Risk and Recreancy: Weber, the Division of Labor, and the Rationality of Risk Perceptions.

The article focuses on risk perceptions in a broader perspective to include not only the individual perceivers and the risks they perceive, but also the institutions that are responsible for risk management. Recreancy can involve failings in either or both of the aspects of trust emphasized by Barber (1983)-- technical competence and fiduciary responsibility--but the term is also intended to describe cases where the failing is neither a matter of (individual) incompetence nor one of self-interest. While recreancy involves the performance of actors who occupy positions of societal trust, it is most appropriately measured not in terms of those actors' perceptions, but, through the assessments of others who have fewer vested interests in describing the legitimacy of their own actions. Risks of death have been dropping significantly for more than a century, but during that lime, there has been a dramatic growth of societal interdependence and hence of the potential for recreancy the failure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities with the degree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust they enjoy.