Summary
Contents
Subject index
Risk and Everyday Life examines how people respond to, experience and think about risk as part of their everyday lives. Bringing together original empirical research and sociocultural theory, the authors examine how people define risk and what risks they see as affecting them, for example in relation to immigration, employment and family life. They emphasise the need to take account of the cultural dimensions of risk and risk-taking to understand how risk is experienced as part of everyday life and consider the influence that gender, social class, ethnicity, sexual orientation, occupation, geographical location and nationality have on our perceptions and experience of risk. Drawing on the work of key theorists - Ulrich Beck, Scott Lash, and Mary Douglas - the authors examine and critique theories of risk in the light of their own research and presents case studies which show how notions of risk interact with day-to-day concerns.
Introduction: Researching Risk and Everyday Life
Introduction: Researching Risk and Everyday Life
In modern western societies, the concept of risk pervades everyday life. Over the course of the twentieth century and into the early years of the twenty-first, there has been an intensification of discourses emerging from fields of expertise such as science, medicine, law, the social sciences and economics on the nature of risk and its effects upon ordinary people's lives. Various specialized fields such as risk management and risk assessment have developed in an attempt to measure and regulate risk. The news media, for their part, have taken up the warnings of experts about risks and communicated them to their mass publics. They have also reported disputes among these experts that concern risks: how ...
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