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Professor Gregory Vit: "The Risk in Risk Management: Financial Organizations and the Problem of Conformity" book release

Published: 12 March 2015

McGill Desautels Professor Gregory Vit's book: The Risk in Risk Management: Financial Organizations and the Problem of Conformity was reviewed in the March 2015 Issue of Organization Studies. The reviewer, Professor Iain Munro, concluded: "…this book deserves to be widely read and I have no doubt that its scrupulous lessons will better equip us and our students to avoid such financial misadventures in the future."

Professor Vit’s book provides a window into the world of risk management and how malpractice has become normalized as a part of everyday business within the finance industry and elsewhere. The governance of risk management in the financial sector is one of the most important and necessary fields of research in management today. The financial crisis of 2008 revealed widespread incompetence and malpractice in the banking industry, leading to the collapse of prominent banks followed by entire economies, but little appears to have changed beyond minor tinkering with rules for ‘self-regulation’ and the imposition of austerity on the poor and middle classes to pay for the shameless incompetence of our ‘rain-making elites’. Vit’s own analysis of this situation has the advantage of combining rigorous academic analysis with the insights of a former insider, Vit having worked for many years as an executive in the Bank of America and other financial institutions prior to pursuing an academic career at McGill University.

Read full book review here: Organization Studies, March 2015

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