‘(World) risk society’ or ‘new rationalities of risk’? A critical discussion of Ulrich Beck’s theory of reflexive modernity

Risk society without reflexive modernization? The case from northwestern Michigan

A commentary on decision-making and organisational legitimacy in the Risk Society

The article critically assesses Ulrich Beck’s body of work and its importance for contemporary sociology. It demonstrates that Beck’s elaboration of his original theory of the ‘risk society’ into a theory of the ‘world risk society’, ‘cosmopolitanism’ and ‘metamorphosis’ involved several key theoretical innovations. Firstly, Beck adjusted his notion of risk to include the threat of international terrorism in his diagnosis of the (world) risk society. Secondly, he introduced a distinction between (normative) ‘cosmopolitanism’ and (real existing) ‘cosmopolitization’ in order to capture the specificity of contemporary social change. Thirdly and most recently, Beck outlined a theory of ‘the metamorphosis of the world’ which marks an important shift of emphasis from ‘the negative side effects of goods’ to ‘the positive side effects of bads’. In conclusion, the article identifies a number of theoretical ambiguities and unresolved questions in Beck’s theory.

In the pre-modern time, natural hazards were viewed as divine retributions decreed from on high by divine forces such as Fortuna -the Roman goddess of fate and translated into English as fortune. People were passively exposed to these ‘strokes of fate’ and believed that they were unable to change them. The Enlightenment project sought to bring such fates under human control by moulding the world to their purposes. The interventions meant that natural hazards which were previously seen as external to and beyond the social realm became increasingly intertwined with it. Modernity and its “technoscience turned what was nonhuman Nature into something contingent and coincident with human society” (Luke 1999: 10), and by doing so it transformed hazards into risks. The distinction between the two lies in the role of human intervention in nature. Whereas hazard refers to a natural event, risk refers to an event whose occurrence is directly or indirectly linked to human action. “Risks are made, hazards naturally occur”, as Ulrich Beck (2012: 13–15) put it. It is this understanding of risk which is at the heart of Beck’s ‘risk society’ and the hallmark of what he calls ‘reflexive modernity’ (Beck 1996). He argues that, the present ecological crisis, along with other social transformations, signifies the emergence of a new form of societal arrangement which he describes as ‘risk society’. Risk society represents a new phase in the process of modernisation in which the ‘production of wealth is systematically accompanied by the social production of risks’ (Beck 1992: 19). He suggests that “the more modern a society becomes, the more unintended consequences it produces, and as these become known and acknowledged, they call the foundations of industrial modernisation into question” (Beck 1998: 91). He describes this contemporary social experience as ‘reflexive modernisation’ referring to an era “when modernity is dealing with problems literally of its own making” (Dalby 2008: 445). Concerns about risk usher in deep anxieties about security. The more we have ‘fabricated uncertainties’ (Beck 1996) the greater our sense of insecurity. In the contemporary ‘ecologies of fear’ (Davis 1999) the risk society becomes intertwined with the security society. Like risk, security is socially produced but, “whereas risk threatens, security promises” (Zedner 2003: 176). It gives people both a sense of being safe and the means to achieve that. It promises a condition in which risk is non-existent, neutralised or avoided (ibid). While non-existence of risk is utopian, the desire for neutralization or avoidance of risk provides the rationale for relentless pursuit of security (Davoudi 2012). Risk and security, therefore, feed from one another in the sense that keeping up the demand for security requires maintaining a heightened sense of risk. Attraction of such circularity has led to the recasting of many social and environmental problems as security measures. Furthermore, security is not just a means to an end (i.e. protection from risk), but is an end in itself (i.e. a positive good). It is “sold as a desirable product in and of its own right” (Zedner 2003: 160). The pursuit of security is as much about security providers seeking raison d’etres for their operations as it is about risk prevention. As a commodity with a price, security becomes factored into both private suppliers’ and urban governance’s strategic decisions and calculations with profound distributional implications and potential for political exploitation. For urban governance security is becoming a highly sought-after commodity which competes with other commodities in terms of economic and social costs. As Sassen (2011) suggests, security is increasingly urbanized, and cities are increasingly in competition with one another in positioning themselves on the world’s league tables of ‘safe places’. Emphasis is shifting from urban sustainability to risk and security. Together, risk and security provoke strong emotions and legitimise extraordinary exercise of power. They renounce or displace social conflicts and lead to practices which may otherwise seem indefensible. They create imaginaries of fear which renounce social conflict, foreclose politics, and crowd out descending voices. They squeeze out the arenas in which questions about justice, fairness and conflicts can be raised. Thus, ‘the hallmark of the reflexive modernity has become not just the risk society, as Beck suggests, but also the security society’ (Davoudi, Environ Plann C: Govern Policy 32(2):360–375, 2014). The recasting of social and environmental problems as security problems reflects and reinforces securitisation as the hegemonic discourse of the twenty-first century.

