While most scholarship in the sociology of insurance has focused on the making of insurance risk by investigating mechanisms of pooling and spreading, this article examines insurers’ management of financial uncertainty. Based on a large corpus of written sources and 44 semi‐structured oral history interviews, this article seeks to describe and explain a shift in how financial uncertainty is dealt with in British life insurance, away from traditional multipolar arrangements revolving around actuarial prudence and discretion, towards bipolar arrangements that rely on explicit risk quantification and the logic of risk‐based capital to “individualise” financial risk. The article identifies two factors that were key in bringing about this shift: first, the competitive dynamics that unfolded with the emergence of challenger “unit‐linked” insurers in the 1960s, and, second, changes in the professional ecology, as manifested by the changing relations between the actuarial profession and insurance supervisors.

Dissertation defenses are ambiguous affairs, which mark both the end of a long process of doctoral education and the inauguration of a doctoral candidate into a body of experts. At Maastricht University (and other Dutch universities), the decision to award a doctoral degree is made on the basis of the written dissertation well before the defense, which makes the ambiguous status of the event between examination and celebration especially evident. Nevertheless, participants attach importance to the event because it impacts the reputation of individual researchers, as well as that of research groups and of the host-university itself. Taking a Goffmanian perspective on the event as a performance, it becomes clear that the ambiguity in the definition between celebration and assessment is contained within the script that details how the performance should be conducted. In this script, participants' role is unclear, providing them the means to act in accordance with their own definition of the event. The ambiguous definition of the event is performed at an individual level but also in team performances, in which participants correct each other when someone's behavior appears too celebratory. Amidst this ambiguity between celebration and assessment, the university reinforces its own authority to award doctoral degrees, acting as a gate-keeping institution to the academic world.

Financialization is commonly understood as the increasing centrality of financial actors and logics in the economy. However, building upon literature which relates financialization to the mathematization of financial valuation practices, this chapter argues that the banking sector was itself financialized since the 1980s. Our historical overview of the changing nature of banking traces the thread running from the Black-Scholes options pricing formula through to Value-at-Risk modelling and Collateralized Debt Obligation valuation. We explore the calculative and regulatory consequences of these risk management techniques and how they allowed large volumes of risk to be removed off banks’ balance sheets and regulatory capital minimized, with deleterious results for financial stability.

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