Examines the diverse uses and abuses of risk by social actors across a wide range of cultural, ethnic, and geographical locales. The introductory chapter by the two co-editors analyzes and contextualizes current scholarly debates on the social, cultural, and political construction of risk. It is followed by an overview on the anthropology of harm reduction that outlines an innovative framework for culturally informed risk analysis. The remaining nine chapters are organized into three sections, The Cultivation of Fear, Perceptions of Health, Safety, and Hazard: Risk Makers and Risk Takers, and Regulating Risk and the Public's Health. The book aims to address a set of questions of theoretical and practical importance to anthropologists, sociologists, public health scholars and professionals, and public policy advocates, among others. These questions include: How do individuals conceptualize and respond to risk? Can risk be a tool of empowerment for individuals and communities who define themselves as at-risk? How has risk figured recently in the production of health inequality? Has the social contract to provide care in its broadest sense expanded or contracted around issues of risk? Are risk and the imperative to adhere to risk warnings used by experts as a means of social control?

The volume's contributors, medical anthropologists and sociologists, provide rich, grounded ethnographic case material on the processes at work in everyday social life around the globe, as individuals and groups struggle to make saense of the health risks and inequities in their lives and communities. Authors address an array of urgent health concerns, ranging from food safety to environment, new technologies to infectious disease, in such contrasting locales as the US, Europe, South and Southeast Asia, and North Africa, and across diverse ethnicities and social classes.

This book offers a multidisciplinary perspective on perceived safety. It discusses the concept of safety from engineering, philosophy, and psychology angles, and considers various definitions of safety and its relationship to risk. Examining the categorization of safety and the measurement of risk, risk cultures, basic human needs and decision-making under uncertainty, the contributions demonstrate the practical implications and applications in areas such as health behavior, aviation and sports. Topics covered include: What is "safety" and is there "optimal safety" in engineering? Philosophical perspectives on safety and risk Psychological perspectives on perceived safety: social factors of feeling safe Psychological perspectives on perceived safety: zero-risk bias, feelings & learned carelessness Perception of aviation safety Intended for both practitioners and academic researchers, this book appeals to anyone interested in decision-making and the perception and establishment of safety.

Risk and reward are always foremost in the determination of investment decisions and business transactions. Advances in the area of Information Communication Technologies (ICT) have enabled the development of new business paradigms. Such paradigms involve transactions taking place between loosely connected parties, often totally or partially unknown to one another. One important concept required to ensure such transactions are successful is transactional risk. The importance of doing this has been demonstrated in recent financial crisis. This book is unique in simultaneously taking into account the likelihood of an event occurring and its financial impact and provides an integrated discussion of the process of transactional risk identification, assessment, evaluation, management and recording in these emerging domains. It provides a detailed and clear exposition of the importance of transactional risk before detailing for its assessment and evaluation. The scope of the book is theoretical and practical and as such it will have a broad market both within academia and industry. Specifically this book should be of primary interest to researchers, graduate students and practitioners in the area of developing business intelligence techniques and their application in various real world applications.

Not only are corporations and other organizations sometimes targeted by competitors in order to steal their information, they are also targets of political and/or religious groups who understand their economic and symbolic importance. However, a realistic security strategy requires a big-picture approach. At the same time, budgets are decreasing while security departments are dealing with threats that demand greater vigilance. In the wake of the 2008-2009 global economic meltdown, corporate executives are asking difficult questions about effectiveness and efficiency. The need for both information security and physical security is greater today than ever before, and not only to address more complex and dangerous crisis situations, but also to ensure that the methods deployed are proportionate to the risk.

The notion of risk is the lens from which all such problems must be viewed. This book identifies and explains these foundational principles, and shows how they directly relate to an assessment of physical security risk. This book provides the modern security professional with a useful reference that facilitates both rigorous thinking and sensible decisions about key strategic choices.

* Offers an integrated approach to assessing security risk * Addresses homeland security as well as IT and physical security issues * Describes vital safeguards for ensuring true business continuity

This book offers a cross disciplinary treatment of the rapidly growing field of integrated approaches in risk assessment in mountainous areas. All major aspects related to hazard and risk assessment, risk management, and governance are illustrated with a wide range of case studies. The first part of the book focuses on new techniques for assessing the natural hazards of different types of mass movements. State-of-the-art techniques for morphological characterization and monitoring of displacements are described. Computational advances are covered to explain the process systems and to quantify the hazards of fast and slow-moving landslides. In the second part of the book methodologies are included for assessing the impact of these natural hazards on the society in terms of risks. In this part, methodologies for defining the vulnerability of the elements at risk are shown and the use of run-out models for risk assessment of the dangerous rapid mass movements are evaluated. The third part of the book focuses on the response of society towards the problems of hazard and risk. It highlights the role of spatial planning, early warning systems and evacuation plans for risk management. It establishes practical thresholds for acceptable and tolerable risks and emphasizes the importance of education and communication to society. Audience The book is of interest to a wide range of experts from related disciplines, practitioners and stakeholders to demonstrate the importance of an integrated approach for all aspects of risks in mountainous areas.

