Risk Society

Over the past twenty-five years, the subject of risk has received not only widespread attention within [Page 1226]the social sciences, but also it has become a fixed point in the vocabulary of daily life, following the publication of the ominous text by Ulrich Beck that pointed out how in contemporary societies stratification, politics, science, social movements, consumption, and identity are entwined with the social definition of risks.

Deborah Lupton divides the main approaches to the issue of risk into two main groups: (1) The realist perspective, developed and used first and foremost in technical and scientific fields, such as engineering, economics, epidemiology, statistics, and psychology. All those fields are said to take the nature of risk for granted: for instance, in the cognitive approach, the key question is to understand—by treating risks in the same way as objective facts—the reactions of ordinary people from a behavioral and cognitive perspective, without taking into consideration the process of definition of the risk itself. (2) The sociocultural perspective, which, by contrast, uses the definition of risk as a starting point. This approach can be subdivided into various strains such as (a) the cultural theory of risk, pioneered by Mary Douglas and adopted by a range of other scholars, which focuses on the metaphorical and symbolical uses of the body by the practices and discourses concerning risk; (b) the governmentalism approach, which applies Foucauldian ideas to the question of risk; (c) the approach that interests us most here, that of risk society.

This term became common currency in academic circles and beyond after 1986—in a period marked by the explosion of the Chernobyl nuclear reaction in the Ukraine (at the time, part of the Soviet Union) and the Union Carbide gas tragedy in Bhopal (India)—when Beck wrote Risikogesellschaft. This key text would shape debate for decades to come and has been translated into more than twenty languages. It is available in English, translated as Risk Society (1992). Over the years, several theorists have faced this issue, developing different facets about the risk theme, establishing what we can loosely call a risk society school. Among these is renowned sociologist Anthony Giddens.

Paradoxically, however, it would be misleading to summarize Beck's ideas on risk by using these as one's starting point. In fact, Beck's theoretical, methodological, and analytical stance can be properly understood only by considering and examining the position of his risk society thesis within the context of a range of connected concepts.