Ulrich Beck's World Risk Society is becoming an increasingly relevant analysis of contemporary human/environment interaction. However, with this said, Beck's observations remain broad and significantly lacking empirical evidence. This paper explores the relationship between sustainable lifestyles and assertions of one of Beck's central ideas, the emergence of a reflexive modernity at the local scale. By empirically examining the motivation of participants for joining a scheme designed to enhance sustainable lifestyles, this paper will progressively outline the way that individuals in a risk society negotiate global images in a local context and what this means for a reflexive modernity. By exposing the complex interaction of global risk imagery and the effect this has on achieving local sustainability, a more realistic understanding of Beck's theoretical assertions can be applied to an increasingly important policy arena.

Ulrich Beck has placed ideas of `risk society' on the intellectual map; his social theory of late modern society and its endemic production of potentially catastrophic risks has attracted, rightly, considerable academic interest in Europe and beyond. Dispersed across his writings is a view of the mass media which is theoretically positioned as playing a crucial role in processes of risk revelation, the social contestation that surrounds scientific knowledge of risks, and also processes of social challenge to `risk society'. It is surprising, then, that his ideas have so far been largely ignored by mass communication researchers — especially by those working in the fields of risk communication and the environment. This article offers a critical exposition of Beck's ideas on the mass media in `risk society'. It indicates how these are indebted to his wider social theoretical views on the historically unprecedented nature of contemporary `risks' and processes of `reflexive modernization', and opens them up to engaged discussion and criticism. Beck's thesis speaks to the conditions of our time and provides theoretical coordinates of potential use to mass communication researchers. It can be criticized nonetheless for its uneven, underdeveloped and often contradictory positions on the mass media.

The Genetically Modified (GM) food and crops issue illustrates some key contemporary differences between the EU and the USA on environmental issues. These differences have been parallel to the apparently stronger influence of environmentalists since 1990 on a range of issues in the EU, compared to the USA. Beck's 'Risk Society' theory has general resonance with contemporary western attitudes to risk. However, it may be that the US regulatory framework may now be more representative of his 'analysis' of archetypal 'reflexive modernisation', while EU policies (on GM food at least) represent more self-critical, precautionary and solutions-oriented 'normative' aspects of the thesis.

This article proposes a (re)consideration of antisocial behaviour control informed by an analysis of the seminal work of sociologists of `reflexive modernity' (Beck, 1992, 1994; Giddens, 1990, 1991; Lash, 1994). It is hoped that the arguments advanced within this article will prompt further consideration of the following questions: What does the relative neglect of the reflexive modernity thesis tell us about the domain conjecture(s) of sociological theory on antisocial behaviour policy and the use of ASBOs? And can a focus upon reflexive modernity theory help to construct a more proportionate account of ASBOs as a form of social control? Hence, it is the purpose of this article to consider critically the implications of Beck's `risk society' to our understandings and explanations of antisocial behaviour, ASBOs and social control, by linking the late modern (re)formatting of antisocial behaviour(s) and the creation of ASBOs to the new parameters of the `risk society'.

The theory of reflexive modernization plausibly advocates postnational cosmopolitanism. As the nation state is eroding today, we are becoming citizens of a ‘global risk society’ whose unity and cohesion is generated by the (ecological) risk that is threatening us world-wide. By the same token, this world risk society is no longer unified in any political sense. There is no world state; its very idea is even rejected. In this sense, the cosmopolitanism argued for in the theory of reflexive modernization proves predominantly to be an extrapolation of (national) civil society on a global scale, while, strictly speaking, having no cosmo‘political’ counterpart. Building on Marcel Gauchet’s political philosophy, the article questions the cosmopolitanism-beyond-the-political position of the theory of reflexive modernization. To do so, it goes substantially into Gauchet’s view of the representational role of the political as an essential dimension in (political) society formation.

