Routledge Handbook of Risk Studies

Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, Jens Zinn, Adam Burgess, Alberto Alemanno, Jens Zinn

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781317691655
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sciences sociales
• Subtopic: Sociologie

It is over 40 years since we began to reflect upon risk in a more social than technological and economic fashion, firstly making sense of the gap between expert and public assessment of risks, such as to our health and environment. With fixed certainties of the past eroded and the technological leaps of 'big data', ours is truly an age of risk, uncertainty and probability - from Google's algorithms to the daily management of personal lifestyle risks. Academic reflection and research has kept pace with these dizzying developments but remains an intellectually fragmented field, shaped by professional imperatives and disciplinary boundaries, from risk analysis to regulation and social research. This is the first attempt to draw together and define risk studies, through a definitive collection written by the leading scholars in the field. It will be an indispensable resource for the many scholars, students and professionals engaging with risk but lacking a resource to draw it all together.

Introduction

Adam Burgess

The risk – and probability – society

This is the first Handbook of Risk Studies, indeed the first book to really use the term ‘risk studies’ that we are aware of. There are other interdisciplinary ‘studies’ such as media studies that are well established, but one hasn’t clearly emerged in the field of risk. In this introduction I’ll provide some context to why this is and, in the process, indicate some of its features and defining research as well as the historical circumstances from which it emerged in the late 1960s and some changes in assumption and emphasis that have subsequently developed. I will also say something about why we as editors were attracted to the project and will outline the structure of the book overall. But first, I will briefly highlight the wide scope of risk research and its contemporary relevance in modern society.

As a guiding theme, risk is quite unique in the quantity and extent of research that draws upon it. Risk concerns the future; specifically of calculating the chance of particular outcomes (usually, but not exclusively negative), and the related concept of uncertainty comes into play when we are not able to do this in a meaningful way, at least according to most perspectives (an exception being the cultural perspective outlined by John Adams in Chapter 7). Risk-related research is thriving in a variety of research areas: in the social sciences, humanities and natural science. This is hardly surprising because planning for the future is fundamental to, and partly defines, our modern world and our sense of it. For much of the world today the future is no longer fatalistically pre-ordained as it was in the pre-modern worldview. We can anticipate future possibilities and risks based upon our knowledge of the past, at least in some areas like medicine and health where we often have the data available to extrapolate likely trends.

Risk remains of considerable – arguably growing – academic and popular interest. Witness the number of successful risk-related books in recent years, such as Nobel prizewinner Daniel Kahneman’s bestselling, Thinking, Fast and Slow (2011), and Richard Thaler and Cass Sunstein’s, Nudge (2009), which has sold over 750,000 copies. There is widespread resonance for reflecting upon how we think about the future and particularly the mistakes we routinely make when instinctively thinking in the short term and ‘slow’, and how we might be ‘nudged’ into improving the outcomes and consequences by acting in our more long-term interests. Away from psychology and towards sociology, countless academic books and articles over the last few decades have begun by referencing the suggestion that we live in a ‘risk society’. The term, as readers may know, was the title of a book by the now-deceased German sociologist, Ulrich Beck, which was published in 1986 in German and translated into English in 1992. This marks an important dimension in the evolution of ‘risk studies’ as risk became a focus for sociological reflection for the first time. Another seminal ‘risk studies’ text is Risk and Culture by British ...