This study concerns risk talk. Recent studies draw attention to the significance of communication for the development of intelligent (reflexive) as opposed to compliance-focused, secondary forms of risk management, but also show that risk management systems do not necessarily produce reflective forms of risk talk. To develop an understanding of why reflective risk talk is (un)able to unfold, we study, through a Luhmannian lens, the communicative practices via which reflections on product quality problems as risk unfold in the setting of a division of a multinational manufacturing firm. The study shows how a technical product quality issue ended up being reduced to a financial risk calculation. In so doing, the study makes three contributions. First, we complement the prevailing focus on the role of risk tools and experts in the organisational life of risk management with an analysis of the ways communicative practices constitute organisational risk management. Second, by explicating the ways in which risk semantics in use can narrow the organisational understanding of risks, we show how pluralistic understandings of risks are easily lost at the interfaces of cross-functional communication. Third, we offer an explanation as to why risk talk may not engender the intended reflectivity. Rather than attributing this to secondary risk management, we propose that reflective risk talk is sometimes hampered by ‘communicative path dependency’, meaning that some organisations fail to change risk talk because of communicative practices that rather than to develop, delimit and perpetuate the observable and addressable space for talking about risks.

这项研究涉及风险话题。最近的研究提请人们注意交流对智能（反身）发展的重要性，这与以合规为重点的次要形式的风险管理相对，但同时也表明，风险管理系统不一定会产生反思性的风险谈话形式。为了理解为什么无法开展反思性风险讨论，我们通过卢曼主义的视角研究了沟通实践，通过这种沟通实践，在跨国制造公司的部门设置中，对作为风险的产品质量问题的思考得以展开。研究表明，技术产品质量问题最终如何减少到财务风险计算中。通过这种方式，该研究做出了三点贡献。第一，通过分析沟通实践构成组织风险管理的方式，我们补充了对风险工具和专家在风险管理的组织生命中的作用的普遍关注。其次，通过阐述使用风险语义可以缩小组织对风险的理解的方式，我们展示了如何在跨职能沟通的界面上轻易丢失对风险的多元理解。第三，我们解释了为什么风险谈话可能无法产生预期的反射率。我们建议不要将反思性风险谈话归因于次要风险管理，有时会受到“沟通路径依赖性”的阻碍，这意味着某些组织由于沟通实践而不是发展而未能改变风险谈话，