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:

1 online resource (330 p.)

Edition:

1st ed.

Place of Publication:

Chicago : University of Chicago Press, 2002.

Language Note:

English

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:

Frontmatter

Contents

Acknowledgments

Contributors

1. Embracing Risk

2. Risk, Insurance, and the Social Construction of Responsibility

3. Beyond Moral Hazard: Insurance as Moral Opportunity

4. Embracing Fatality through Life Insurance in Eighteenth-Century England

5. Imagining Insurance: Risk, Thrift, and Life Insurance in Britain

6. Insuring More, Ensuring Less: The Costs and Benefits of Private Regulation through Insurance

7. Rhetoric of Risk and the Redistribution of Social Insurance

8. Taking Risks: Extreme Sports and the Embrace of Risk in Advanced Liberal Societies

9. At Risk of Madness

10. The Policing of Risk

11. The Return of Descartes's Malicious Demon: An Outline of a Philosophy of Precaution

Index

Notes:

Description based upon print version of record.

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN:

9786612537387

9780226035178

0226035174

9781282537385

1282537385

OCLC:

593295911