Uncertain Business : Risk, Insurance, and the Limits of Knowledge Paperback / softback
by Aaron Doyle, Richard V. Ericson
Paperback / softback
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Description
We live in an age of increasing doubt about whether our institutions and technologies can provide security against risks, many of which they themselves have created.
Uncertain Business is an unprecedented inquiry into insurance industry practices and what they tell us about risks and uncertainties in contemporary society. The core of the book is ethnographic studies in distinct fields of insurance: premature death, disability, earthquake, and terrorism.
These studies reveal that uncertainty pervades different fields of insurance, the very industry that is charged with transforming uncertainty into manageable risk.
Scientific data on risk are variously absent, inadequate, controversial, contradictory, and ignored.
Insurers impose meaning on uncertainty through non-scientific forms of knowledge that are intuitive, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and speculative.
Nevertheless, the nature of uncertainty and the response to it varies substantially across the fields studied, showing how contemporary society is characterized by competing risk logics. Insurers' perceptions and decisions about uncertainty - with potential for windfall profits as well as catastrophic losses - create crises in insurance availability and provoke new forms of inequality and exclusion.
Hence, while the insurance industry is a central bulwark against uncertainty, insurers also play a key role in fostering it.
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Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:335 pages
- Publisher:University of Toronto Press
- Publication Date:23/04/2004
- Category:
- ISBN:9780802085627
Other Formats
- PDF from £55.25
- Hardback from £44.48
Information
-
Available to Order - This title is available to order, with delivery expected within 2 weeks
- Format:Paperback / softback
- Pages:335 pages
- Publisher:University of Toronto Press
- Publication Date:23/04/2004
- Category:
- ISBN:9780802085627