Risk management unveiling and taming danger : exploratory search embedded in legitimating routines

Abstract

This paper explores how contemporary organizations manage inherent tensions between productivity and legitimacy in the context of the "risk society." Interviews with executives in large organizations across a range of industries reveal that many risk managers echo this tension within their own work as they juxtapose two seemingly contradictory modes of search and action across five dimensions of risk management (identification, assessment, action, reassessment, and monitoring/reporting). On the one hand, they employ the routine procedures, measurement, tracking and reporting of audit processes designed to uphold legitimacy. On the other hand, though, they also use a radically different approach for risk identification, which they view as the substance of their work. Aware of risk's indeterminate nature, they adopt unscripted processes of exploration that question and undermine the taken-for-granted nature of measurement and routine, employing a collection of techniques I label "creative challenge."