In recent decades, the modern state and its institutions - including planning - have been the subjects of sustained and ultimately destabilizing critique by post-modernists. More recently, a new perspective on the 'crisis of modernity' has emerged. The theory of 'reflexive modernisation' has sought to renew both understanding of, and support for, the radical political-ethical vision of the Enlightenment. Whilst the perspective seems to have generated a vigorous debate in sociology, its impact on geography and urban planning has been much more limited, especially in Australia. This paper argues that theories of reflexive modernization are directly relevant to the concerns of the spatial sciences. In particular, I aim to show that the notion of reflexive modernization and its subsidiary concepts (e.g., risk society) can provide a powerful theoretical frame within which to place and understand the recent transformations of western urban and environmental planning systems. I draw upon the reflexive modernization thesis to describe and explain the broad changes and reform pressures that have emerged within planning in Australia.

The aim of this article is to present a view on adult education in the light of the concept of ‘risk society’, as articulated by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck. In his view, there is no such thing as a post‐modern society; on the contrary we are rapidly entering into a new episode of history in which ‘simple modernization’ is transforming into ‘reflexive modernization’. This development confronts society, and adult education, with new themes such as ecological safety, the danger of losing control over technological and scientific innovations, the internalization of political structures, the growth of a much more flexible labour force, etc. A specific feature of risk society mentioned by Beck is the process of individualization: biographies become more ‘self‐reflexive’, i.e., what used to be a socially conditioned biography is gradually transformed into a biography in which the individual is free to make decisions about the organization of his life. In a way, biographies are de‐standardized; this development, however, should not be equated with an increasing autonomy and emancipation of the individual, because the process entails a great number of pitfalls. The ambiguous nature of processes in individualization in risk society is a tremendous challenge to adult education and its applications of traditional life course theories. In the final section of the paper some suggestions are discussed with respect to resulting methodological questions of adult education. These suggestions are partly based on 20 in‐depth interviews with practitioners in The Netherlands, on the basis of keywords derived from the theories presented in this article.

As we discussed in Chap. 3, childhood and youth policy at both a national and international level is frequently silent on the subject of sex and sexuality. Where it does refer to sexuality it is primarily within a framework of heteronormative and medico-moral discourses of sexual health, well-being and sexual risk taking. A number of commentators have suggested that risk and risk management are defining features of contemporary society. Ulrich Beck, for example, has described the ‘risk society’ as an inevitable and inescapable condition of globalised, advanced industrialisation (Beck 1992) and Anthony Giddens (1991: 28) has argued that “living in the ‘risk society’ means living with a calculative attitude to the open possibilities of action, positive and negative, with which, as individuals and globally, we are confronted in a continuous way in our social existence”. In other words, social life in late/high/post modernity is characterised by uncertainty and unpredictability. The social structures that shaped, if not determined, one’s life expectancies under modernity, such as class and gender, have been replaced by contingency and choice. No longer restrained by these structural determinants, individuals engage in a ‘reflexive project of the self’ (Giddens 1991) whereby risks are assessed and calculated and the individual is an active agent in the construction of their own biography. The extent to which Beck’s ‘reflexive modernisation’ thesis and Giddens’ ‘reflexive project of the self’ can be applied to young people in the twenty-first century has been extensively discussed elsewhere (see, for example, Thomson et al. 2002, 2005, Henderson et al. 2007). These critiques have focused, in particular, on the continued significance of social structures on shaping young people’s life chances. In this chapter, we focus on teenage pregnancy and, specifically, the construction of teenage pregnancy as a social problem in order to explore how young people, especially young women, understand and negotiate risk within the confines of their social circumstances. In so doing, it becomes evident that the social structures of age, class and gender are central to the construction of risk in relation to teenage pregnancy. This chapter will critically consider the construction of risk in terms of sexuality and argue that because of the antithetical constructions of childhood and sexuality, all sexual behaviour that children and young people engage in are, by definition, considered risky.

This paper examines the nature of late‐modern child protection by placing it in the context of the paradigm of `risk society'. It traces out a structural transformation in the relationship between expertise and lay people that has occurred since the 1970s which resulted in the emergence of child abuse inquiries and new public disclosures of professional ‘failures’'. The dynamic and empowering features of social developments are identified in how institutions, professionals and lay people re‐appropriate power, knowledge and reskill themselves. Traditionally repressed problems like child sexual abuse have gained recognition in a context where abused women and children – like all late‐modern citizens – are reflexively engaged in constructing their own biographies and using expertise in the planning of their life projects. A radically new professional risk consciousness in child protection is traced to late‐modern existential crises associated with death and sexuality and the emergence of manufactured risk, which is known and experienced by social workers as risk in the context of radically uncertain futures for children. Drawing on the work of sociologists of ‘reflexive modernity’, the paper aims to advance our understandings of social work and child protection beyond the one‐dimensional focus of post‐modernist critics on power, control and bureaucracy to recognize the new opportunities, as well as the dangers, involved in child protection in risk society.

