Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Insurance and Responsibility - Hardcover

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0226035182 ISBN 13: 9780226035185

Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR, 2002

Inhaltsangabe

For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources.

Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk is used to govern fields outside the realm of insurance, from extreme sports to policing, mental health institutions, and international law. Offering an original approach to risk, insurance, and responsibility, the provocative and wide-ranging essays in Embracing Risk demonstrate that risk has moved well beyond its origins in the insurance trade to become a central organizing principle of social and cultural life.

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Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Tom Baker is Professor of Law at the University of Pennsylvania Law School and author of The Medical Malpractice Myth, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

Jonathan Simon is Associate Dean of Jurisprudence and Social Policy and Professor of Law at the University of California, Berkeley, and the author of Poor Discioline: Parole and the Social Control of the Underclass, 1890-1990, also published by the University of Chicago Press.

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For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources.

Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk is used to govern fields outside the realm of insurance, from extreme sports to policing, mental health institutions, and international law. Offering an original approach to risk, insurance, and responsibility, the provocative and wide-ranging essays in Embracing Risk demonstrate that risk has moved well beyond its origins in the insurance trade to become a central organizing principle of social and cultural life.

Aus dem Klappentext

For much of the twentieth century, industrialized nations addressed social problems, such as workers' compensation benefits and social welfare programs, in terms of spreading risk. But in recent years a new approach has emerged: using risk both as a way to conceive of and address social problems and as an incentive to reduce individual claims on collective resources.

Embracing Risk explores this new approach from a variety of perspectives. The first part of the book focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second part examines how risk is used to govern fields outside the realm of insurance, from extreme sports to policing, mental health institutions, and international law. Offering an original approach to risk, insurance, and responsibility, the provocative and wide-ranging essays inEmbracing Risk demonstrate that risk has moved well beyond its origins in the insurance trade to become a central organizing principle of social and cultural life.

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Embracing Risk

The Changing Culture of Insurance and ResponsibilityBy Tom Baker

University of Chicago Press

Copyright © 2002 Tom Baker
All right reserved.
ISBN: 0226035182
ONE - Embracing Risk

Tom Baker and Jonathan Simon

Centuries are too convenient not to be used for organizing historical developments. But as cognitive psychologists have discovered, people are so hard-wired for seeing patterns that we tend to see them where there are none. For this reason, historical patterns witnessed at the start of a new millennium may be suf?ciently suspect members of an already highly suspicious class that they ought, perhaps, to be discounted entirely. With that said, however, a premise of this book is that we are, at the beginning of the twenty-?rst century, witnessing an important transformation in the approach to risk and responsibility, an approach that we call embracing risk.

In coining the term embracing risk, we mean to both evoke and distinguish the idea of spreading risk that has been so in?uential over the last century. Embracing risk captures two related cultural trends. The ?rst follows logically from efforts to spread risk and consists of a wide variety of efforts to conceive and address social problems in terms of risk. For example, money management, social services, policing, environmental policy, tort law, national defense, and a host of otherwise unrelated ?elds have all come to share a common vocabulary of risk. The second cultural trend is a reaction against spreading risk, and it consists of various efforts to make people more individually accountable for risk.

Together these two trends mean that, as more of life is understood in terms of risk, taking risks increasingly becomes what one does with risk. Once you begin to look, you can see these efforts almost everywhere: in transformations in the private insurance market, pensions, and social insurance; and in popular culture, where extreme sports, day trading, and the cult of the technology entrepreneur all exalt individuals who (at least seem to) spurn the safety nets of large institutions.

Ideas like embracing risk or spreading risk inevitably promise more than they can deliver, and they never capture more than a partial vision of a cultural moment. Yet that does not diminish their importance. The notion of insurance as risk spreading was a veritable genie from a bottle in the early twentieth century, as reformers sought to extend its logic from workplace accidents to automobile accidents, unemployment, poverty, disease, and nearly every other social problem, with wide-ranging consequences (Simon 1998). We see signs that embracing risk may become as symbolically powerful. Indeed, reformers today are recasting their approaches to many of those same problems in terms of embracing risk.

