Valuing What You Risk and Risking What You Value: Advancing a research agenda for risk studies

Abstract

Risk studies have rapidly expanded in the last few decades. Yet this growth is characterized by fragmentation in the literature despite it being a central concept for a vast array of organizations, where their success or failure to manage risk is considered central to thriving, surviving or collapsing. We take this opportunity provided by the Perspectives format to engage with a selection of six diverse papers published in Organization Studies over four decades. Drawing from these papers, we trace the evolution of risk research in relation to its epistemic bases in either metrics or values and the strategic focus on risk as either harm or opportunity. Inspired by the tensions between each of these bases, our review of the selected articles illustrates the dynamic entanglement of these ostensibly distinct and polarised strategic and epistemic bases of risk studies. We then develop a conceptual framework to map the field of risk research and propose avenues for future research. Our framework enables us to propose a stronger focus on risk taking for opportunity, warn against becoming overly focused on the metrics for controlling harm especially in the face of enticing visualizations of harmful risk, and strongly assert values as an important epistemic basis for risk studies. As these values may be hidden or visible, we emphasize the importance of understanding whose values are foregrounded in proposing a research agenda for reclaiming societal benefit. This latter focus is a neglected area of risk studies yet vitally important in addressing the big societal issues of our time.