Analyzing Complicity in Risk

Abstract

When risks generate anger rather than fear, there is at least someone who regards the imposition of those risks as wrongdoing; and it then makes sense to speak of the involvement in producing those risks as complicity. It is particularly relevant to examine the complicity of risk bearers, because this is likely to have a strong influence on how far other actors should go in providing them with protection. This article makes a case for analyzing complicity explicitly, in parallel with normal processes of risk assessment, and proposes a framework for this analysis. It shows how it can be applied in a case study of maritime transportation, and examines the practical and theoretical difficulties of this kind of analysis. The conclusion is that the analysis has to be formative rather than summative, but that it could provide a useful way of exposing differences in the assumptions of different actors about agency and responsibility.

Conceptualising responsibility in the aftermath of the horsemeat adulteration incident: an online study with Irish and UK consumers

“…Consumers can hold certain individuals or organisations causally responsible for an event or see them as causally contributing to the event by the actions they take or fail to take (Schafer, 1999). Consumers can see these individuals or organisations as 'complicit' as Busby argues not as primary agents but as contributors: the involvement that various groups have in the generation of a risk, not as primary agents, nor as the notional risk managers, but as people whose action in some way contributes to the risk (Busby, 2008(Busby, , p. 1571). …”

The Influence of Crisis Management on Customer Purchase Intention

“…Consumers deem a business that takes its failure as causally accountable to the crisis events. Busby (2008) noted that business is seeming accountable by customers if it is supposed to be 'complicit' by things tangled in risks generation whose responsibility in some way that may contributes to the risks. Therefore, the following hypothesis was formed:…”