Interpreting banks’ sustainability initiatives as reputational risk management and mechanisms for coping, re-embedding and rebuilding societal trust

Purpose This paper aims to contribute to a growing literature in sustainable and green banking by exploring the views of senior banking representatives towards the implementation of sustainability initiatives through extensive interview research. The authors explore the extent to which such initiatives are embedded within the banking industry, whether they represent risk management mechanisms and whether they are imbued with reputational risk management rather than a genuine response to ethical societal concerns. Design/methodology/approach Qualitative semi-structured interviews were conducted with UK bank managers. The interviewees’ utterances are interpreted through a sociological theoretical lens derived from the study of Giddens and Beck, allowing us to conclude that external initiatives such as the Equator Principles seem to be adopted as re-embedding mechanisms that can rebuild societal trust, as well as representing mechanisms of reputational risk management. Findings The analysis suggested that internal sustainability initiatives were interpreted as coping mechanisms whereby bank employees can recreate their protective cocoon, reinstating their ontological security in response to the high consequence risks of climate change and other related systemic factors that create overwhelming feelings of engulfment. Originality/value Using Beck’s risk society theory as a theoretical lens through which to interpret the interview data allows a number of concluding comments and suggestions to be made. The findings resonate with earlier research into institutional investors’ attitudes towards climate change that found their engagement and dialogue with companies around climate change issues to be imbued with a risk discourse: their initiatives and actions were dominated by risk management motivations.

Socio-cognitive biases in folk AI ethics and risk discourse

The ongoing conversation on AI ethics and politics is in full swing and has spread to the general public. Rather than contributing by engaging with the issues and views discussed, we want to step back and comment on the widening conversation itself. We consider evolved human cognitive tendencies and biases, and how they frame and hinder the conversation on AI ethics. Primarily, we describe our innate human capacities known as folk theories and how we apply them to phenomena of different implicit categories. Through examples and empirical findings, we show that such tendencies specifically affect the key issues discussed in AI ethics. The central claim is that much of our mostly opaque intuitive thinking has not evolved to match the nature of AI, and this causes problems in democratizing AI ethics and politics. Developing awareness of how our intuitive thinking affects our more explicit views will add to the quality of the conversation.

Citizen Science Fiction: The Potential of Situated Speculative Prototyping for Public Engagement on Emerging Technologies

In response to calls for a research and innovation system that is more open to public scrutiny, we have seen a growth of formal and informal public engagement activities in the past decades. Nevertheless, critiques of several persistent routines in public engagement continue to resurface, in particular the focus on expert knowledge, cognitive exchange, risk discourse, and understandings of public opinion as being static. In an attempt to break out of these routines, we experimented with an innovative engagement format that employs situated speculative prototyping to support citizens in contextualizing and discussing developments regarding—in this case—nanotechnology. This format invites participants to imagine and critically reflect on technological futures through collaborative prototyping and story-writing. In this paper, we outline five reconstructed contextualization patterns in which participants engaged during the format’s exercises and use these to assess the value of the format in the current engagement landscape. We show that situated speculative prototyping has potential in the realm of informal public engagement initiatives, taking an explorative approach, but also warn of ‘the designer fallacy’ as a prominent pitfall of prototyping that could reproduce techno-scientific framings and obstruct critical reflection on technological directions and implications if not treated with caution.

Staying away, staying alive: Exploring risk and stigma of COVID-19 in the context of beliefs, actors and hierarchies in India

The article examines the media discourse of risk and stigma which developed in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in India, employing the theoretical frameworks of Mary Douglas and Erving Goffman. Accessing the Factiva database archive, the authors analysed a total of 139 stigma-linked media reports, using the Discourse Network Analyzer (DNA) to identify thematic groups of beliefs and related actors contributing to the risk discourse on the contagion. The results exhibit a clear difference in opinion on various stigma-related beliefs among the individuals diagnosed or assumed susceptible to COVID-19, including the issue of disclosing identities. In India, domestic actors have dominated the media discourse, particularly national government agencies, rather than intergovernmental organisations or foreign governments. The media content analysis in this article shows that new hierarchies have emerged based on confirmed or suspected contact with the disease along with reinforcement of traditional myths and superstitions, leading to discrimination against the quarantined individuals, their families, healthcare staff and socially marginalised communities.

