IsisCB Explore

Article ID: CBB896991149

Total life insurance: Logics of anticipatory control and actuarial governance in insurance technology (2024)

Sadowski, Jathan (Author)

Social Studies of Science
Volume: 54
Issue: 2
Pages: 231-256
Publication date: 2024
Language: English

DOI: 10.1177/03063127231186437

URI: https://doi.org/10.1177/03063127231186437

Outside Links

WorldCat

Google Scholar

JSTOR

Calling attention to the growing intersection between the insurance and technology sectors—or ‘insurtech’—this article is intended as a bat signal for the interdisciplinary fields that have spent recent decades studying the explosion of digitization, datafication, smartification, automation, and so on. Many of the dynamics that attract people to researching technology are exemplified, often in exaggerated ways, by emerging applications in insurance, an industry that has broad material effects. Based on in-depth mixed-methods research into insurance technology, I have identified a set of interlocking logics that underly this regime of actuarial governance in society: ubiquitous intermediation, continuous interaction, total integration, hyper-personalization, actuarial discrimination, and dynamic reaction. Together these logics describe how enduring ambitions and existing capabilities are motivating the future of how insurers engage with customers, data, time, and value. This article surveys each logic, laying out a techno-political framework for how to orient critical analysis of developments in insurtech and where to direct future research on this growing industry. Ultimately, my goal is to advance our understanding how insurance—a powerful institution that is fundamental to the operations of modern society—continues to change, and what dynamics and imperatives, whose desires and interests are steering that change. The stuff of insurance is far too important to be left to the insurance industry.

...More

Citation URI

data.isiscb.org/p/isis/citation/CBB896991149

This citation is part of the Isis database.

Citations Indexes

Similar Citations

Article Ana Patrícia Martins; (2020)
An Overview on the History of Actuarial Calculus in Portugal Until the Late 19th Century (/p/isis/citation/CBB573284495/)

Article Daniel C.S. Wilson; (2018)
Babbage Among the Insurers: Big 19th-Century Data and the Public Interest (/p/isis/citation/CBB082253889/)

Book Benjamin Wiggins; (2020)
Calculating Race: Racial discrimination in risk assessment (/p/isis/citation/CBB498430122/)

Article Mara Mills; Dan Bouk; (2024)
The History of “Impairment” (/p/isis/citation/CBB233586496/)

Article Chiara Carboni; Rik Wehrens; Romke van der Veen; Antoinette de Bont; (2023)
Eye for an AI: More-than-seeing, fauxtomation, and the enactment of uncertain data in digital pathology (/p/isis/citation/CBB216179221/)

Book Sun-ha Hong; (2020)
Technologies of speculation : The limits of knowledge in a data-driven society (/p/isis/citation/CBB966764954/)

Article Christine Von Oertzen; (2018)
Datafication and Spatial Visualization in Nineteenth-Century Census Statistics (/p/isis/citation/CBB929971565/)

Book Grietjie Verhoef; (2018)
The Power of Your Life: The Sanlam Century of Insurance Empowerment, 1918–2018 (/p/isis/citation/CBB515093181/)

Article Dan Bouk; (2018)
The National Data Center and the Rise of the Data Double (/p/isis/citation/CBB460183522/)

Article Loft, Philip; (2013)
Political Arithmetic and the English Land Tax in the Reign of William III (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212666/)

Article Antonio J. Heras; Pierre-Charles Pradier; David Teira; (2020)
What Was Fair in Actuarial Fairness? (/p/isis/citation/CBB253254427/)

Book Bouk, Daniel B.; (2015)
How Our Days Became Numbered: Risk and the Rise of the Statistical Individual (/p/isis/citation/CBB013286991/)

Book Nicola Bruton Bennetts; (2020)
William Morgan: Eighteenth-Century Actuary, Mathematician and Radical (/p/isis/citation/CBB974882800/)

Article James Kneale; Samuel Randalls; (2014)
Invisible Atmospheric Knowledges in British Insurance Companies, 1830-1914 (/p/isis/citation/CBB792257485/)

Article Fressoz, Jean-Baptiste; (2013)
L'industrie chimique et la compensation des dommages environnementaux, 1800--1850 (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212595/)

Book Trepl, Ludwig; (1987)
Geschichte der Ökologie, vom 17. Jahrhundert bis zur Gegenwart: Zehn Vorlesungen (/p/isis/citation/CBB000059500/)

Article Backouche, Isabelle; Labbé, Morgane; (2013)
Réparer, dédommager. Introduction (/p/isis/citation/CBB001212590/)

Article Aro Velmet; (2019)
The making of a Pastorian empire: tuberculosis and bacteriological technopolitics in French colonialism and international science, 1890–1940 (/p/isis/citation/CBB640020338/)

Article Vasiliki Makrygianni; Vasilis Galis; (2023)
Practices of radical digital care: Towards autonomous queer migration (/p/isis/citation/CBB803018064/)

Article Anna Sofie Bach; Charlotte Kroløkke; (2020)
Hope and Happy Futurity in the Cryotank: Biomedical Imaginaries of Ovarian Tissue Freezing (/p/isis/citation/CBB249301914/)