The parameters of the risk society: a review and exploration

This article offers a review and exploration of the parameters of the risk society. The primary focus is on the theoretical works of German sociologist Ulrich Beck and British sociologist Anthony Giddens, and in particular, their claim that we are living in a second, reflexive age of modernity, or risk society, characterized by an omnipresence of low probability—high consequence technological risks. The article concludes that the theorists of the risk society succeed in their goal of raising important questions for reflection and for future research. The risk society thesis succeeds in describing the emergence of a risk ethos, the development of a collective risk identity and the formation of communities united by an increasing vulnerability to risk. It draws attention to how the essentialist nature of risk has been transformed and how the origins and impact of risk have been reassessed. The theory points to a reconfiguration in the way risk is identified, evaluated, communicated and governed. The risk society expands the traditional concept of risk understood as the sum of the probability of an adverse event and the magnitude of the consequences, to include the subjective perception of risk, the inter-subjective communication of risk and the social experience of living in a risk environment. Finally, the theorists of the risk society succeed in iterating that it is not just health and the environment that are at risk, but in addition, the fundamental sociopolitical values of liberty, equality, justice, rights and democracy are now at risk

Diffusion In The Face Of Failure: The Evolution Of A Management Innovation

Recent work has questioned the institutional model of management innovation by highlighting interactions between the field-level actors engaged in diffusing innovations and implementation of the innovation at organization level. Focusing on the adaptation of management innovations to their context, rather than their creation, we review this work and use it to analyse the global diffusion of resource planning (RP), counter posing this case with the widely studied example of total quality management. Both of these innovations experienced a high level of failure when implemented by organizations. Total quality management's diffusion was characterized by a ‘boom and bust’ cycle. RP, however, has continued to spread globally in the form of its variants: MRP, MRPII and ERP. Our analysis seeks to account for the long-run diffusion of RP through a processual model which highlights the interplay between RP's discursive framing at field level, the affordances of the innovation itself and its adaptation within organizations. This demonstrates how objectifying RP in software not only helped to spread the innovation but also allowed field-level actors to differentiate its development as a successful innovation from the many failures experienced by organizations attempting to adapt it

Towards Innovation Democracy? Participation, Responsibility and Precaution in Innovation Governance.

Innovation is about more than technological invention. It involves change of many kinds: cultural, organisational and behavioural as well as technological. So, in a world crying out for social justice and ecological care, innovation holds enormous progressive potential. Yet there are no guarantees that any particular realised innovation will necessarily be positive. Indeed, powerful forces ‘close down’ innovation in the directions favoured by the most privileged interests. So harnessing the positive transformative potential for innovation in any given area, is not about optimizing some single self-evidently progressive trajectory in a ‘race to the future’. Instead, it is about collaboratively exploring diverse and uncertain pathways – in ways that deliberately balance the spurious effects of incumbent power. In other words, what is needed is a more realistic, rational and vibrant ‘innovation democracy’