While most scholarship in the sociology of insurance has focused on the making of insurance risk by investigating mechanisms of pooling and spreading, this article examines insurers’ management of financial uncertainty. Based on a large corpus of written sources and 44 semi‐structured oral history interviews, this article seeks to describe and explain a shift in how financial uncertainty is dealt with in British life insurance, away from traditional multipolar arrangements revolving around actuarial prudence and discretion, towards bipolar arrangements that rely on explicit risk quantification and the logic of risk‐based capital to “individualise” financial risk. The article identifies two factors that were key in bringing about this shift: first, the competitive dynamics that unfolded with the emergence of challenger “unit‐linked” insurers in the 1960s, and, second, changes in the professional ecology, as manifested by the changing relations between the actuarial profession and insurance supervisors.

中文翻译：

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使财务不确定性重要：英国人寿保险中的单位相连保险、投资和财务风险的个性化。

虽然保险社会学中的大多数学术研究都通过研究汇集和分散机制来研究保险风险的形成，但本文研究了保险公司对财务不确定性的管理。基于大量书面资料和 44 次半结构化口述历史访谈，本文试图描述和解释英国人寿保险中如何处理财务不确定性的转变，摆脱围绕精算审慎和自由裁量权的传统多极安排，依靠明确的风险量化和基于风险的资本逻辑来“个体化”金融风险的两极安排。这篇文章确定了促成这种转变的两个关键因素：首先，