Understanding risk discourse through the lens of Vietnamese women

Motivated by a call for risk discourse research in non-Western settings, this study examines how Vietnamese road safety video advertisements are constructed and interpreted. Following a literature review of risk and gender, the study first sets out socio-semiotic multimodal analysis of video advertisements to detail how concepts of risk and gender are constructed. Afterwards, I take an ethnographic-based approach in a series of interviews with professional Vietnamese women to gain insights into these concepts. Findings of the study reveal the expected female roles as wives and mothers in Vietnamese advertising as interpreted by Vietnamese women. The study contributes to an understanding of risk in this Asian setting and opens up the potential for a critical, interpretive approach to risk discourses that are grounded in lived experiences.

Differentiated impacts of human interventions on nature

Biotechnology describes a range of human activities in medicine, agriculture, and environmental management. One biotechnology in particular, gene technology, continues to evolve both in capacity and potential to benefit and harm society. The purpose of this article is to offer a policy bridge from unproductive descriptions of gene technology to useful methods for identifying sources of significant biological and socioeconomic risk in complex food systems. Farmers and the public could be voluntarily and involuntarily interacting with new techniques of genome editing and gene silencing in entirely new ways, limiting the usefulness of previous gene technology histories to predict safety. What we believe is a more consistent, verifiable, and practical approach is to identify the critical control points that emerge where the scale effects of a human activity diverge between risk and safety. These critical control points are where technical experts can collaborate with publics with different expertise to identify and manage the technology. The use of technical terminology describing biochemical-level phenomena discourages publics that are not technical experts from contesting the embedded cultural perspectives and uncertainty in “scientific” concepts and prejudice the risk discourse by ignoring other issues of significance to society. From our perspective as gene technologists, we confront the use of pseudo-scale language in risk discourse and propose an escape path from clashes over whether risks that arise spontaneously (from nature) can be perfectly mimicked by gene technology to a discussion on how to best control the risks created by human activity. Scale is conceptually implicit and explicit in gene technology regulation, but there is no agreement about what scales are most useful to managing risk and social expectations. Both differentiated governance (risk-tiered) and responsible research and innovation models could accommodate the critical control points mechanism that we describe.

Can augmentation with oxytocin be ‘too much, too soon’?

The Sustainable Development Goals have specific aims to reduce maternal mortality and achieve gender equality. While a significant amount of literature focuses on lower-income countries, which have higher mortality and morbidity rates than the UK, the UK must not be complacent. Maternal mortality and morbidity can still be improved nationally by critically evaluating whether the almost ubiquitous use of interventions in obstetric units is a contributory factor. Labour augmentation with oxytocin is not without risk and this raises the question of why maternity care is not incorporated into the gender equality goals in the UK. At its most basic level, it could lead to a lack of informed consent but is influenced by the risk discourse, changing epidemiology of women and sociocultural norms.

Risk, Property Rights, and Antidiscrimination Law in Rental Housing: Toward a Property-in-Action Framework

Landlords’ decisions significantly shape the housing outcomes of poor and stigmatized renters. Despite this important gatekeeping role, studies of antidiscrimination law have not thoroughly examined how private market actors respond to reform efforts or how private property rights potentially enable them to evade regulation. This study draws on ethnographic data gathered between late 2015 and early 2018 to examine how and why Seattle landlords opposed an ordinance regulating the use of criminal records in rental housing. The findings indicate that landlords’ opposition stems from their expectation that property protects owners’ ability to control their exposure to risk. Yet conceptions of property and risk perception alone cannot explain how landlords can evade regulation. Toward this end, I show how private property rights facilitate adaptation by which landlords can legally circumvent the intent of the law. The study highlights the value of a sociolegal framework of property in action, which incorporates cultural notions of ownership, legal rights, and the regulatory and market environments that shape owners’ discretion. I suggest that greater attention to risk discourse and property rights will deepen our understanding of the limits of antidiscrimination law and the ability of private market actors to adapt to, and resist, legal reform efforts.