Department of Organization
Public Lecture Series
Lecture Series Calendar
Cosmopolitan Metaphysics and Territorial Diplomacy: Kant and Vattel on International Justice
Tid: 28.09 kl. 14.00 - 16.00
Sted: CBS, Kilen. Kilevej 14A. 2000 Frederiksberg. Ks54.
Risk and denials: exploring energy risk possibilities and probabilities from 1945 to 2012
Tid: 17.09 kl 16.15 -17.45
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads, 2000 Frederiksberg, SP201
Cosmopolitan Knowledge for an Uncertain World
Tid: 15.05 kl. 14.00 -16.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads, 2000 Frederiksberg, SPs12
From Theory to Theorizing
Tid: 19.03 kl. 14.00 -16.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads, 2000 Frederiksberg, Room: SP216
Collateral Knowledge: Legal Reasoning in the Global Financial Markets
Tid: 07.10 kl. 14.30 - 16.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School
Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SP113 IBM
The Market as an Object of Attachment: What type of Agent is a Financial Market?
Tid: 07.12 kl. 15.00 - 16.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SP201 Danske Bank Auditorium
The Credit Crisis as a Problem in the Sociology of Knowledge
Tid: 18.11 kl. 16.00 - 17.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SPs01 BG Fond Auditorium
Rethinking the moral economy of risk management.
Tid: 03.06 kl. 15.30 - 17.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Porcelænshaven 20, 2000 Frederiksberg, Ovnhallen
The Sense of Dissonance: Reflexivity in Organizations
Tid: 14.01 kl. 15.00 - 17.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Kilevej 14 A, 2000 Frederiksberg, Ks43 Nokia Auditorium
Organizing Uncertainties: the mapping controversies project
Tid: 30.10 kl. 14.00 - 16.00
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SPs01 BG Fond Auditorium
Hope, Uncertainty and the Research Proposal: a tale from the UK
Tid: 01.09 kl. 14.30 - 16.30
Sted: Copenhagen Business School, Solbjerg Plads 3, 2000 Frederiksberg, SP202 Carlsberg Auditorium
Organizing Uncertainty 2009 - 2011
'Organizing Uncertainty' is a deliberately ambiguous title for a Public Lecture Series, but also, we hope, a not entirely unsuggestive one. After all, formal organization, pretty much the core object of analysis for academics working in business schools, has always existed in a fundamental, even rather banal sense, to manage uncertainty. The idea of formal organization as the management of uncertainty is a constitutive feature of a number of well known organizational theories - transaction costs and principal agent modelling, for instance.
Many traditional approaches to analysing the relationship between formal organizations and uncertainty within the field of organizations studies focus upon the relationship between an organization and its environment, What have been termed ‘dyadic’ approaches, for example, examine exchange relationships between organizations and their environments in terms of other organizations in supply chains and customer relationships, or in terms of resources and capabilities, such as technology and labour (Power, 2008). While these dyadic theories have tended to concentrate upon the individual organization as the central object of analysis, other significant strands of work focus upon the ways in which organizational environments themselves are organized. Specifically, work undertaken within what has come to be known as the new-institutionalism suggests that organizational environments themselves help supply the scripts, routines, ideas, and forms of knowledge which formal organizations adopt to deal with crucial elements of uncertainty, such as legitimacy (Powell & Di Maggio, 1992).
These and many other accounts of how organizations deal with uncertainty suggest that ‘risk’ management, in the broadest and most abstract meaning of that term, is constitutive of organization. Organizing and managing in this sense are fundamentally concerned ‘with individual and collective human efforts to process uncertainty’ (Power, 2008:8). However, uncertainty in this very general sense is also an analytical construct of the organizational theorist, and is certainly not the only way in which we might approach the notion of ‘organizing uncertainty’.
