The enactment of risk categories: organizing and re-organizing risk management practices in the energy industry

Aimed at energy organizations adapting to the competitive demands associated with liberalization, transaction and risk management software “A-Trade” was part of the shift from a traditional engineer-led culture of risk cognition to market-oriented financial risk management. The story of A-Trade illustrates the progress of risk industries, the development of encounters between different risk cultures, and the entanglement of technological artefacts in the enactment of managerial approaches to risk. We suggest that risk management is an organizing category in whose name organizing and re-organizing activity is done. In our conclusion, we consider what the story of A-Trade tells us about how organizations experience the limits of their own capacity to organize in the face or uncertainty and consider the role of routine information infrastructures in mitigating risk.