Abstract (EN)

This study addresses organizations’ ability to manage their attention to risks, in an increasingly complex and uncertain environment. Risks, regardless their nature, can be ambiguous or even unthinkable: thus, delimiting where, when and how to allocate attention remains a challenge. Through their structures, organizations attempt to manage this attention as a scarce resource: to which extent can organizations manage their attention to risks? We answer this question by mobilizing theories that consider risk as an object socially constructed by organizations. We mobilize the Attention-Based View to explore the ambiguous role of attention (i.e. the allocation of time and efforts to environment’s objects) in risk construction.This study relies on the analysis of practices in twelve organizations from various sectors, through sixty interviews with risk managers, top managers and middle managers. We describe risk construction as an “art of photographing”, through the succession of attentional mechanisms. We show that as an “object”, risk is a way to express the artificial reconstitution of a reality, but also organizations’ intention or capacity to act toward their environment. As a “structure”, risk reflects a particular way of thinking and organizing, which drives organizational attention in daily practices. Finally, we highlight risk’s “unexpected” effects on attention: paradoxically, risk can both amplify and neutralize attention. Those results invite to consider risk management, theoretically as in practice, as an art of composing with the necessary subjectivity of actors.