For two decades, risk management has been gaining ground in banking. In light of the recent financial crisis, several commentators concluded that the continuing expansion of risk measurement is dysfunctional (Power, 2009; Taleb, 2007). This paper asks whether the expansion of measurement-based risk management in banking is as inevitable and as dangerous as Power and others speculate. Based on two detailed case studies and 53 additional interviews with risk-management staff at five other major banks over 2001–2010, this paper shows that relentless risk measurement is contingent on what I call the “calculative culture” (Mikes, 2009a). While the risk functions of some organizations have a culture of quantitative enthusiasm and are dedicated to risk measurement, others, with a culture of quantitative scepticism, take a different path, focusing instead on risk envisionment, aiming to provide top management with alternative future scenarios and with expert opinions on emerging risk issues. In order to explain the dynamics of these alternative plots, I show that risk experts engage in various kinds of boundary-work (Gieryn, 1983, 1999), sometimes to expand and sometimes to limit areas of activity, legitimacy, authority, and responsibility.

The situations in which accounting is practiced raise moral concerns about customer and employee safety, community welfare, environmental sustainability, and human rights. Traditional accounting practices, such as budgets and performance measurement systems, have been widely regarded as ‘crowding out morality’ by objectifying the people affected by a firm's actions. In two North American utilities, we observed a stepwise structured process of moral reflection (which we identify as an instance of Rawls's reflective equilibrium approach), in which accounting, in the form of the risk appetite radar, helped guide executive decision making informed by moral principles. We develop two dimensions of accounting's role as ‘moral interlocutor’: enabling organizational value consensus and organizational value coherence. We identify three features of the observed accounting practice that enable it to act as moral interlocutor: subjectification rather than objectification of potential victims of the firm's actions; de-monetization, that is, considering trade-offs in terms of multiple organizational values, not only in terms of cost; and visualization of the organizations' moral principles on value priorities and how they are shaped by organizational decision making and action. The accounting visualizations did not only enable executives' reflection on rights and wrongs, but also triggered a fuller and richer moral vocabulary that was used for complex decision making involving, for instance, automation and the risk of suicides.