One of the most critical issues facing supply chain managers in today's globalized and highly uncertain business environments is how to deal proactively with disruptions that might affect the complicated supply networks characterizing modern enterprises. Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk presents a state-of the-art perspective on this particular issue. Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk demonstrates that effective management of supply disruptions necessitates both strategic and tactical measures - the former involving optimal design of supply networks; the latter involving inventory, finance and demand management. It shows that managers ought to use all available levers at their disposal throughout the supply network - like sourcing and pricing strategies, providing financial subsidies, encouraging information sharing and incentive alignment between supply chain partners - in order to tackle supply disruptions. The editors combine up-to-date academic research with the latest operational risk management practices used in industry to demonstrate how theoreticians and practitioners can learn from each other. As well as providing a wealth of knowledge for students and professors who are interested in pursuing research or teaching courses in the rapidly growing area of supply chain risk management, Supply Chain Disruptions: Theory and Practice of Managing Risk also acts as a ready reference for practitioners who are interested in understanding the theoretical underpinnings of effective supply disruption management techniques.

Risk Culture is a practical volume devoted to the qualitative aspects of risk management, including those that should be firmly embedded in the corporate culture. Through descriptions, examples and case studies, the book analyzes weak and strong cultures and proposes a series of structural and behavioral actions to strengthen a company's culture.

Managing Towards Supply Chain Maturity takes a view of the crucial issues involved in supply chain management, namely risk, information and social capital management. Over the last dozen or so years, the outsourcing and offshoring processes have grown in importance. It is now more and more the case that enterprises concentrate on their key competences while transferring operations or specific tasks to other countries. Modern supply chains are becoming supply networks; hence there is a need for conscious and concerted implementation of methods to manage risk, information and social capital. These issues are very important for the efficiency and competitiveness of supply chains and are discussed in detail. The discussion includes the results of research and introduces the concept of risk, information and social capital management that will ensure supply chain excellence and maturity according to the Poirier's model that has been taken as the point of reference for this study. From a managerial point of view this study can play a significant role in determining the best risk and information management practices in the context of the outsourcing and offshoring of business processes.

The International Section on Machine and System Safety was founded in 1975 to deal with questions on occupational risks in this ?eld at the inter- tional level. It is a member of the Special Commission on Prevention of the International Social Security Association (ISSA). The Special Commission is a body within ISSA that focuses on work-related risks. It has 11 inter- tional Sections as members. ISSA was founded in 1927 with its headquarters in Geneva. It is working worldwide in over 150 countries with nearly 370 member institutions from all ?elds of social security. TheSection on Machine and System Safety, when it was founded, had its focus on machine safety, particularly on the ma- facturing of safe machinery, on assisting developing countries to be able to buy safe used machinery, and on delivering clear operating instructions. Our members and partners are: * institutions for safety and health at work; * insurance companies dealing with work-related risks; * research institutions; and * various enterprises, e.g. manufacturers, importers and users of machines and systems/installations. We thus bring together the experiences of our members and partners. The role of the operators soon grew in importance, and their capability for ha- ling machinery became an important factor for the safety and success of enterprises. The growing importance and complexity of handling different man-machine-environment situations created new challenges and led to - larging the Section's tasks to machine and system safety.

When is it morally acceptable to expose others to risk? Most moral philosophers have had very little to say in answer to that question, but here is a moral philosopher who puts it at the centre of his investigations. Sven Ove Hansson shows why traditional moral theories are ill suited to deal with risk and uncertainty, and proposes new approaches that can do so much better. The book contains many examples that connect moral philosophy to the practical world of risk management in new ways. This is an important book for moral philosophers as it opens up a new area for ethical investigations. It is equally important for risk analysts and policy makers who need input from moral philosophy in order to deal with the difficult normative issues that arise in decision-making under risk and uncertainty.

