Speaking for the Dead: Coroners, Institutional Structures, and Risk Management

Based on interviews and ethnographic fieldwork, this dissertation shows how the Office of the Chief Coroner of Ontario (OCC) – whose object is to speak for the dead to protect the living – is shaped by risk management priorities. It illustrates how the OCC, like many contemporary organizations, has altered its operations and decision making to manage threats to its reputation. The result of these moves has been the privatization of public safety decision making with bereaved families, the general public, and even front line coroners, increasingly excluded from speaking for the dead. This is to say, policy recommendations that shape how life in Ontario is lived tend to be generated in private sessions by OCC managers. While much of this can be attributed to the OCC’s focus on reputational risk management, there are other important factors affecting the privatization of public safety. Drawing on research in the sociology of culture, the dissertation finds that the OCC’s experience of risk management is moderated by other, layered institutional structures. These ‘institutional structures’ are analytic constructs with moral and methodological dimensions that inform the way work in the OCC is carried out. The dissertation demonstrates that the moral priorities and method preferences of doctors, lawyers, managers, families, and modern governments are layered over and under risk management. These layers augment or diminish risk management’s impact on the way death is determined and public safety regimes are developed. In addition to offering a window on death investigators and their work, the dissertation proposes a theoretical toolset for better understanding how contemporary organizations are organized and run.Ph