This embrace of risk creates new challenges, not only for those with risks to spread or embrace, but also for the study of risk and insurance. Historians, anthropologists, political scientists, and lawyers have all explored the emergence of modern approaches to risk and insurance. But the implicit background for much of this work has been the risk-spreading approach. For example, this work has almost always understood insurance as a mechanism of risk spreading, and risk itself in terms of future harms with measurable probabilities (Ewald 1986).

The two trends that come together in embracing risk challenge us to understand other aspects of both risk and insurance. Insurance institutions that embrace risk push us to recognize that insurance can be about much more than risk spreading. Looking back with this expanded vision, we see that insurance has always done much more than spread losses. Similarly, if risk is something to be embraced, it cannot only be about harm or danger. And, once we free risk from risk spreading, there is no longer a reason to con?ne risk to probability. Once again, looking back with expanded vision we see that risk was never completely tied up with either harm or probability.

The essays in this book are a variety of efforts to bring into view changes along two axeschanging ways of governing risk and changing ways of doing the sociology of insurance and risk. They represent the beginning of what we hope will be an important new area of thought and research. We have collected these essays together to invite and encourage further work along either of the above axes or between them. Toward that end, in the remainder of this introduction we consider each axis in a bit more detail. Introductory sections at the beginning of each of the two parts of the book describe the individual essays that follow them and how each essay contributes to the books main themes.

From Spreading Risk to Embracing Risk

From the adoption of workers compensation laws in the early twentieth century through at least the late 1980s, the United States and other industrializing societies socialized, or spread, more and more risks. Over this period, ever-expanding public and private insurance pools assumed ?nancial responsibility for signi?cant risks faced by individuals, families, and organizations. On the private side, the twentieth century witnessed the dramatic growth of health insurance, tort liability insurance, workers compensation insurance, and private pensions (which typically have an annuity, and, hence, insurance character), as well as the slower but still steady rise in older forms of insurance such as life, property, and disability insurance. On the public side, there was the creation and perhaps even more dramatic expansion of an entirely new social insurance sector, beginning with the multifaceted Social Security program during the New Deal and followed by Medicare, Medicaid, and natural disaster insurance, as well as a host of public sector insurance ventures directed primarily at business risks.

During this era, insurance was widely understood as the science and art of spreading risks over populations. Indeed, some visionaries went so far as to claim that insurance embodied the superiority of science and technology over religion. Through insurance, science would be able to resolve social con?icts and produce forms of collective mutuality envisioned but un-achieved by any of the major religions (see, e.g., Dawson 1895).

The trend was not always uniform, and signi?cant risks and important segments of the population were always left out. Nevertheless, the overall picture during this period is one in which the steadily employed, as well as an expanding percentage of those outside the labor market, enjoyed increasing protection from the ?nancial consequences of illness, injury, old age, premature death of the family breadwinner, ?re, and natural disaster. Indeed, more insurance for more people might best describe the twenti-eth-century U.S. domestic social policy well into the Reagan/Bush years. Our focus is on the United States, but we think that experience is not unique. If anything, risk has been socialized to an even greater extent in Western Europe and Japan.

More recently, there has been a series of developments in the United States and elsewhere that suggest the appeal of a domestic social policy of more insurance for more people has begun to fade in favor of policies that embrace risk as an incentive that can reduce individual claims on collective resources. Signi?cantly, these developments are occurring in both public and private forms of insurance, so that they cannot be attributed solely to a reexamination of the role of the state in the...

Details zur Ausgabe

• Verlag: UNIV OF CHICAGO PR
• Erscheinungsdatum: 2002
• Sprache: Englisch
• ISBN 10: 0226035182
• ISBN 13: 9780226035185
• Einband: Gebundene Ausgabe
• Anzahl der Seiten: 329
• Herausgeber: Baker Tom, Simon Jonathan
• Kontakt zum Hersteller: The University of Chicago Press; https://press.uchicago.edu/index.html; ; 5801 S. Ellis Avenue; Chicago; IL; 60637; USA
• Verantwortliche Person: Nicht verfügbar