On ‘risk work’: Professional discourse, accountability, and everyday action

Abstract

In recent years a technical discourse of risk has assumed the status of a universal basis for governance and administrative practice in both private and public sector organizations within Britain, the United States, and a number of other Western countries. The re-framing of pre-existing organizational concerns in terms of risk categories reflects an underlying bureaucratic concern with the accountable and cost-effective management of contingency. This paper examines some of the diversity of real-world features of the penetration of spheres of professional practice by this new discourse of risk. While risk-based practice is advocated by rhetorics that stress the promotion of administrative efficiency, in the real world it is possible to observe a wide variety of situationally-specific risk-related practices. This paper argues that ‘risk work’ in organizational settings offers especially useful resources that allow actors to pursue such diverse agendas, while also providing an accounting mechanism that allows them to legitimate such activity.