Understanding Risk

During recent years, news headlines have been rife with criticisms of the risk management practices of public and private sector entities. These criticisms have often been accompanied by calls for greater transparency in the way government entities manage risks and communicate dangers to the public. Similarly, in the private sector, the internationalization of economic activity has heightened concerns over the potential adverse implications of mismanagement and financial scandals, and has led to calls for greater regulation and supervision. While the responses of public sector agencies and private sector actors to these challenges have differed, they share a common acknowledgement that effective governance relies on the pro-active identification, assessment, and management of risks as well as appropriate regulatory frameworks. This edited book covers a number of divergent topics illustrating the emergence of several novel themes in the area of economic and social risk. As a commonality, these novel themes relate to the growing complexity in which human activity in this late stage of capitalist development is embedded. This risk-generating complexity, in turn, can be observed at several levels, including workplace hazards, governance problems within the private sector or within the intersection of private and public, and in relation to the economic risks faced by larger entities such as individual countries.