Ioan-Octavien Mara: Quantifying or deciphering risks? ‘The actuarial profession: between scientific legitimacy and political practice’

Environmental risks, terrorist threats, health risks, identity-related risks, food safety risks, educational risks… the list of risks on which we are expected to take a stance seems to grow a little longer every day. Some sociologists see this as the emergence of a genuine ‘risk society’, undermining all the key principles of wealth redistribution inherited from past centuries. The process is said to have begun in France at the end of the 19th century with the issue of workplace accidents, which were gradually addressed by laws authorising compensation for many workers in exchange for the introduction of compulsory insurance for all.

Since then, the management and prevention of risks through insurance have clearly become ubiquitous, even indispensable, in the daily lives of everyone, whenever they wish to travel or find accommodation, for example. Our thesis project aims to understand how this evolution is manifested and continues today, at a time when digital tools, giving rise to new models, could lead us to rethink the definition of the risks surrounding us.

More specifically, we propose to examine the characteristics of a particular social group, namely ‘actuaries’ – statisticians specialising in the insurance sector, whose work focuses on assessing and defining the risks to which a given population is exposed.