Bibliographic details:
Tellmann, U. (2009). Imagining catastrophe: Scenario planning and the striving for epistemic security. economic sociology_the european electronic newsletter, 10(2), 17-21.
Abstract:
The Basel Committee on Banking Supervision recently stated that one important cause for the catastrophic nature of the financial crisis has been a false sense of security. The report thereby rehearses the widely shared diagnoses that a lack of an appropriate estimation of risk exposures belongs to the core causes of the crisis. Interestingly, this epistemological failure is taken to be a “failure of imagination” about what the future may hold in store (Basel Committee on Banking Supervision 2009: 17). Accordingly, the efforts of regulation called for are directed at furthering more imaginative and flexible views of the future. They seek to imply modes of stress testing that are not any longer linked to the notion of risk as a “constant statistical process” (ibid.:9f). Imaginations of “shocks which have not previously occurred” (ibid: 14) promise – so it seems – more adequate knowledge about one’s own risks. The archive of previous occurrences and the statistical calculations of normal distributions are replaced by “non-statistical modes of anticipating the future” (O’Malley 2003: 277).