Three ways of behaving better, or at least differently, as a reaction to real and/or perceived managerial risk increases, are "Get Better" at societal risk management, "Get Smarter" at managerial risk management or "Get a Lawyer" 1(Hood 1986, Hood 2001; Rothstein et al. 2006).
Despite this truism, they can serve a very helpful role by opening the Black Box of societal risk management so that robust and candid scrutiny of the past can lead to better management of the future.
They can serve a very helpful role by opening the black box of societal risk management so that robust and candid scrutiny of the past can lead to better management of the future.
Simoncini (Simoncini 2013, Simoncini 2014 9) notes the allocation of liability not only makes possible post-facto criminal law sanctions and civil law remedies to penalise inadequate societal risk management (it creates the stick) but also provides an ex-ante indirect incentive for good risk management (it produces the carrot).
Under such conditions, in the absence of mechanisms for challenge or even observation, societal risk management behaviours and even failures present relatively low managerial risks.
Laws rarely, if ever, attempt to dictate, in either general or more detailed terms, the societal risk management arrangements that will be required to either fulfil a functional role or achieve a stated safety outcome.
This growing realisation of greater scrutiny and accountability, as evidenced by the public reactions of many scientific groups to the L'Aquila case, should be used positively as an incentive for better societal risk management (i.e. for Getting Better).
Within the 'goal-setting' legislative approach, referred to above, it is implicit that there is an obligation on duties holders to establish the nature and suitability (i.e. the legal adequacy) of their societal risk management arrangements.
The resulting challenges faced by duty holders are: (1) to find or design authoritative standards or benchmarks to steer their societal risk management arrangements; and thereby (2) increase their chances of fulfilling their societal risk duties of care and achieving legal compliance; and thereby (3) minimise their vulnerability to managerial risks.
A related legal process, described by Lauta (2014a) as "a spectacular penal case", opened up the Black Box3 (Latour 1987) of societal risk management and scrutinised at length the behaviour of a number of officials, most of whom were scientists (Alexander 2014a).
