Risk Acceptability According to the Social Sciences

8. Institutional Constraints

Cltapter 8 Institutiona' Constraints Summary: This chapter scans the literature for typologies of organizations that might influence perceptions of risk. In the theory of organizations, the question of how different types of social environment affect decision-making has been raIsed, but it has never been held in focus. "The organizational and social environment in which the decision maker finds himself determines what consequences he will anticipate , what ones he will ignore. In a theory of organization, these variables cannot be treated as unexplained, independent factors, but must be determined and explained by the theory" (March and Simon 1958). It was a long time ago that this was said by March and Simon. It suggests that organizational theory would have much to reveal about the rational agent's definition of a situation and selection of odds. There has indeed been considerable work on the differences of viewpoint from different parts of an organization , the worm's-eye view, the bird's-eye view, the leader's view, the outsider's view, the view from the workshop floor. Yet, in spite of this good sociological starting point, questions about human perception of risk are not traced to the qualitatively different characteristics of institutions. If it is conceded that institutions play any role, then it would follow that much of the inquiry about risk perception has been applied to the wrong units, to individuals instead of to institutions. The upshot of research on cultural bias even suggests that individuals do not try to make inde83 pendent choices, especially about big political issues. Some policy aspects of this argument have been developed in Douglas and Wildavsky (1982). When faced with estimating the credibility of sources, values, and probabilities, they come already primed with culturally learned assumptions and weightings. This does not imply a deterministic influence on individuals. One could say that they have been fabricating their prejudices as part of the work of designing their institutions. They have set up their institutions as decision processors which shut out some options and put others in favorable light. The first choices before individuals lie between joining and not joining institutions of different kinds. At the next level individuals engage in continuous monitoring of their chosen institutional machinery. The big choices reach them in the form of questions of whether to reinforce authority or to subvert it, whether to block or to enable action. This is where rationality is exerted. To understand rational behavior, we should examine this everyday monitoring process. It consists of applying two kinds of coherence tests to the institutional structure. One is the matching of promises to performance. For instance, the firm promises that jobs are safe, then someone gets fired; what are the probabilities that the firm's guarantees of security are reliable? The other test is applied to the principles of justification: Is their logic strong? What are the principles of classification? Are the rules contradictory? How coherent is the whole system of rules by which the institution works? Mishaps, misfortunes, threats, and disasters provoke the endless challenges and cogitation about the structure of institutional life. It is not difficult to see that this monitoring process establishes for any institution at the appropriate level some agreed norms for acceptable and unacceptable risk. The central method of monitoring is to fasten attention on misfortunes. Focus on Misfortune "The test of what is the dominant motif is usually, perhaps always , to what a people attribute dangers and sickness and other misfortunes and what steps they take to avoid or eliminate them" (Evans-Pritchard 1956:315). For seeking the principles which focus attention on risks this is a better prescription than studying the smooth runs and sunny moments. 84 Evans-Pritchard (1937) defined this approach when he demonstrated that neither questions nor attributions of blame fall in random patterns of accusations, as would be the case if attribution were a function of the individual perceiver. Any major mishap in an organization sparks off questions about responsibility. If the organization has been established long enough to have taken a particular form, the questions are not going to be random. Still less will the answers seem credible unless they reinforce the members' concerns about the form of the organization they live in. For example, if people in an organization dislike the way that top authority has been exercised, it will be credible that the responsibility for accidents be pinned at the top; in the...