Managing risk and contingency: Interaction and accounting behaviour

Abstract

This commentary paper sets the six preceding studies within an emerging understanding of the character of risk and social interaction, and the wider social and organisational context: of shifting lay sensibilities towards risk, and the role of risk in shaping professional practices. It critically examines the explanatory potential of two approaches drawn from social theory--reflexive modernisation and governmentality--to encompass the specific features of these studies. It concludes that risk-related settings have the capacity to bring out certain inherent dimensions of social interaction in particularly forceful ways. This capacity leads to the existence of a sphere of situationally-specific interaction patterns, an understanding of which necessitates detailed empirical investigation.