Description, Articulation and Limitations in the Social Theory of Insurance

Abstract

There have been surprisingly few sustained efforts to explain or theorise the role insurance plays in society. Even the most theoretically inflected insurance scholarship, emanating from governmentality and Actor Network Theory scholarship, tends to be grounded in empirical cases, set in particular periods and places, and it is often ambivalent toward the label of theory. It is surprising both because of the foundationally social character of insurance and because of its sheer heft - economically and politically insurance is everywhere and involved, somehow, in everything. As many working in the field have complained, insurance has not been deemed a central object of either empirical or theoretical enquiry anywhere. In its endlessly variable private, commercial forms especially, insurance is understudied, the overlooked, dull sibling of finance. There is today a still small, but accumulating body of work spread across disciplines but the size of the field measured against the character and scale of the topic itself makes thinking, explaining or theorising insurance generally peculiarly hard. This article uses the concept of articulation, as a descriptive and structurally relational category, to argue that there is a need for more scholarship than reaches across insurance lines, industry sectors and academic disciplines. To do this I recount how two relations - individual/social', and insurance/finance - have featured in insurance research.