A second, rather different, way of approaching the issue relates to how uncertainties become objects of organization and management in the first place, and this demands an analysis of the manner in which they are represented and assembled within organizational and managerial fields(Hood & Heald, 2006, Power, 2008). Uncertainties in the form of possibilities of financial loss, for instance, have to ‘be organized, ordered, rendered thinkable and made amenable to processes and practices of intervention’ (Power, 2008:9). In this sense, formal practices of ‘risk management, for example, are themselves part of this organizational construction of risk from uncertainty (Hutter & Power, 2005; Power, 2008). From this point of view, definitions of risk and uncertainty management do not exists prior to practice but are themselves part of the practical organization of uncertainty.
This focus on the organizational processing of uncertainty also requires that attention be paid to the uncertainties that are produced as a result of these very same efforts to manage and organize uncertainty and risk. Exploring and analysing the unintended consequences or effects of organizational action has long been a feature of social scientific enquiry, in economic sociology and organisation studies, for instance, but more recently a veritable explosion of ‘risk regulation’ has taken place in response to political and social demands to deal with these effects, though not, of course, ‘without further side-effects of its own’ (Power, 2008:9, Perrow, 1984). The notion of organizing uncertainty in this sense, tries to capture both the sense of organizations as constructing processes of uncertainty management, and relatedly, as producers of uncertainties resulting from those very same efforts. Again, as recent events in the world of finance have indicated., financial risk models may themselves be an enormous source of risk, not least when all market participants end up deploying more or less the same one (Power, 2008; Tett, 2009).
Ultimately, any form of organizing involves closure, restriction and limitation, which can of course become a source of uncertainty itself. As Michael Power (2008:202) has indicated, ‘Organized uncertainty’ is a paradoxical idea ‘which signifies that efforts to construct knowledge of things as risks or uncertainties can create new risks and uncertainties’. Clearly, technological systems, for instance, will continue to be a source of risk, but management systems, particularly the sometimes far from subtle contemporary variants associated with certain political rationalities of enterprise and audit are implicated too.
It is sometimes claimed in certain epochal forms of social theory, that the present age while apparently more complex than its predecessors – and the word ‘apparently’, should be stressed here - is also, at the same time, more aware of what it does not know. However, as Power (2008: 202-3) has argued, the rise of a broad “risk management” mandate over the last decade or so suggests a continuing ambition to ‘control and managerialize the future’ in a distinctive way. This ambition is reflected in a powerful, mechanistic focus on internal control systems in organizations, in the creation of ‘new risk categories and definitions to focus managerial efforts, in the creation of new agents and risk responsibility structures, and not least in the development of new procedures and routines that seek to align risk with a certain moral discourse of good governance’ (Power, 2008:203). The reach of this ambition, as Power (2004) describes it, seems to be the ‘risk management of everything’. The re-framing of organizational governance in the name of uncertainty is no mere technical development. It also institutes a new moral economy of organizational life by defining ideals of best practice for states, public bodies, private corporations, and individuals as particular categories of person, whether employees, parents, consumers or patients.
References
Hood, C. & Heald, D. (2006) Transparency: the key to better governance? Oxford: OUP
Hutter, B. & Power, M.(eds.) (2005) Organizational Encounters with Risk Oxford: OUP
Perrow, C. (1984) Normal Accidents: living with high risk technologies New York; Basic Books
Powell, W. & di Maggio, P. (1991) The New Institutionalism in Organizational Analysis Chicago: University of Chicago Press
Power, M. (1997) The Audit Society: rituals of verification Oxford: OUP
Power, M. (2004) The Risk Management of Everything London: DEMOS
Power, M. (2008) Organized Uncertainty; designing a world of risk management Oxford: OUP
Tett, G. (2009) Fools Gold New York; Little Brown
________________________________________
Professor
Paul du Gay
Telephone: +45 3815 2917
Email: pdg.ioa@cbs.dk
________________________________________
POSTAL AND VISITING ADDRESS
Department of Organization
Copenhagen Business School
Kilevej 14A
DK-2000 Frederiksberg
Denmark
Phone: +45 3815 2815
E-mail: reception.ioa@cbs.dk
EAN: 5798000424999