Risk

Second Edition

Deborah Lupton

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2013
• eBook ISBN: 9781135090319
• Edition: 2
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Sociology
• Index: Social Sciences

Risk (second edition) is a fully revised and expanded update of a highly-cited, influential and well-known book. It reviews the three major approaches to risk in social and cultural theory, devoting a chapter to each one. These approaches were first identified and described by Deborah Lupton in the original edition and have since become widely used as a categorisation of risk perspectives.

The first draws upon the work of Mary Douglas to articulate the 'cultural/symbolic' perspective on risk. The second approach is that of the 'risk society' perspective, based on the writings of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens. The third approach explored here is that of the 'governmentality' perspective, which builds on Michel Foucault's work. Other chapters examine in detail the relationship between concepts of risk and concepts of selfhood and the body, the notion of Otherness and how this influences the ways in which people respond to and think about risk, and the pleasures of voluntary risk-taking, including discussion of edgework.

This new edition examines these themes in relation to the newly emerging threats of the twenty-first century, such as climate change, extreme weather events, terrorism and global financial crises. It will appeal to students and scholars throughout the social sciences and humanities.

1
Introduction

In his history of life in medieval France, Robert Muchembled (1985) portrays a world in which there were many threats and dangers to human health and life for both peasantry and aristocracy alike. During this era, death was ‘on display everywhere, to the point of banality’ (ibid.: 31). The most extreme of these threats and dangers were hunger, cold, epidemic disease and war. Food supply at the end of the Middle Ages in Europe was very tenuous. Grain provided the basis of the diet, and production was vulnerable to the vicissitudes of the seasons. Infant mortality was very high and lifespans short (reaching the age of 40 being considered a fair lifespan). Epidemics of such diseases as smallpox, whooping cough, typhoid, syphilis, dysentery and the plague regularly struck villages and towns, decimating their populations. People living in rural areas faced other dangers, such as wolves, which were known to attack children and sometimes adults in the fields and near their cottages. Wild dogs presented the threat of rabies should they bite and wild pigs were known to attack and eat small children. Bands of brigands roamed the forests and high roads, regularly attacking and robbing peasants. Feuds and battles between family clans were frequent and violent, often resulting in murder.

In this world, insecurity was rife and permanent, and ‘fears, real and imaginary, abounded’ (Muchembled 1985: 22). Dead bodies were very much in the public eye. Bodies of hanged men dangled from gallows, slowly rotting, for several days or weeks in public places, executions took place in public and the dead victims of brigands and soldiers were to be found on roads, as were the bodies of beggars and vagabonds who had perished from starvation or disease. Villagers and townspeople closed themselves in their dwellings at night, not daring to go out once darkness had fallen, because night was considered the domain of all dangers: the kingdom of the Devil, of demons, of witches and werewolves and monstrous beasts. They were also afraid of natural events that were seen to disturb the order of things, such as comets, extraordinary cold, earthquakes and floods.

In medieval France, therefore, magic, combined with a dash of Christianity, served as the belief system by which threats and dangers were dealt with conceptually and behaviourally, allowing people to feel as if they had some sense of control over their world. The presence of the supernatural was taken for granted, incorporating notions of a vengeful God with that of an evil Satan. A network of superstition existed to deal with evil, including beliefs in portents, pilgrimages to shrines, amulets, offerings to the gods, avoidance of tabooed places such as crossroads and of people such as lepers and gypsies. Everyday life was full of customs and beliefs that involved behaving in certain ways or avoiding actions so as to ward off danger or disease. Thus, for example, in some areas of France it was believed that kittens born in the month of May must be drowned, or danger would threaten (Muchembled 1985: 81).

This description of everyday life and beliefs in medieval France provides a fascinating account of how people in that particular historical and sociocultural context dealt with danger, hazard and fear. As Muchembled shows, societies develop a system of strategies and beliefs in the attempt to deal with, contain and prevent danger. To lack such systems is to throw oneself upon the mercy of fate, to relinquish any sense of control. In contemporary Western societies, where control over one’s life has become increasingly viewed as important, the concept of ‘risk’ is now widely used to explain deviations from the norm, misfortune and frightening events. This concept assumes human responsibility and that ‘something can be done’ to prevent misfortune. Feelings of insecurity are common, just as they were in pre-modern times, but we now harbour somewhat different fears, different targets and causes for our anxiety. While we no longer regularly view dead bodies lying about, while the plague has all but vanished as a cause of death, while infant mortality is extremely low and most of us expect to live well into old age, we fear being the victim of a crime, falling prey to cancer, being in a car accident, losing our jobs, having our marriage break down or our children fail at school. As in pre-modern times, the symbolic basis of our uncertainties is anxiety created by disorder, the loss of control over our bodies, our relationships with others, our livelihoods and the extent to which we can exert autonomy in our everyday lives.

