Organizational Risk: “Muddling Through” 40 Years of Research

Abstract

The recognition that organizations are a part of adverse outcomes has become commonplace in risk research. Social organization is a key theme in relation to risk minimization through institutional control and monitoring, and in how organizations are connected to society's perceptions of risk (beyond outcomes). The article reviews progress made in research on organizational risk over the last four decades and the contributions made to the field by fieldwork and descriptive approaches, understanding risk as partly determined by organizational context. A key issue for risk analysis is to figure out what these insights mean for risk professionals, such as while developing assessment methodologies and management approaches. Analysis of the literature shows that what to model if organizational factors are to be included in risk assessments remains as big a question as how to model. Integrating fieldwork and descriptive approaches for analyzing organizational risk, accidents, and safety is argued to be a main task for the risk analysis community.

Through a Glass Darkly: How Natural Science and Technical Communities Looked at Social Science Advances in Understanding Risk

“…Charles Perrow's book Normal Accidents (Perrow, 1984) was provocative in several ways. It was a springboard for a great deal of social science speculation and research (Petterson Gould, 2020). But its claim that nuclear accidents were inevitable, seemed both wrong and threatening to nuclear experts.…”

“…But its claim that nuclear accidents were inevitable, seemed both wrong and threatening to nuclear experts. While social scientists explored the notion of high reliability organizations and reflected on and studied the idea of a “safety culture” and its aspects (Petterson Gould, 2020), the prevailing attitude within the nuclear industry was that “high reliability” and “safety culture” were the same thing; they were all that were needed to keep nuclear operations safe, and the only problem was to learn better methods of promoting reliability and safety. With this attitude came a nostalgic longing for the days of Admiral Rickover's running of nuclear programs for the U.S. Navy (Wikipedia, 2020).…”

“…However, there are good reasons for social scientists to resist purely instrumental framings. For example, Petterson Gould (2020) points out, following Silbey (2009), that there is a tension between considering “safety culture” as a means to achieve safety goals and the notion of culture as an “emergent property and indeterminate phenomenon.” Such tensions appear in many contexts and many areas of social science study. Both poles of the tension offer insight.…”

“…Adversarial mechanisms in such a setting may be counterproductive; better understanding of distrust and evaluating alternative approaches for coping with it are needed. Mental models (Morgan et al., 2002) could be a useful approach to capturing mismatches between expert and public expectations. It has become increasingly clear that organizational capabilities and human behavior play a critical role in hazard management and much has been learned about these factors (Petterson Gould, 2020): however, management performance is not generally included as part of a risk assessment; learning how to assess risks related to management performance should lead to more realism in risk analysis; it could also provide another path toward improving organizational capabilities. The adaptive management strategies needed for coping with uncertainty (Goble et al., 2017) pose challenges to experts in their decision making and in their communication with members of the public. There will be ongoing demands for actions and answers when, however, much is unknown and delay is sometimes an appropriate strategy.…”

Quality and choice: aim high, don't muddle through!

“…Muddling-through is something that does have to be done in some circumstances and is regarded by some as a science in itself, especially when applied to issues such as economic and political theory (Lindblom, 1959; Bendor, 1995). Others, however, have suggested that the approach has serious flaws, in relation to issues as diverse as disaster response (Gould, 2020) and embryo protection (Fox and McGuinness, 2015). I would suggest that collecting data for its own sake or in the hope that it will eventually lead to the resolution of a problem is akin to muddling-through, but in a knowledge-rich era it is increasingly the way that research is done.…”