner’s nearest and dearest. Before the bad event the sinner on the brink of transgression could be reminded of his responsibilities and checked in time; when the bad event happened, it would be traced back to the known sin. Before Christianity, the Bible is full of such interpretations: the defeats of the Israelites by foreign armies, destruction by earthquake, plague, and drought, were attributed to God’s anger for sins. The public discourse on sin’s dangers mobilized a moral community. This would seem to be a far cry from the modern, sanitized discourse of risk.

Taboos and sins belong to the discourse of religious faith. Because it promotes the opening of closed communities and the free movement of individuals, industrialization also promotes religious skepticism as part of that same cultural homogenizing process. The two cultural contexts for risk and sin would seem to be quite incompatible. If Western industrial democracy were ever to build a homogeneous culture using a uniform vocabulary for moralizing and politicizing the dangers around, it could not use the vocabulary of religion. The neutral vocabulary of risk is all we have for making a bridge between the known facts of existence and the construction of a moral community. But this is why the public discourse about modern risks has fallen into an antique mode. Risk, danger, and sin are used around the world to legitimate policy or to discredit it, to protect individuals from predatory institutions or to protect institutions from predatory individuals. Indeed, risk provides secular terms for rewriting scripture: not the sins of the fathers, but the risks unleashed by the fathers are visited on the heads of their children, even to the nth generation.

Risk is certainly not the same as sin or taboo. The differences are not quite what they would seem at first sight. From our modern, skeptical, secular standpoint we have the illusion that taboos and sins work backwards: first the disaster, then the explanation of its cause in an earlier transgression. By contrast, risk seems to look forward: it is used to assess the dangers ahead. This is not a real difference between the discourses about risk and sin. The observer’s standpoint deceives. Looking from a secular perspective at sin and taboo, we draw upon our own knowledge about the lack of connection between moral misdeeds and the weather or the spread of disease. The connection the religions used to make between the sins and the disasters is given to them along with the rest of their construction of nature. The model of how the world works is in continuous production and sins work forward just as well as risks. The very name of the sin is often a prophecy, a prediction of trouble. So for the people living together first comes the temptation to sin, and then the thought of future retribution, then warnings from friends and relations, attacks from enemies, and possibly a return to the path of righteousness before the damage is done. The big difference is not in the predictive uses of risk, but in its forensic functions.

As a community reaches for cultural homogeneity, it begins to signpost the major moments of choice with dangers. The signs say that certain kinds of behavior are very dangerous. That means that the community has reached some (probably temporary and fragile) consensus in condemning the behavior. Ready examples would be blasphemy, perjury, treason, sedition, disrespect to elders. A climate of disapproval grounds the belief that certain deeds are dangerous. The foreigners’ gullibility for taboo which we find strange arises where information about causes is least coordinated. Without professional institutions to narrow enquiry and sustain it on empirical tracks, the forensic uses of disaster triumph. We have similar gullibility for forensic explanations on the outlying fringes of the professional world. This is why...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Series Page
• Original Title Page
• Original Copyright Page
• Content
• Acknowledgements
• Series Preface
• Introduction
• PART I THEORIES AND BACKGROUND
• PART II THEORIES AND CASES
• PART III POLICIES AND POLITICS
• Name Index