Risk practices in politics and the financial sector: A comparative analysis of their characteristics and of translational dynamics across social fields

处理复杂的风险已经成为当代社会的主要挑战之一。经济、政治和民间行为体一致认为，风险原则上是可以管理和控制的。然而，与此同时，根据风险本质上是社会建构的假设，人们对风险是什么，如何在不同的社会领域评估和处理风险有着共同的理解。这一点在金融领域和政治领域尤为明显，在这两个领域，风险往往有着截然不同的含义。在金融领域，风险和随之而来的机遇是正相关的，而政治行为者（至少在许多西方民主国家）则尽可能地避免或最小化风险。这些对风险含义解释的差异可能成为社会挑战，例如，关于不同社会领域之间的相互作用和协调，对风险的霸权理解，以及管理和控制风险的适当策略。到目前为止，人们对这些不同的理解及其对社会领域之间相互作用和协调的影响知之甚少。以金融危机和欧元危机为起点，该项目的目标是(a)分析金融部门和专业政治领域风险的具体含义和理解，(b)调查风险的含义如何作为领域之间相互作用的结果而转变。特别是，我们旨在重建这些转变背后的多样化和多方面的翻译过程。该项目基于这两个领域之间日益增加的相互作用和交织的论点，这对于风险作为政治和经济行动的参考点的意义是重要的，至少需要在对风险的不同理解的对话方面做出一些努力。因此，我们试图理解对金融部门风险的具体理解成为政治行动的参考点，以及政治决策成为金融市场参与者决策的基准的社会后果。总的来说，我们试图发展一个经验证实的理论概念，了解风险的不同含义和理解，以及它们对金融部门和专业政治领域行动的后果。

The handling of complex risk has become one of the key challenges of contemporary societies. Economic, political, and civil actors converge on the assumption that risks can in principle be managed and controlled. However, at the same time, following the conjecture that risks are inherently socially constructed, there are concurrent understandings of what risks are, how they should be evaluated and dealt with in different social fields. This is particularly evident in the financial sector and in politics, where risk often carries very different meanings. Whereas in the financial sector, risk and accompanying chances are positively associated, political actors, at least in many western democracies, try to avoid or minimize risk wherever possible. These differences in construals of the very meaning of risk can become societal challenges, for example regarding the interactions between and the coordination of different social fields, the hegemonic understandings of risk, and adequate strategies of managing and controlling risk. Until now, only very little is known about these different understandings and their consequences for interaction and coordination between social fields. Taking the financial- and Euro-crises as a starting point, the objectives of the project are (a) to analyze specific meanings and understandings of risk in the financial sector and the field of professional politics, (b) to investigate how the meanings of risk shift as a consequence of interactions between fields. In particular, we aim at reconstructing the diverse and multi-facetted translation processes underlying these shifts. The project is based on the thesis of increasing interactions and interweavings between the two fields, which are consequential regarding the very meaning of risk as a point of reference in political and economic action, at least requiring some effort at dialogue over different understandings of risk. Hence, we seek to understand the social consequences of the specific understandings of risk in the financial sector becoming a reference point of political action, and of political decisions becoming a datum of the decisions of financial market actors. Overall, we seek to develop an empirically substantiated theoretical conception of the different meanings and understandings of risk and their consequences for action in the financial sector and the field of professional politics.