Managing Risk as a Duality of Harm and Benefit: A Study of Organizational Risk Objects in the Global Insurance Industry

This study examines how organizations construct and manage risk objects as a duality of harm–benefit within their normal operations. It moves beyond the existing focus on accidents, disasters and crisis. We study the risk‐transfer processes of 35 insurers where they navigate the tension of retaining risk in their insurance portfolio to increase the benefit of making profit and transferring risk to reinsurance to reduce the harm of paying claims. We show that organizations’ constructions of risk are underpinned by everyday risk management practices of centralizing, calculating and diversifying. Through variation in these practices, not all organizations seek balance and we in turn uncover the sensemaking processes of abstracting and localizing that enable organizations to prioritize harm or benefit. This contributes to the risk literature by illuminating the co‐constitutive relationship between risk sensemaking processes and everyday risk management practices. Following the complex linkages involved in the construction of risk objects as sources of harm–benefit, our analysis also contributes to the literature on dualities. It shows that while immediate trade‐offs between harm–benefit occur, prioritizing one element of the duality is ultimately a means for attaining the other. Thus, while initial imbalance is evident, prioritization can be an enabling approach to navigating duality.     

Absent bodies and present memories: marking out the everyday and the future in Eastern Sri Lanka

Drawing from ethnographic work carried out between 2005 and 2007, this article considers the ways in which a women’s network has developed strategies to find meaning around the absences of loved ones, killed or ‘disappeared’ during the decades of conflict in Sri Lanka. For most of these women, the fate of their husbands, brothers, sons and fathers is not known and the lack of answers means that they are unable to fully grieve and find closure. In order to survive, they must find ways to deal with the absent bodies and present memories of those who may never be located and accounted for. These strategies include tree-planting ceremonies carried out as a way of not only remembering and mourning loved ones but also asking questions about how one makes sense of loss and what it means to carry the burden of unanswered absences through everyday life and into the future.     

Disability and the Notion of Human Development: questions of rights and capabilities

From a rights perspective disability has come increasingly to be seen as less a matter of personal misfortune than of societal neglect and obstruction, and as much warranting claims on the state to ensure inclusion and equality as to prosecute a duty of care. This shift resonates with other transitions within international discourse, most notably the increasing prominence of the notion of human development, which emphasises the importance of equity, freedom, and full realisation of human rights and capabilities as central to societal developmental objectives. After briefly examining apparent parallels in discourses relating to disability and to human development, the capabilities approach, upon which the concept of human development is grounded, is examined more closely and its implications for disability considered. It is argued that a capabilities approach may serve alternatively to keep disability partially hidden from view or become a powerful means for identifying the responsibilities of governments and external agencies in genuinely equalising opportunities.     

Dementia Problem Behavior and the Production of Informal Caregiving Services

Informal caregivers of individuals with Alzheimer's disease spend a considerable amount of time providing care. In this paper, we use Grossman's health production and Becker's time allocation models to develop a model of informal care provision to elderly dementia patients. In our model, time inputs produce caregiving services, which provides utility to the caregiver, but reduces leisure. We assume that time is less productive of services on the margin as the disease progresses. In this framework, an increase in patients' disease severity does not necessarily increase informal caregiver time input. The cost of formal care establishes a reservation price for informal caregiving. When the costs of informal caregiving rise above this reservation level, the patient is institutionalized. We test empirically the effect of deterioration in the patients' condition, proxied by both disease severity and dementia problem behavior, on informal caregiving time. We find that dementia-related problem behaviors and functional limitations significantly increase inputs of informal caregiving time. Patients' problem behavior exerts a modifying effect on functional limitations, and patients' comorbidities have no effect on informal caregiving time.     

Naturally occurring play patterns in groups of latency aged children

This study examines the influence of the socialization of aggression among different gender and social class groupings and the influence of psychosocial stage on cognitive developmental play preferences among groups of school aged children. Observations of 143 play groups were coded for play preference (symbolic play, practice play, games with rules) and play performance (cooperative or competitive). Findings of the log-linear data analysis suggest a middle class and masculine bias in Piaget's cognitive model (i.e., that as age increases children prefer more games with rules). This model held only for middle class and affluent boys. Girls (both latency and prepubertal) and lower socioeconomic groups tended to prefer practice play. Girls were more likely to play cooperatively; boys more likely to play competitively. Implications for theory development and clinical practice are explored.     

Narrating Significant Experience: Reflective Accounts and the Production of (Self) Knowledge

Notwithstanding the rise of evidence-based practice, other tendencieswithin social work scholarship are also discernible. One ofthese is the study of the everyday, routine accomplishment ofpractice, drawing on microsociological methods and techniques.In this article, I apply techniques drawn from narrative anddiscourse analysis to the study of reflective practice accounts,which hold an important place in social work education. In particular,it is relevant to examine the form that reflective accountstake and the rhetorical and narrative devices deployed withinthem to accomplish a competent professional identity. My argumentis not that such accounts of practice are untruthful, ratherI propose that we would do well to move beyond taking texts(and talk) for granted and treating language as merely the mediumfor expressing inner thoughts and feelings. Social work shouldtake seriously the need to explore its modes of representationand to cultivate a more self-conscious approach to the way professionaland client identities are produced in practice.