Risk Management: the Talking Cure

The use of risk management as a response to ‘strategic’ organizational uncertainties is investigated. The deconstruction of uncertainties to rationalized probabilities is argued to be symptomatic of a specific conceptualization of problems as ‘tame’, a narrow epistemology that fails to account fully for organizational experience. By introducing ‘messes’ and ‘wicked problems’, a new mode of rhetorical, allegorical risk management is argued for. Insights from Machiavelli and psychoanalysis provide frameworks by which this can be achieved.

[1]  E. Schein.  Three Cultures of Management: The Key to Organizational Learning , 1996 .

[2]  M Eck,et al.  [The normal and the pathological]. , 1973, La Nouvelle presse medicale.

[3]  K. Figlio.  REGISTRATION AND ETHICS IN PSYCHOTHERAPY , 2000 .

[4]  Jochen Runde,et al.  Clarifying Frank Knight's discussion of the meaning of risk and uncertainty , 1998 .

[5]  Aleksei Savatyugin,et al.  The History of Economic Analysis , 2002 .

[6]  D. Milovanović.  Book Review: The Theory of Communicative Action Vol. Two, Lifeworld and System: A Critique of Functionalist Reason , 1989 .

[7]  U. Beck,et al.  The Risk Society and Beyond: Critical Issues for Social Theory , 2000 .

[8]  Martin Kendrick,et al.  Internal Control: Guidance for Directors on the Combined Code (The Turnbull Report) , 2000 .

[9]  C. Geertz,et al.  The Interpretation of Cultures , 1973 .

[10]  P. Senge.  THE FIFTH DISCIPLINE , 1997 .

[11]  R. Rorty.  Contingency, irony, and solidarity: Contents , 1989 .

[12]  S. Freud.  Introductory lectures on psycho-analysis , 1915 .

[13]  Keith Paton,et al.  Crisis and Renewal , 1974 .

[14]  Peter M. Senge,et al.  From theory to practice: research territory, processes and structure at an organizational learning centre , 1996 .

[15]  Chris Argyris,et al.  Action science and organizational learning , 1995 .

[16]  G. Tourney.  The Four Fundamental Concepts of Psycho-Analysis , 1979 .

[17]  M. Gane,et al.  Baudrillard Live: Selected Interviews , 2002 .

[18]  H. Rittel,et al.  Dilemmas in a general theory of planning , 1973 .

[19]  C. Branford-White.  The Financial Aspects of Corporate Governance , 2003 .

[20]  J. W. Bryant,et al.  Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems , 1976 .

[21]  K. Pearson,et al.  Germinal Life: The Difference and Repetition of Deleuze , 1999 .

[22]  F. Cioffi.  Freud and the Question of Pseudoscience , 1998 .

[23]  Jose Brunner.  Freud and the Politics of Psychoanalysis , 1995 .

[24]  S. Aronson,et al.  May sheep safely graze? , 2006, Medicine and health, Rhode Island.

[25]  J. E. Groves,et al.  Made in America: Science, Technology and American Modernist Poets , 1989 .

[26]  J. Habermas.  The theory of communicative action: Lifeworld and system - A critique of functionalist reason , 1990 .

[27]  K. Weick.  The social psychology of organizing , 1969 .

[28]  G. Canguilhem,et al.  On the Normal and the Pathological , 1978 .

[29]  Steven Stewart,et al.  Avoiding severe environmental consequences: evidence on the role of loss avoidance and risk attitudes , 1999 .

[30]  K. Bowen.  Redesigning the Future: A Systems Approach to Societal Problems, Russell L. Ackoff. Wiley, New York (1974), 260 pages, $ 14.70 , 1977 .

[31]  D. L. Simms,et al.  Normal Accidents: Living with High-Risk Technologies , 1986 .

[32]  R. Dingwall.  “Risk Society”: The Cult of Theory and the Millennium? , 1999 .

[33]  Larry Hirschhorn.  The Primary Risk , 1999 .