This scientific article seeks to analyze the risks of the application of artificial intelligence in the drafts of Brazilian judicial decisions in the context of reflexive modernization and risk society. Through the deductive method and an exploratory research, the concepts of reflexive modernization and risk society were analyzed. The concept of artificial intelligence and its applications were also explored. Finally, the risks of the application of artificial intelligence in the drafts of Brazilian judicial decisions were studied, as well as an overview of artificial intelligence projects in this sense in Brazilian courts. The methodology adopted was the literature review, through legislation, scientific articles, doctrine and specialized journals. In the end, it was concluded that it is essential to respect the ethics, governance and transparency guidelines established by Resolution 332 of the National Council of Justice. It was also concluded that, for the effectiveness of transparency, it is essential that the codes of the algorithms are open source and available to any and all citizens, as well as that the application of artificial intelligence occurs through supervised learning.

ASIANPERSPECTIVE, Vol. 27, No. 2,2003, pp. 241-251. Commentary RISK SOCIETY COMES TO CHINA: SARS, TRANSPARENCY AND PUBLIC ACCOUNTABILITY Paul Thiers A Risk Society By now, it is clear that the spread of Severe Acute Respiratory Syndrome (SARS) and its bureaucratic mismanagement is a politi­ cal, economic, and public-health nightmare for China. But the SARS crisis presents two important tests for the Chinese govern­ ment and, so far, it has failed only the first. The bureaucracy pre­ dictably botched the administration of the outbreak, leading with secrecy and denial, allowing the disease to spread further and faster than necessary, and losing any semblance of legitimacy in both the domestic and international community. The political leadership, however, has yet to indicate what lessons it will draw and what steps it will take in the long term. If it makes the right decisions, SARS could provide a context for addressing a long­ standing weakness in Chinese public administration. SARS occurs as a new leadership is attempting to consoli­ date power under a populist program, claiming to defend those left to bear the costs and risks of China's rapid growth and glob­ al integration. China's new premier, Wen Jiabao, spent Spring Festival in a Chinese coal mine, arguably the most risky occupa­ tional environment in the world. Hu Jintao, the new president, has spoken of the need to support hundreds of thousands of urban workers and poor farmers whose livelihoods are at risk from increased competition and low prices that China's acces­ 242 Paul Thiers sion to the World Trade Organization will bring in the next ten years. While it is still too early to tell, this could be a political platform, recognizing that industrialization, technology, and global market integration create risks—and that a government that fails to manage those risks, fails its own people and loses the confidence of the global community. Since these are specifi­ cally the bureaucratic failures of the SARS crisis, the long-term response will be a crucial test of the new political leadership. To understand the significance of the SARS crisis for Chinese politics, it is useful to consider German social theorist Ulrich Beck's concept of risk society.1 Examining the late 20th century social movement politics of nuclear power, environmental pol­ lution, and food safety scares such as mad cow disease, Beck argues that we have entered a new stage of modernity in which the definition, management, and allocation of risks replaces the generation and allocation of costs and benefits as the central theme of politics and science. Beck cites an emerging, world­ wide awareness that industrialization, technology, and global­ ization bring risks that nation-states, as the traditional arenas of policy making, are expected to address. But this same industrial­ ization, and particularly the new technologies and levels of global interaction that characterize it in our era, facilitate infor­ mation exchange and policy advocacy independently of nation­ state authority. Beck further argues that emerging networks of interaction below, above, and around the nation-state erode the state's monopoly on the definition and management of risk even as they increase pressure on the state to manage risk effectively. What is more, because risk is largely a function of public percep­ tion, state proclamations that a problem is under control can backfire. Non-state actors can challenge official assurances, lead­ ing to public distrust and anger toward state administrators. In democracies, risk society unravels the progressive-era model in which public administrators are seen as technical experts, insu­ lated from direct public pressure. For Beck, the only solution is to open up policy making and administration to ever greater 1. See Ulrich Beck, Risk Society: Tozvards a New Modernity, trans. M. Ritter (London: Sage, 1993), and Beck, World Risk Society (Cambridge: Polity Press, 1999). Risk Society Comes to China 243 levels of public accountability. Of course, this presents the great­ est challenges for non-democratic systems that have relied on authoritarian models of science and politics to define and administer policy in risk-prone areas such as health, the envi­ ronment, and global market integration. Beck's argument has important implications for a country like China. At least since...