For a long time, conventional reliability analyses have been oriented towards selecting the more reliable system and preoccupied with maximising the reliability of engineering systems. On the basis of counterexamples however, we demonstrate that selecting the more reliable system does not necessarily mean selecting the system with the smaller losses from failures! As a result, reliability analyses should necessarily be risk-based, linked with the losses from failures.
Accordingly, a theoretical framework and models are presented which form the foundations of the reliability analysis and reliability allocation linked with the losses from failures.
An underlying theme in the book is the basic principle for a risk-based design: the larger the cost of failure associated with a component, the larger its minimum necessary reliability level. Even identical components should be designed to different reliability levels if their failures are associated with different losses.
According to a classical definition, the risk of failure is a product of the probability of failure and the cost given failure. This risk measure however cannot describe the risk of losses exceeding a maximum acceptable limit. Traditionally the losses from failures have been 'accounted for' by the average production availability (the ratio of the actual production capacity and the maximum production capacity). As demonstrated in the book by using a simple counterexample, two systems with the same production availability can be characterised by very different losses from failures.
As an alternative, a new aggregated risk measure based on the cumulative distribution of the potential losses has been introducedand the theoretical framework for risk analysis based on the concept potential losses has also been developed. This new risk measure incorporates the uncertainty associated with the exposure to losses and the uncertainty in the consequences given the exposure. For repairable systems with complex topology, the distribution of the potential losses can be revealed by simulating the behaviour of systems during their life-cycle. For this purpose, fast discrete event-driven simulators are presented capable of tracking the potential losses for systems with complex topology, composed of a large number of components. The simulators are based on new, very efficient algorithms for system reliability analysis of systems comprising thousands of components.
An important theme in the book are the generic principles and techniques for reducing technical risk. These have been classified into three major categories: preventive (reducing the likelihood of failure), protective (reducing the consequences from failure) and dual (reducing both, the likelihood and the consequences from failure). Many of these principles (for example: avoiding clustering of events, deliberately introducing weak links, reducing sensitivity, introducing changes with opposite sign, etc.) are discussed in the reliability literature for the first time.
Significant space has been allocated to component reliability. In the last chapter of the book, several applications are discussed of a powerful equation which constitutes the core of a new theory of locally initiated component failure by flaws whose number is a random variable.
This book has been written with the intention to fill two big gaps in the reliability and riskliterature: the risk-based reliability analysis as a powerful alternative to the traditional reliability analysis and the generic principles for reducing technical risk. I hope that the principles, models and algorithms presented in the book will help to fill these gaps and make the book useful to reliability and risk-analysts, researchers, consultants, students and practising engineers.
- Offers a shift in the existing paradigm for conducting reliability analyses.
- Covers risk-based reliability analysis and generic principles for reducing risk.
- Provides a new measure of risk based on the distribution of the potential losses from failure as well as the basic principles for risk-based design.
- Incorporates fast algorithms for system reliability analysis and discrete-event simulators.
- Includes the probability of failure of a structure with complex shape expressed with a simple equation.

Epidemics know no borders and are often characterized by a high level of uncertainty, causing major challenges in risk governance. The author shows the emergence of global risk governance processes and the key role that the World Health Organization (WHO) plays within them.

Decision making in environmental projects is typically a complex and confusing process characterized by trade-offs between socio-political, environmental, and economic impacts. Comparative Risk Assessment (CRA) is a methodology applied to facilitate decision making when various activities compete for limited resources. CRA has become an increasingly accepted research tool and has helped to characterize environmental profiles and priorities on the regional and national level. CRA may be considered as part of the more general but as yet quite academic field of multi-criteria decision analysis (MCDA). Considerable research in the area of MCDA has made available methods for applying scientific decision theoretical approaches to multi-criteria problems, but its applications, especially in environmental areas, are still limited. The papers show that the use of comparative risk assessment can provide the scientific basis for environmentally sound and cost-efficient policies, strategies, and solutions to our environmental challenges.

This edited book contains several state-of-the-art papers devoted to econometrics of risk. Some papers provide theoretical analysis of the corresponding mathematical, statistical, computational, and economical models. Other papers describe applications of the novel risk-related econometric techniques to real-life economic situations. The book presents new methods developed just recently, in particular, methods using non-Gaussian heavy-tailed distributions, methods using non-Gaussian copulas to properly take into account dependence between different quantities, methods taking into account imprecise ("fuzzy") expert knowledge, and many other innovative techniques. This versatile volume helps practitioners to learn how to apply new techniques of econometrics of risk, and researchers to further improve the existing models and to come up with new ideas on how to best take into account economic risks.