As in pre-modern times, we may acknowledge that threats exist, but we like to think that something can be done to deal with them. We may not perform such acts as drowning unfortunate kittens born in the wrong month as a strategy of risk prevention, but we have a range of other strategies that in emotional terms serve the same purpose. Agitating for anti-pollution legislation, watching one’s diet, having tests to diagnose disease in its early stages, installing a burglar alarm in one’s home, going online to seek further information or taking out life insurance are all ways in which people seek to contain and manage the anxiety and fear aroused by what they perceive to be a danger or threat. Rational thinking, bureaucratic systems of prevention, ways of identifying threats before they take effect, are regularly put forward as means of managing danger and threats.

The response to the Port Arthur killings in Australia is one example. On 28 April 1996, a young man, Martin Bryant, entered the Port Arthur historic tourist site in the Australian island state of Tasmania and proceeded to shoot randomly at people visiting and working there using two semi-automatic weapons. He then left Port Arthur and travelled to a local guest house, shooting at others and taking a male hostage en route. Bryant was not arrested until the next morning, when he ran out of the guest house after having set it alight. He had left 35 people dead and a further 17 badly wounded.

A central theme in the media coverage of the Port Arthur killings, which received a high level of publicity both in Australia and abroad, questioned why such an event could have happened. In trying to give a meaning to Bryant’s acts, numerous suggestions were put forward. One suggestion was that Bryant had been exposed to too many violent films or ‘video nasties’ which had influenced him to commit murder. Some media reports suggested that he had been bullied as a child because he was ‘simple’ or too effeminate-looking, and that the murders may have been an act of revenge upon the world for this cruelty. Still others commented that Bryant’s father was violent and had beaten him when he was a child, and that this had led him into violence himself. Several calls for action were suggested. The major one was gun control, particularly in relation to semi-automatic weapons. New gun control regulations were seized upon as a strategy of risk containment. A secondary call for action was that violent films and videos be banned or censored. Further suggestion was made that individuals with a history of psychiatric illness be prevented from acquiring gun licences. All of these strategies were directed at regaining control over what was seen to be an unanticipated expression of evil, helping people deal with the horror, anger and frustration, the loss of control they felt in response to Martin Bryant’s actions. These strategies are the products of late modern ways of thinking about, and reacting to, risk.

Changes in the Meaning of Risk

Over the centuries, the word ‘risk’ has changed its meaning and its use has become far more common and applied to a plethora of situations. The word ‘risk’ appeared in German in references in the mid-sixteenth century and English in the second half of the seventeenth century. However, the Renaissance Latin term riscum had been in use long before in countries such as Germany (Luhmann 1993: 9). Most commentators link the emergence of the word and concept of risk with early maritime ventures in the pre-modern period, used to designate the perils that could compromise a voyage: ‘At that time, risk designated the possibility of an objective danger, an act of God, a force majeure, a tempest or other peril of the sea that could not be imputed to wrongful conduct’ (Ewald 1993: 226). This concept of risk, therefore, excluded the idea of human fault and responsibility. Risk was perceived to be a natural event such as a storm, flood or epidemic rather than a human-made one. As such, humans could do little but attempt to estimate roughly the likelihood of such events happening and take steps to reduce their impact.

Changes in the meanings and use of risk are associated with the emergence of modernity, beginning in the seventeenth century and gathering force in the eighteenth century. Modernity has been defined as ‘the institutions and modes of behaviour established first of all in post-feudal Europe, but which in the twentieth century increasingly have become world-historical in their impact’ (Giddens 1991: 14–15). Modernity is equivalent to the ‘industrialized world’, incorporating capitalism, the institutions of surveillance and nuclear weaponry as well as the process of industrialism. Modernity depends upon the notion emerging in the seventeenth-century Enlightenment that the key to human progress and social order is objective knowledge of the world through scientific exploration and rational thinking. It assumes that the social and natural worlds follow laws that may be measured, calculated and therefore predicted.

During the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, the early modern European states sought to harness their populations productively and deal with the social changes and upheavals wrought by mass urbanization and industrialization as part of the Industrial Revolution. The science of probability and statistics was developed as a means of calculating the norm and identifying deviations from the norm, thus embodying the belief that rationalized counting and ordering would bring disorder under control (Hacking 1990). These fields were to become important to the modernist technical notion of risk. During the eighteenth century, the concept of risk had begun to be scientized, drawing upon new ideas in mathematics relating to probability. The development of statistical calculations of risk and the expansion of the insurance industry in the early modern era meant that the effects of phenomena that once were viewed as affecting individuals now could be calculated across populations. These phenomena could now be described, quantified and predicted and thus managed or avoided (Beck 1992a: 99). By the nineteenth century, the notion of risk was extended. It was no longer located exclusively in nature, but was ‘also in human beings, in their conduct, in their liberty, in the relations between them, in the fact of their association, in society’ (Ewald 1993: 226).

