Uncertain business : risk, insurance and the limits of knowledge / Richard V. Ericson and Aaron Doyle.
"Uncertain Business explores insurance industry practices and what they tell us about risks and uncertainties in contemporary society. The core of the book is a set of unique ethnographic studies of the insurance industry. Addressing four fields of insurance - life, disability, earthquake, and...
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| Main Authors: | , |
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| Format: | Book |
| Language: | English |
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Toronto :
University of Toronto Press,
[2004]
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| Summary: | "Uncertain Business explores insurance industry practices and what they tell us about risks and uncertainties in contemporary society. The core of the book is a set of unique ethnographic studies of the insurance industry. Addressing four fields of insurance - life, disability, earthquake, and terrorism, - these studies reveal that a high degree of uncertainty pervades the insurance business, the very industry that is charged with transforming uncertainty into manageable risk. The authors show how scientific data on risk are often absent, inadequate, controversial, contradictory, or ignored, and how insurers often impose meaning on uncertainty through non-scientific forms of knowledge that are intuitive, emotional, aesthetic, moral, and speculative. Furthermore, the nature of uncertainty and the response to it varies substantially across the areas studied, showing how contemporary society is characterized by competing interests and forms of logic in regard to risk."--BOOK JACKET. |
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| Physical Description: | viii, 332 pages : illustrations ; 24 cm |
| Bibliography: | Includes bibliographical references and index. |
| ISBN: | 0802087590 9780802087591 0802085628 9780802085627 |