From solidarity-based mutualization to actuarial management
This article outlines the fundamentals of a research program in the sociology of insurance. Based on an institutionalist reading of the Durkheimian approach, we posit that the conception of insurance as a probabilistic technology overshadows evolving forms and patterns of solidarity and overstates the significance of probabilism within the industry. We argue that the understanding of insurance as a probabilistic technology applies to but one aspect of insurance, namely : actuarial management. Our research focusses on the history of the relationship between insurance and mutualization in England and French-speaking Canada. We contend that the mutuals, which are the foundation of the insurance industry, have had none or little bearing on the probabilistic abstraction of individual risk ; instead, they developed over time from exposure to physical or material and to communal uncertainties. In opposition to insurance sociologists who reject Durkheimian theory, we maintain that the tense, contradictory relationship between mechanical and organic systems is key to the evolution of the mutual insurance industry. In the study of actuarial management, this contradiction has resulted in an anomic division of labour.