ABSTRACT
Risk, modernity and control Some argue that the world has entered a new era of extreme events and risks (e.g. Beck 1992; OECD 2003; Lagadec and Michel-Kerjan 2005; Lagadec 2007), citing examples such as the AIDS epidemic; Chernobyl nuclear disaster in 1986; the Sarin nerve gas attacks on the Tokyo Subway in 1995; 11 September 2001 terror attacks; the major power outages in North America during August 2003; the Asian tsunami of December 2004; Hurricane Katrina in September 2005; and the Credit Crunch of 2008/2009. Beck (1992: 21) argues risk can be understood as modern society’s response to ‘hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself ’. This changing risk environment is attributed to processes of globalisation (in its economic, technological, cultural and environmental forms), increasing interdependence, urbanisation and technological innovation.2 The scale and form of modern life is at the root of its own instability and vulnerability. The complex and systemic relationship between modern organisations, technologies and individuals is said to be a source of ‘normal accidents’ (Perrow 1984, 1999), exacerbated through failures of organisational culture (Vaughan 1997), with positive feedback processes that give rise to the social amplification of risk (Kasperson et al. 1988; Pidgeon et al. 2003). Whether or not such accounts are right to stress the newness of the risks encountered in modernity, they nevertheless shed light upon social, technological, economic and organisational productions of risk. In this age of uncertainty, societies, economies and governments are increasingly organised in response to risk (Giddens 1991, 1999; Beck 1992), reflecting modernist aspirations of quantification, measurement and control (e.g. Porter 1995; Scott 1998). The idea of risk, Giddens argues (1999: 3), is interlinked with attempts to control the future. It acquired increasing influence in public and private institutions (see Hacking 1990; Bernstein 1996) after the emergence of
probabilistic thinking during the nineteenth century (Hacking 1975). While risk is now ubiquitous, formal controls have also become pervasive in both government and business, in attempts to account for and manage risk (e.g. Hood et al. 1992, 1999, 2001; Hood and Jones 1996; Power 1997, 2004, 2007). This has coincided with wider shifts towards regulation as a mode of governing (e.g. Majone 1994, 1996; Moran 2003), and transformation of organisation of the modern state and its relations with its citizens and private interests. All these approaches to organisation share a concern with securing of order and control through instruments of surveillance, formal reporting, policing and enforcement. Risk is increasingly an organising concept (O’Malley 2004; Power 2007), in fields such as counter terrorism, nuclear energy, public health, financial markets and transport. The replication of organisational responses to risk across domains has been reinforced through the professionalisation of risk analysis as a generic practice since the late 1960s (Hacking 2003). This chapter argues that changes in organisational responses to risk associated with the Olympic Games must be understood in the context of broader social, governmental, technological and economic trends, of which the rise of regulation and risk management in both the public and private spheres is just one recent phase. The analysis that follows offers a theoretical dissection of different forms of Olympic risk, describes a number of decision-making biases and errors that are common in the organisation of the Games, and reviews the changing nature of organisational responses to risk throughout Olympic history, with particular reference to security. It notes the origin of Olympic governance in entrepreneurial, philanthropic and municipal forms, moving towards state-dominated arrangements from the 1930s onwards, and since the 1970s increased transfer of risk to markets, increased dependence upon technological solutions, spread of regulation and risk-management as organising logics and methods, and the evermore interconnected character of information and organisational responses to risk. While the main bodies engaged in staging and securing the Olympics – the host government, the International Olympic Committee (IOC) and the host OCOG – are much the same as was the case in 1896, these shifts in the ownership and management of risk have contributed to a more complex and diverse organisational environment that, in turn, has had profound effects upon administration of the Games and its response to security and other risks.
