Risk society

Risk society is the manner in which modern society organizes in response to risk. The term is closely associated with several key writers on modernity, in particular Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The term was coined in the 1980s and its popularity during the 1990s was both as a consequence of its links to trends in thinking about wider modernity, and also to its links to popular discourse, in particular the growing environmental concerns during the period.

According to British sociologist Anthony Giddens, a risk society is "a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and also with safety), which generates the notion of risk," whilst the German sociologist Ulrich Beck defines it as "a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself (Beck 1992:21)".

Beck (1992:50) defined modernization as,

"surges of technological rationalization and changes in work and organization, but beyond that includes much more: the change in societal characteristics and normal biographies, changes in lifestyle and forms of love, change in the structures of power and influence, in the forms of political repression and participation, in views of reality and in the norms of knowledge. In social science's understanding of modernity, the plough, the steam locomotive and the microchip are visible indicators of a much deeper process, which comprises and reshapes the entire social structure."

Beck and Giddens both approach the risk society firmly from the perspective of modernity, "a shorthand term for modern society or industrial civilization... modernity is vastly more dynamic than any previous type of social order. It is a society... which unlike any preceding culture lives in the future rather than the past." (Anthony Giddens) They also draw heavily on the concept of reflexivity, the idea that as a society examines itself, it in turn changes itself in the process. In classical industrial society, the modernist view is based on assumption of realism in science creating a system in which scientists work in an exclusive, inaccessible environment.

In 1986, right after the Chernobyl disaster, Ulrich Beck, a sociology professor at the University of Munich, published the original German text, Risikogesellschaft, of his highly influential and catalytic work (Suhrkamp, Frankfurt 1986). Risikogesellschaft was published in English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity in 1992. The ecological crisis is central to this social analysis of the contemporary period. Beck argued that environmental risks had become the predominant product, not just an unpleasant, manageable side-effect, of industrial society.

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