The Governance of Risk
Christian Huber, Kim Soin & Tobias Scheytt
Discussant: Jérémy Morales
This paper studies the introduction of risk management devices in higher education
institutions. The authors examine risk registers and the information on risk management
published online by UK universities. This material is analysed using Douglas’s cultural theory
to show that a certain point of view structures those reports and may foster cultural change in
higher education institutions.
In the UK, the authors show, the Higher Education Funding Council for England, Wales
and Scotland (HEFCE) has played a role in the managerialisation of universities. In the last
ten years, it has taken more and more regulatory functions and uses funding mechanisms to
promote financial accountability and ‘good’ governance. Precisely, higher education
institutions are required to adopt a ‘risk-based approach’ and to publish risk reports, which the
authors analyse to highlight a competition between different worldviews.
To make sense of their data, the authors use Mary Douglas’s ‘grid/group-model’ as a
theoretical framework. The ‘grid’ relates to the intensity of rules and behavioural constraints
on the members of organisations. The ‘group’ relates to the degree of coherence within an
organisation. Douglas thus identifies four types of culture: hierarchist (high grid, high group),
fatalist (high grid, low group), egalitarian (low grid, high group) and individualist (low grid,
low group). All types have specific ways to deal with risks and each has its own ‘Achilles’
heel’. For instance, the egalitarian culture deals with risks through collegial control whereas
the individualist culture adapts the ‘rules of the game’; the egalitarian’s weakness is the
unwillingness to accept external authority and the individualist’s weakness is that it places
individual before collective benefit. Douglas thus introduces the notion of risk in the study of
cultures.
Applying this model to the risk reports analysed, the authors argue that the ‘risk-based
approach’ promoted by the HEFCE and followed (at least rhetorically) by the universities is
best described through the individualist culture. This is problematic, they argue, as
universities used to be structured around an egalitarian culture. The authors see two
possibilities: either the values of higher education are going to change, or the risk
management system will meet strong resistance. In the first case, a cultural shift will happen.
As the authors put it: “The introduction of ideas of risk management, which then form the
basis for a new repertoire of actions, then leads to a strengthening of the cultural perspective
these management ideas include, which then reciprocally strengthen a certain understanding
of the idea of risk management.” (p.10)
I found the paper interesting to read and liked the idea that an organisation can be
influenced by different cultural patterns that relate to different worldviews, including different
definitions of risk. However, I think that both the theoretical framework and empirical
material can be strengthened.
The paper gives very little information on the method used to build the empirical
material. More importantly, the findings are very quickly described – one page gives broad
information on the risk registers analysed. The authors explain that the empirical work is still
on-going, but this makes it difficult to evaluate how convincing the main argument can be.
Also, the idea that universities used to be structured around an ‘egalitarian’ culture, although
related to references, has to be argued more heavily and nuanced. I can understand that you
want to build ideal-types, or to argue that universities used to be more egalitarian, but I find
the idea that universities used to be consensual (p.7) and that “formalised rules played only a
role on the border of the organization” (p.9) hard to believe.
I am more easily convinced by the idea that two broad patterns structure higher
education institutions and compete for the monopolisation of the definition of how they
should be managed. But this raises the question of the theoretical framework adopted. Others
can seem very suitable, as you do not really show why this is cultural change, not
organisational or institutional change, you are describing. Why is risk management different
from what Covaleski and Dirsmith long ago called re-coupling? Can it be considered a
competition between institutional logics? I do not argue that you should use another
framework, but I believe you should explain in more detail why you chose this one.
This is important because I am not sure you really use Douglas’s notions of culture and
risk. In fact, I believe you should explain why you talk about ‘culture’. At the end of the
conclusion you argue that the types of culture can dynamically interact, which seemed a bit
weird to me. Maybe you should be more specific about the groups, their cultures, and how
they interact as I am not sure about ‘cultures’ interacting with devices. Or maybe you want to
argue that the assumptions enclosed within risk management devices supported by the
HEFCE are inconsistent with the culture of universities, but this seems to be a different story
requiring a different methodology.
What I can see is that you have access to a logic, a rationale, a set of assumptions that
structure risk management devices and might be inconsistent with the culture, or maybe ethos,
of members of higher education institutions. I can see several frameworks that could fit this
story, but I am sceptical about Douglas. This appears for instance in your definition of risk. I
might be wrong, but you seem to adopt an interpretive notion of risk. And if I understand it
well, Douglas adopts a ‘realist’ and ‘structuralist’ approach. Is this framework consistent with
your notions of risk and culture?
Indeed, the ‘grid/group-model’ looks like a very durkheimian model to me, where grid
is social regulation (mechanical solidarity, cohesion) and group is social integration (organic
solidarity, coherence). This seems very holistic and I don’t really understand how you
reconcile it with the idea of dynamic interaction (is it possible to have low integration and
high integration at the same time?). This is also important because the framework makes the
argument a bit ambiguous. If I understood well, you argue that a cultural change, from an
egalitarian to an individualist culture, could go against academics values and beliefs. If we go
back to how the matrix has been built, we see that both types have low grid (that is low
cohesion) and the shift would be from high group (that is high coherence) to low group. Is it
really inconsistent with the academia? Would a low degree of coherence within a university
go against professors values and beliefs? Was an individualist culture impossible to imagine
in a university ten years ago?
Finally, you might be interested in reading a comment by Zygmunt Bauman of
Douglas’s Risk and Blame (published in the British Journal of Sociology, 1994, vol.45, n°1). I
liked the links he says Douglas made with shifting blame patterns or the role of experts. He
also argues that the shift from ‘danger’ to ‘risk’ puts greater emphasis on the idea that there is
neither determination nor chance but gambling possibilities, meaning we should see the world
as a set of risk-distributions and try to ‘play our hand right’. This might be a way to relate the
changes you highlight to political economy issues, such as neoliberalism and the idea that
individuals and organisations should behave as entrepreneurs, education being redefined as an
investment. For instance, an interesting question could be to ask whether the philosophy of
the risk management devices you describe is consistent with central values of Western
democracies.
To sum up, I was interested in the argument you try to build up, but I think that a more
detailed analysis of the empirical material could lead you to a more convincing theoretical
contribution.