Stream C – The financialization of recovery
APROS Colloquium 2013
Hitotsubashi University, Tokyo, 15-17 February 2013
Stream C: The financialization of recovery
Conveners:
Dean Pierides, University of Melbourne
Nicholas Barthel de Weydenthal, University of Melbourne
Contacts:
n.bartheldeweydenthal@pgrad.unimelb.edu.au
For this stream we invite all papers that explore the relationship between organizations, risk, and the financialization of recovery. Organizations that are involved in disaster recovery have, over the years, increasingly come to rely on the use of financial instruments. Risk management validates the adoption, invention and deployment of various financial tools. With these tools, pre-disaster risk and post-disaster costs are connected and held together. Finance becomes integral and self-perpetuating in preparation for the next disaster or crisis, whether it be climate or market related. By way of providing an example, we focus here on natural disasters. However, we explicitly invite papers that address the relationship between organizations, risk and the financialization of recovery in any kind of disaster, crisis or emergency situation involving organizations, including banking, health, and so forth.
Emergency management is often described in cyclical terms, placing recovery between response and mitigation. This signals the impossibility of detaching recovery from other organizational dimensions of disasters. While prescriptions are being proposed for united organizational structures (Boin & ‘t Hart, 2010; Leonard & Howitt, 2010) to best exchange information about risk from ‘experts’ to ‘lay people’ (Paton, 2008), disaster recovery is being configured quantitatively and financially. Where risk, relief and recovery are a matter of collective interpretation, they are in effect being resolved in monetary terms (c.f. Beck, 2009; Callon, Lascoumes, & Barthe, 2009; Power, 2007). Matters of concern are being rendered into matters of fact (Latour, 2004).
Risk-calculating organizations in the United States and more recently in Australia, are an example of this process of rendering. These organizations are charged with the task of identifying and categorizing risks and it is under the rubric of emergency stabilization that their work contributes toward recommendations for cost mitigation strategies. Made up of experts with diverse scientific specializations, these teams engage in assessing the risk to people, property, infrastructure and the environment often before the catastrophic event is over. Within a short period of time a report is prepared that outlines what funding is required for stabilization.
Accounting for the financialization of recovery as a form of stabilization, contributes to a ‘pragmatic turn’ in economic sociology because it seeks to understand how recovery is rendered into economic terms (Callon, 2007). It is in this rendering that objects can be brought into sociological analysis without a return to the classic bifurcations; an ‘economic agencement is, in a broadest sense, one that renders things, behaviors and processes economic’ (Callon, Millo & Muniesa, 2007, p. 3). By extending the literature on the sociology of finance to the study of recovery we invite papers which seek to contribute to the sociology of risk, social studies of finance (Knorr-Cetina & Preda, forthcoming), economic sociology (Lounsbury & Hirsch, 2010), cultural economy (du Gay & Pryke, 2002) and broadly the sociology of organization by:
- providing detailed empirical accounts that describe and interpret, or explain, the relationship between organizations, finance, risk and recovery (including their respective actors);
- addressing the relevance of related literature—e.g. organizational communication (Taylor & Van Every, 2011), normal accident theory (Perrow, 1984), sensemaking (Weick & Sutcliffe, 2001), risk (Gephart, Van Maanen, & Oberlechner, 2009; Michael Power, 2007), and so forth—for how we might understand the relationship between organizations, risk and recovery;
- introducing literature from other disciplines to inform the relationship between organizations, finance, risk and recovery as it has been studied and theorised within the fields to which this session seeks to make a contribution; and,
- critiquing existing accounts of risk and recovery in relation to organizations and finance, especially those which sit within the fields to which this session seeks to make a contribution.
References
Beck, U. (2009). World at risk. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Boin, A., & ‘t Hart, P. (2010). Organising for effective emergency management: Lessons from research. Australian Journal of Public Administration, 69(4), 357-371.
Callon, M. (2007). What does it mean to say that economics is performative? In D. MacKenzie, F. Muniesa & L. Siu (Eds.), Do Economists Make Markets? On the Performativity of Economics (pp. 311-357). Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.
Callon, M., Lascoumes, P., & Barthe, Y. (2009). Acting in an uncertain world: an essay on technical democracy. Cambridge: MIT Press.
du Gay, P., & Pryke, M. (2002). Cultural economy: cultural analysis and commercial life. London: SAGE.
Gephart, R. P., Van Maanen, J., & Oberlechner, T. (2009). Organizations and Risk in Late Modernity. Organization Studies, 30(2-3), 141-155.
Knorr-Cetina, K., & Preda, A. (forthcoming). Handbook of the Sociology of Finance. Oxford: Oxford University Press.
Latour, B. (2004). Why Has Critique Run out of Steam? From Matters of Fact to Matters of Concern. Critical Inquiry, 30(2), 225-248.
Leonard, H. B., & Howitt, A. M. (2010). Organising Response to Extreme Emergencies: The Victorian Bushfires of 2009. The Australian Journal of Public Administration, 69(4), 372-386.
Lounsbury, M., & Hirsch, P. M. (2010). Markets on trial: Toward a policy-oriented economic sociology. Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 30A, 5-26.
Paton, D. (2008). Risk communication and natural hazard mitigation: how trust influences its effectiveness. International Journal of Global Environmental Issues, 8(1), 2-16.
Perrow, C. (1984). Normal accidents: living with high-risk technologies. New York: Basic Books.
Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty: designing a world of risk management. New York: Oxford University Press.
Power, M. (2007). Organized uncertainty: designing a world of risk management. New York: Oxford University Press.
Taylor, J. R., & Van Every, E. J. (2011). The situated organization: case studies in the pragmatics of communication research. New York: Routledge.
Weick, K. E., & Sutcliffe, K. M. (2001). Managing the unexpected: assuring high performance in an age of complexity. San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.
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