Risky business: Socializing asbestos risk and the hybridization of accounting

Lee C. Moerman and Sandra L. van der Laan

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING, 2012, vol. 23, issue 2, 107-116

Abstract: Risk management has become a major focus of corporate strategy. The management of risk often results in hybrid forms of calculative practice and to the production of “novel metrics” to make the future both calculable and manageable (Miller et al., 2008, p. 962). This paper contributes to an understanding of how accounting is implicated in the socialization of risk by examining the corporate funding of asbestos liabilities. Recent changes to the funding of asbestos claims in Australia provide a unique institutional context to utilize Douglas and Wildavsky's (1982) cultural risk model to examine the evolution of a hybrid calculative technology to manage, mediate and facilitate the socialization of risk.

Keywords: Socialization of risk; Asbestos liabilities; Douglas and Wildavsky; Hybrid accounting (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
References: View references in EconPapers View complete reference list from CitEc
Citations: View citations in EconPapers (5)

Downloads: (external link)
http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S1045235411001389
Full text for ScienceDirect subscribers only

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:eee:crpeac:v:23:y:2012:i:2:p:107-116

DOI: 10.1016/j.cpa.2011.10.004

Access Statistics for this article

CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING is currently edited by Marcia Annisette, Christine Cooper and Yves Gendron

More articles in CRITICAL PERSPECTIVES ON ACCOUNTING from Elsevier
Bibliographic data for series maintained by Catherine Liu ().