ABSTRACT Universities are often imagined as epistemic institutions oriented towards experimentation and openness, yet in high‐risk teaching and research settings they increasingly operate as risk organizations. Drawing on risk society theory, this study examines how governance rationalities are reshaped in high‐risk environments within a university in south‐eastern coastal China. Based on 22 semi‐structured interviews conducted across the governance chain, including principal investigators and course leaders, technicians and laboratory managers, EHS and safety staff, administrators, and laboratory users, the paper analyzes how manufactured uncertainty and accountability pressures are organized in everyday routines. The findings identify four interlinked mechanisms. First, competence is reformatted from tacit expertise into auditable evidence through training certification, SOP sign‐off, access authorization, and formal record‐keeping. Second, accountability is organized through ‘signature politics’, producing traceable responsibility chains that redistribute exposure while encouraging defensive compliance. Third, risk governance operates through temporal regimes—approval lead times, audit cycles, and renewal requirements—that collide with the rhythms of teaching and experimental work, generating informal workarounds. Fourth, governance is also affective and moral: incident and near‐miss reporting may support collective learning or reproduce fear, depending on whether disclosure is protected or triggers accountability cascades. Conceptually, the paper advances institutional defensibility as a mechanism through which universities seek legitimacy under conditions of uncertainty. Practically, it shows that effective risk governance depends on aligning auditability with situated judgement, protecting reporting as voice, and matching responsibility with authority in high‐risk academic work.
Shan et al. (Fri,) studied this question.