Ambiguity and therapy in risk management

Tom Horlick-Jones and Jonathan Rosenhead

LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library

Abstract: Ambiguity, the existence of multiple plausible (though possibly contested) ways of making sense of the characteristics of decision situations, can present significant difficulties for a wide range of risk management tasks. We will argue that ambiguity is present in risk management situations to a far greater extent that is commonly appreciated. The concept of ambiguity has arisen in different forms across disciplinary literatures and domains of practice. In this paper, we situate our experience of finding ways of supporting planning and decision-making processes concerned with ambiguous risks in the context of those wider perspectives. Our own efforts have employed a hybrid form of problem structuring methods (drawn from operational research and management science) and ethnography (drawn from sociology and anthropology). These engagements with organisational and inter-organisational risk management issues have led us to recognise that ‘untangling’ otherwise intractable risk management problems may be regarded, in some sense, as a therapeutic process. In this paper, we develop this therapeutic interpretation of the untangling of collective ambiguities using illustrations from a concrete problem situation. We set this therapeutic reading of decision processes in the context of wider perspectives, including those drawn from Habermas’ theorisation of communication, the sociology of science and the literature on citizen engagement and deliberation processes.

Keywords: organizational risk management; ambiguity; uncertainty; plural rationalities; ethnomethodology; problem structuring methods; practical reasoning; the metaphor of psychotherapy; engagement; transdisciplinarity (search for similar items in EconPapers)
JEL-codes: G32 J50 (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2013-11
New Economics Papers: this item is included in nep-cbe, nep-cfn, nep-rmg and nep-upt
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations:

Published in EURO Journal on Decision Processes, November, 2013, 1(3-4), pp. 263-283. ISSN: 2193-9438

Downloads: (external link)
http://eprints.lse.ac.uk/62497/ Open access version. (application/pdf)

Related works:
This item may be available elsewhere in EconPapers: Search for items with the same title.

Export reference: BibTeX RIS (EndNote, ProCite, RefMan) HTML/Text

Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:ehl:lserod:62497

Access Statistics for this paper

More papers in LSE Research Online Documents on Economics from London School of Economics and Political Science, LSE Library LSE Library Portugal Street London, WC2A 2HD, U.K.. Contact information at EDIRC.
Bibliographic data for series maintained by LSERO Manager ().