Bednarek, Rebecca and Chalkias, Konstantinos and Jarzabkowski, P. (2021) Managing risk as a duality of harm and benefit: a study of organizational risk objects in the global insurance industry. British Journal of Management 32 (1), pp. 235-254. ISSN 1045-3172.
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Abstract
This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm-benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk-transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating, and diversifying. Through variation in these practices not all organizations seek balance and we, in turn, uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co-constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm-benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade-offs between harm-benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.
Metadata
| Item Type: | Article |
|---|---|
| Additional Information: | This is the peer reviewed version of the article, which has been published in final form at the link above. This article may be used for non-commercial purposes in accordance with Wiley Terms and Conditions for Self-Archiving. |
| School: | Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School |
| Depositing User: | Konstantinos Chalkias |
| Date Deposited: | 18 Oct 2019 08:55 |
| Last Modified: | 02 Aug 2023 17:54 |
| URI: | https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/29420 |
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