New Forms Of Risk Research Articles

A European Framework to Address Psychosocial Hazards

Over the past decades, emphasis has been placed on the changing nature of work and new forms of risk that could negatively affect employee health and safety. These are mainly associated with new types of occupational hazards that have been termed psychosocial. Issues such as work-related stress, bullying and harassment are now receiving attention on a global basis and efforts have been made to address them at the workplace level. However, it has been acknowledged that despite developments of policy in this area, there still appear to be a broad science-policy gap and an even broader one between policy and practice. The WHO Network of Collaborating Centers in Occupational Health has, since the late 1990s, been supporting a dedicated program of work on psychosocial factors and work-related stress. Part of the Network's work is currently focusing on the translation of existing knowledge into practice in the area of psychosocial risk management. This program has identified that the optimum way forward lies in the development of a European framework for psychosocial risk management. This framework will serve as the basis for coordination of research activities and preventive action with an emphasis on evidence based interventions and best practice on an international basis.

The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir (review)

Reviewed by: The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir Sally J. Scholz The Other Within: Ethics, Politics, and the Body in Simone de Beauvoir. Fredrika Scarth. Feminist Constructions Series, ed. Hilde Lindemann Nelson and Sara Ruddick. Lanham, Md.: Rowman and Littlefield, 2004. 195 pp. $70.00 h.c. 0-7425-3475-8; $24.95 pbk. 0-7425-3476-6. Simone de Beauvoir's The Second Sex has been quoted, critiqued, dissected, interpreted, and reinterpreted for almost sixty years. It is a multilayered text with countless possibilities that continues to inspire activists and scholars alike. One such scholar, Fredrika Scarth, suggests that by paying attention to the different voices Beauvoir uses within the text, and by reading it in light of Pyrrus et Cineas and The Ethics of Ambiguity, we might discern in Beauvoir a new account of the development of subjectivity that grounds a positive assessment of the maternal body as also subject. Scarth situates her reading of The Second Sex in response to a number of critics of Beauvoir. Three aspects of these criticisms are especially relevant to understanding Scarth's project. The first is the accusation that Beauvoir equates transcendence with masculinity and immanence with femininity. Scarth offers evidence instead that demonstrates Beauvoir's more subtle position that every existent is both immanence and transcendence. Oppression occurs when transcendence is "condemned to fall uselessly back upon itself because it is cut off from its goals" (Beauvoir 1948, 81). The second relevant criticism of Beauvoir's work assumes that immanence is body and transcendence is consciousness. As Scarth shows, however, Beauvoir does not make such an easy equation between body as immanence and transcendence as consciousness. Our bodies are, after all, that with which we "live out this transcendence" (111). Finally, Scarth examines the criticisms of Beauvoir's descriptions of maternity. While there is no contesting Beauvoir's negative portrayal of pregnancy and motherhood, Scarth argues, following Linda Zerilli, that attention to Beauvoir's multiple voices reveals that this portrayal is an analysis of patriarchal representations of maternity. Maternity that is freely undertaken (little more than hinted at by Beauvoir) has tremendous potential, according to Scarth, for revealing the other within. En route to the maternal subject, Scarth identifies two types of ambiguity at work in Beauvoir's ethics. Ambiguity means the meaning of existence must constantly be won and that each existent is both freedom and flesh (112–13, 125). At times this latter form of ambiguity is described as the tension between freedom and the body (e.g., 60, 110), freedom and facticity (110), "our essential solitude and our essential bond with others" (112), and as "assuming ourselves as both transcendent and immanent at once" (71, see also 40, 112). A difficulty [End Page 248] arises with the terminology as it is easy to slip from saying the body is the site where the ambiguity is lived to saying it is a pole within that ambiguity. Scarth tries to clarify the difference by saying that oppression, like childhood, is marked by a reduction of the body to its immanent mode and a denial of its aspect in subjectivity; authentic subjectivity is embodied. Scarth focuses on maternity in her interpretation of The Second Sex. She argues that, like an erotic encounter, pregnancy demonstrates a new form of risk that replaces Hegel's patriarchal risk in the formation of subjectivity. Risk in both eroticism and pregnancy is an assumption of otherness within. Scarth argues that we must recognize the other within ourselves if we want to truly have a reciprocal relationship. Such a recognition is an acknowledgement of our own difference. In Hegel's master/slave dialectic, subjectivity is won through a hostile encounter with the other. Beauvoir, according to Scarth, sees the erotic encounter as providing a new type of risk-taking, a generous giving of the self. Hegel's is a risk of death; Beauvoir's is a risk of the self as both body and freedom (the second form of ambiguity). In subjectivity as generosity, "we can assume our situation, and come to recognize the reciprocity of otherness: that each subject is, for the other, also an other, and that we...

Risk Transfer and the Insurance Industry

This paper asks whether the transfer of risk from banking to non-banking institutions, such as insurers, has reduced risk for the financial system as a whole or merely shifted it to less transparent sectors. If the latter is the case, then it may be that new forms of risk and vulnerability are being introduced into the global financial system.

Management Accounting — Beyond 2000

In this essay we consider the future of management accounting in the new millennium. We draw on the themes of postindustrialism to highlight the major discontinuities emerging in management accounting work. In particular, these discontinuities are discussed in the context of the following themes: the recession of the real; the rise of rival voices; the cyber‐centred democracy; risk, trust and time‐space; and the erosion of the bi‐polar. We argue that management accounting will emerge as a paradoxical form of practice in the 21st century — management accounting work will continue, but it may not be undertaken by professionals bearing the management accounting brand; reports will be produced for managing, but these reports will have an increasingly diverse authorship; financial representation will remain central to the internal reporting process, but there will be a growing need to represent activities and outcomes that do not have a material referent; management accounting will enter the ‘business’ of building trust, whilst enabling new forms of risk to emerge in more complex organisational and inter‐organisational relationships. We conclude by arguing that postindustrialism creates significant opportunities for researchers in the 21st century.

The Actuary’s Role in Managed Care

Financial risk is moving to center stage in the $1-trillion U.S. health-care market. The growth of managed care has created new forms of risk and has shifted this risk from insurance companies, which have long dealt with it successfully, to health-care providers and other organizations that have not traditionally accepted the same type and amount of risk. Health-care actuaries have the expertise to help these institutions, and the nation, protect their financial well-being. Actuaries specialize in the evaluation, quantification, and management of risk. Actuarial models of health-care costs, which help evaluate risk, offer management a window to the managed care world. With these models and other tools, health-care actuaries help organizations succeed in today’s health-care environment by showing how the financial and functional elements of an organization relate to risk. This report discusses the evolution of the health-care industry and the role that the healthcare actuary has played in that evolution. Eight case studies outline actuarial approaches to assessing risk in the era of managed care by discussing situations affecting five groups: providers, employers, regulators, public policy organizations, and HMOs. Built on experience gained in hundreds of cases, these studies show the range of tasks encountered by managed care actuaries and outline approaches that can help balance risks in today’s health-care system.

Perceptions of risk in the Private Finance Initiative

The UK Government’s Private Finance Initiative introduces new arrangements for the provision of buildings from which public services are delivered. These arrangements require the private sector to take on new forms of risk. Discusses the progress of the Initiative and focuses on a study to determine whether differences exist in the weighting given by different “players” to these risks. Argues that the existence of such differences would present an additional barrier to the PFI’s implementation. The findings reveal that one form of risk, namely that associated with revenue from occupancy under PFI, is viewed as both of greater importance and more uncertain than other risks. Generally, however, finds that perceptions of risk are not significantly different between the four groups examined in the study (surveyors, financiers, contractors and purchasers).