Between everything and nothing: Organising risks and oil production in the Russian Arctic

The presence of a developed and visible risk management1 (RM) and/or risk governance (RG) system has been highly institutionalised and discoursed in all kinds of modern activities. Based on the case of an oil-producing company operating in the Russian Arctic, the purpose of this paper is to challenge the organising (everything) capability of the risk concept showing that RM may exist between the everything-nothing extremums. By advocating the practice-based approach to organisational RG, the paper studies how the concepts of risk are used (or not used) in handling hazardous activities among different groups of professionals in a nature-exposed context. When following the mainstream of research on risk in the extreme conditions of the Arctic context one would expect the “risk” concept to be present in all practices throughout the company. However, the findings indicate that-apart from practices aimed at building the public sector of the company-the majority of practices carried out daily amid the challenges of the Arctic context do not even allow “risk” into their vocabulary. Instead, due to deeply inherited tacit knowledge of the context and intense entwinement of practices, their uncertainties are seasonally predictable and expected. As a result, RG within the company includes a range of various risk-displacing practices rather than an all-encompassing RM system.