Global Journal of Human Social Science, C: Sociology and Culture, Volume 23 Issue 2

practices are greatly responsible for introducing uncertainty into social reality in the first place. Management theories keep reinventing and restructuring organisations while rapidly succeeding and contradicting each other, often undoing the changes imposed by previous fads in the process (Micklethwait & Wooldridge, 1996). This swift succession of management fads generates uncertainty concerning the structure and operations of organisations, the feasibility of investments and decisions etc. New managerial discourse and practices also make employment increasingly precarious and temporary by means of significant downsizing, delayering and redefinition of jobs (Kalleberg & Vallas, 2017). The work process becomes chaotic to the point of defying understanding, as one day workers are praised for their achievements and the next they are part of a delayering plan, fired and then rehired (Sennet, 1998). Constant reconfiguration of the work processes becomes a permanent feature of working life and a major means of managerial control. Firstly, the more the work process is reconfigured, the more crucial is the managerial regulation of the work process. Second, such constant reorganisation means that professionals are never fully familiar with organisational procedures and practices, and are never quite certain how to properly do their job. Under invasive monitoring of their performance, workers are always on trial and never certain of their goals or methods. This increases their reliance on management for even the most basic routines. These measures therefore transpose effective power from both owners and staff to managers. This is joined by the frequent changes of products and technologies, so that both workers and consumers accept the uncertain and insecure nature of knowledge, skills and products. Nowhere is this more apparent than in the rise of risk management, concurrently with second modernity and the new managerial discourse, as the principal organisational response to risks and uncertainties. Risk management helped to consolidate a new and comprehensive concept of risk, which compounds the wider social risks as discussed by Beck with organisational risks posed by rogue traders, Ponzi schemes, legal liabilities, changing consumer fashions and so on. The promise of risk management is to mitigate and control these risks. Not only did management thereby assume functions previously performed by professional accountants, analysts and legal specialists, but risk management has also quickly become the core around which corporate governance has been totally reshaped: It is as if the managerial instruments of the ‘risk society’ have undergone a mutation which cannot be entirely explained in Beck’s (1992) terms of the increased risk reflexivity of individuals. Rather, the phenomenon is better described as a new reflexivity of organizations and organizing around riskmanagement (Power, 2007, p. 4). The practical outcome of these developments was the establishment of internal managerial control systems, galvanised by the rhetoric of deregulation, entrepreneurship and self governance. Every aspect of organisational structure and function was subjected to these mechanisms and redesigned so as to become auditable, i.e. susceptible to managerial and regulatory review. Auditability was reinforced as an ethical norm that became the mark of corporate responsibility, accountability and good practice. While there is little evidence or agreement concerning their efficacy even among risk management practitioners, such practices are circularly justified mainly as preventing the ‘second order’ risks of disrepute, liability and blame incurred for failing to implement them (Ibid.). Risk management has therefore become an ethical norm equating responsible, transparent and virtuous organisational behaviour with managerial control. This complements managerial performance based ethics, and reinforces the perception of all knowledge and praxis as inherently partial and contingent. Not only has risk management become almost synonymous with management at large, but the more this norm strikes root, the more it spreads to all aspects of social life. Health, finance, and the environment all find themselves newly governed by similar risk management standards and guidelines defining cultural values and beliefs about what is proper organisational conduct. Management is construed as the only reliable means to negotiate a risk ridden environment. The more we become uncertain of the environment, the more we put our trust in managing it. Careful management of the business, public and personal spheres seems to offer the only reassurance and hope of success in steering the high seas of uncertainty. Management thus gains more power, value and importance in organisations the more it initiates audits, performance assessments and modifications of organisational structure and function. However, what is less obvious is that management is itself the origin of many of the risks it is called upon to handle. Beck defined risk as manufactured and therefore the indirect outcome of human conduct. But the risks which management promises to control are often the direct result of its own interventions. For one thing, risks are often born simply by management’s recasting of operational, legal and marketing issues in terms of risks in order to apply risk management measures to them. Furthermore, while the uncertainties of the global market are often invoked in order to justify deregulation, short term thinking and flexibility, these © 2023 Global Journals Volume XXIII Issue II Version I 75 ( ) Global Journal of Human Social Science - Year 2023 C Epochal Change and Second Modernity as a Sociocultural Manifestation of Managerialism At the same time, however, managerial