On ‘risk work’: Professional discourse, accountability, and everyday action

Abstract

In recent years a technical discourse of risk has assumed the status of a universal basis for governance and administrative practice in both private and public sector organizations within Britain, the United States, and a number of other Western countries. The re-framing of pre-existing organizational concerns in terms of risk categories reflects an underlying bureaucratic concern with the accountable and cost-effective management of contingency. This paper examines some of the diversity of realworld features of the penetration of spheres of professional practice by this new discourse of risk. While risk-based practice is advocated by rhetorics that stress the promotion of administrative efficiency, in the real world it is possible to observe a wide variety of situationally-specific risk-related practices. This paper argues that 'risk work' in organizational settings offers especially useful resources that allow actors to pursue such diverse agendas, while also providing an accounting mechanism that allows them to legitimate such activity.

On doing ‘risk work’ in the context of successful outcomes: exploring how medication safety is brought into action through health professionals’ everyday working practices

“…We found that frontline practitioners claimed that they worked within and conformed to formally established medication safety risk management practices; but we also found that actual risk-related practices were not fully encapsulated by normative frameworks (Horlick-Jones, 2005b). …”

“…Following Lupton (1999, p. 34) both risks as measured and identified by 'experts', and risks as perceived by 'lay' actors, lead to certain actions. It is therefore relevant to look at the ways in which these understandings are constructed and acted upon in the context of risk-related everyday working practices (Horlick-Jones, 2005a;Horlick-Jones, 2005b;Zinn, 2008).…”

Special Issue: Complexity, Routines, and Reflexivity in Professional Work

“…By "risk work" we refer to the practices of professionals (and those assisting professional work) dealing directly with clients, where the management of riskthrough assessing, intervening, advising and/or communicating-has become a key and (in some cases) (re)defining logic of everyday work. Our approach to risk work is especially focused upon the material and embodied practices which enable this work to "get done" (see Horlick-Jones, 2005), and what this means to lived experiences of work and (para)professionals' identities (cf. Power, 2016).…”

“…Few studies have peered into the messy world of how such risk work actually "gets done" (Harrits, 2016;Horlick-Jones, 2005) and still fewer have considered the lived, embodied experiences of what it means to accomplish everyday risk work (Gale et al 2016 andHarrits andMøller 2014 analyse decision-making and identity among front-line prevention workers but not in relation to risk).…”

The Role of Valuation Practices for Risk Identification

“…Value is an outcome of intricate social processes of identification, definition, hierarchization, and calculation that condition preferences in more or less determined ways. Therefore, if one wishes to understand what value stands for, one needs to unfold the social practices of valuation that determine, explicitly or implicitly, what is worth being considered as an object of care and why this is the case (Horlick-Jones 2005).…”