Insurance is an important – if still poorly understood – mechanism for dealing with a broad variety of risks associated with modern life.
This book conducts an in-depth examination of one of the largest and longest-established private insurance industries in Europe: British life insurance. In doing so, it draws on over 40 oral history interviews to trace how the sector is changed since the 1970s, a period characterised by rampant financialisation and neoliberalisation.
Combining insights from science and technology studies and economic sociology, this is an unprecedented study of the evolution of insurance practices and an invaluable contribution to our understanding of financial capitalism.
changing circumstances not only to find new tactics to escape migration control attempts targeted at their exclusion, but also to find opportunities that might improve migrants’ situation. They thus must figure out ways to navigate the uncertainty they encounter. In this chapter, I first show how the implementation of laws is perceived and experienced as highly unpredictable and arbitrary. Second, I draw on Das’ (2004) concept of ‘illegibility’ to explain that the power of the state lies partly in the fact that it is difficult for migrants (as well as citizens) to
This book explores how the uncertainties of the 21st century present existential challenges to civil society. These include changing modes of governance (through devolution and Brexit), austerity, migration, growing digital divides, issues of (mis)trust and democratic confidence, welfare delivery and the COVID-19 pandemic and the contemporary threat to minority languages and cultures.
Presenting original empirical findings, this book brings together core strands of social theory to provide a new way of understanding existential challenges to the form and function of civil society. It highlights pressing social issues and transferable lessons that will inform policy and practice in today’s age of uncertainty.
321 CHAPTER B5 Spatial planning and dealing with uncertainties associated with future disasters Stefan Greiving Introduction The reduction of disaster risk from multiple hazard sources is an explicitly pronounced aim in several international agendas, for example, in the Agenda 21 (UN, 1992), the Johannesburg Plan (adopted at the 2002 World Summit on Sustainable Development) and the Hyogo framework for action (UN-ISDR, 2005). Strategies and actions to ‘control, reduce and transfer risks’ on the basis of risk assessments and analyses can be subsumed under
© The Policy Press • 2013 • ISSN 1744 2648 re se ar ch Evidence & Policy • vol 9 • no1 • 2013 • 49–64• http://dx.doi.org/10.1332/174426413X662554 Plural forms of evidence and uncertainty in environmental health: a comparison of two Chinese cases1 Anna Lora-Wainwright This paper examines the plural forms of evidence of harm presented by the residents of two Chinese villages affected by severe pollution. Conversely, it scrutinises how and why the antonym to evidence – uncertainty – is emphasised and with what effects. It argues that their uncertainty
reforms, the role of scientific knowledge remains contested within these reforms. Policy solutions, interventions, and reform revolve around the specific societal diagnoses of the problems that policymaking is supposed to solve. These societal diagnoses are produced in a global network of various policy practitioners. One of the most influential societal diagnoses informing contemporary policy reform seems to be the following: the world has become more ‘complex’, problems have become ‘wicked’, and all policy solutions involve a great deal of ‘uncertainty’ (for example
in the present. Like the optical condition it analogises, ‘policy myopia’ or the inability to clearly see the horizon of the future policy environment in which impacts of the policy will develop, requires corrective lenses to help clarify and offset the uncertainties with which policy makers are dealing (Ison et al, 2015 ; Maxim and van der Sluijs, 2011 ). These lenses include building ‘robustness’, ‘resilience’ and ‘agility’ into policies or the ability for them to change and adapt over time to build capacity for better learning on the part of policy makers and
5 REFLEXIVITY AND UNCERTAINTY IN THE RESEARCH PROCESS Paul Haggett, Syd Jeffers and Lyn Harrison In this article we provide an account of the process of doing social scientific research - in this case an eighteen month study of 'multi-racial' community initiatives in three different localities in the UK. Given the transience of many such initiatives and the contested meanings that both 'race' and 'community' have acquired the experi- ence of doing research in this area is one surrounded by uncertainty. We describe the mistakes made, blind allies pursued
Policy and Politics, Vol. 12 No.3 (1984),269-280 SCHOOL GOVERNING BODIES: A Case of Uncertainty Tim Packwood As social institutions, governing bodies display a remarkable resilience. Emerging in medieval times they have survived the Reformation, the Industrial Revolution, the development of mass education in the nine- teenth century and its subsequent reshaping in the twentieth, the coming of local government and its further reorganisation. Latterly, they have been the subject of a government inquiry I and subsequent legislation. Today, with broadened membership
