Embracing risk : the changing culture of insurance and responsibility / edited by Tom Baker & Jonathan Simon.

Format:

Book

Contributor:

Baker, Tom, 1959-

Simon, Jonathan, 1959-

Language:

English

Subjects (All):

Risk--Sociological aspects.

Risk.

Risk (Insurance).

Responsibility.

Physical Description:

ix, 318 pages : illustrations, forms ; 24 cm

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Summary:

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.

Contents:

1 Embracing Risk / Tom Baker, Jonathan Simon 1

Part 1 Toward a Sociology of Insurance and Risk 27

2 Risk, Insurance, and the Social Construction of Responsibility / Tom Baker 33

3 Beyond Moral Hazard: Insurance as Moral Opportunity / Deborah Stone 52

4 Embracing Fatality through Life Insurance in Eighteenth-Century England / Geoffrey Clark 80

5 Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift, and Life Insurance in Britain / Pat O'Malley 97

6 Insuring More, Ensuring Less: The Costs and Benefits of Private Regulation through Insurance / Carol A. Heimer 116

7 Rhetoric of Risk and the Redistribution of Social Insurance / Martha McCluskey 146

Part 2 Risk(s) beyond Insurance 171

8 Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies / Jonathan Simon 177

9 At Risk of Madness / Nikolas Rose 209

10 The Policing of Risk / Richard V. Ericson, Kevin D. Haggerty 238

11 The Return of Descartes's Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution / Francois Ewald, (translated by Stephen Utz) 273.

Notes:

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

0226035182

0226035190

OCLC:

47216185