The modernist concept of risk represented a new way of viewing the world and its chaotic manifestations, its contingencies and uncertainties. It assumed that unanticipated outcomes may be the consequence of human action rather than the result of God’s will, largely replacing earlier concepts of fate or fortuna (Giddens 1990: 30). Reddy claims that ‘[m]oderns had eliminated genuine indeterminacy, or “uncertainty”, by inventing “risk”. They had learnt to transform a radically indeterminate cosmos into a manageable one, through the myth of calculability’ (1996: 237). Castel goes even further, arguing that the obsession with the prevention of risk in modernity is built upon

a grandiose technocratic rationalizing dream of absolute control of the accidental, understood as the irruption of the unpredictable ... a vast hygienist Utopia plays on the alternate registers of fear and security, inducing a delirium of rationality, an absolute reign of calculative reason and a no less absolute prerogative of its agents, planners and technocrats, administrators of happiness for a life to which nothing happens.

(Castel 1991: 289)

In modernity, risk, in its purely technical meaning, came to rely upon conditions in which the probability estimates of an event are able to be known or knowable. Uncertainty, in contrast, was used as an alternative term when these probabilities are inestimable or unknown. For example, in one form of economic theory developed in the mid-nineteenth century, risk was differentiated from uncertainty in this way. This distinction presupposed that there was a form of indeterminacy that was not subject to rational calculation of the likelihood of various alternative possibilities (Reddy 1996: 227). John Maynard Keynes, the influential English economic theorist, built on this distinction to argue that investors’ behaviour should be classified as subject to uncertainty rather than the laws of risk because they were ‘driven by “animal spirits”’ which ‘by their very nature were not subject to probabilistic or “risk” analysis’ (cited in Reddy 1996: 229).

Modernist notions of risk also included the idea that risk could be both ‘good’ and ‘bad’. The notion of risk as it developed in insurance is associated with notions of chance or probability, on one hand, and loss and damage, on the other. These two sets of notions come together in the concept of the accident, against which one insures oneself (Ewald 1991: 199). From this perspective, ‘risk’ is a neutral concept, denoting the probability of something happening, combined with the magnitude of associated losses or gains. In other words, there once was such a thing as a ‘good’ risk as well as a ‘bad’ risk (Douglas 1992: 23). This meaning of risk dominated until the beginning of the nineteenth century (Ewald 1991).

Contemporary Concepts of Risk

In the first decades of the twenty-first century, these fine distinctions between risk and uncertainty and ‘good risk’ and ‘bad risk’ have tended to be somewhat lost. The use of the word ‘risk’, as Douglas contends, now ‘has not got much to do with probability calculations. The original connection is only indicated by arm-waving in the direction of possible science: the word risk now means danger; high risk means a lot of danger’ (1992: 24, original emphases; see also Boholm 2012). Risk is now generally used to relate only to negative or undesirable outcomes, not positive outcomes. This is even often the case in more technical assessments of risk, where the potential benefits or positive aspects of risk tend to receive far less attention (Short 1984: 711). In the esoteric parlance of economic speculation, however, there remain such things as ‘good risks’ in relation to making a profit. It is recognized that risks must be taken to make money in speculative enterprises, and that often the greater the risk of losing one’s money, the greater the return should things go well (Luhmann 1993: 71).

It is important to emphasize the ‘always becoming’ and transitory nature of risk. A risk is not a phenomenon that already exists; it is a phenomenon that may happen some time in the future, ‘an unrealized potentiality’ (Rigakos and Law 2009: 80). Further, risk is always a normative statement of morality because it incorporates the notion that it may involve harm to someone or something (ibid.: 80).

In everyday lay people’s language, risk tends to be used to refer almost exclusively to a threat, hazard, danger or harm: we ‘risk our life savings’ by investing on the stock exchange, or ‘put our marriage at risk’ by having an affair. The term is also used more weakly to refer to a somewhat negative rather than disastrous outcome, as in the phrase ‘If you go outside in this rain, you’ll risk catching a cold.’ In this usage, risk means somewhat less than a possible danger or a threat, more an unfortunate or annoying event. Risk is therefore a very loose term in everyday parlance. Issues of calculable probability are not necessarily important to the colloquial use of risk. Risk and uncertainty tend to be treated as conceptually the same thing: for example, the term ‘risk’ is often used to denote a phenomenon that has the potential to deliver substantial harm, whether or not the probability of this harm eventuating is estimable.

In contemporary Western societies, the noun ‘risk’ and the adjective ‘risky’ have become very commonly used in both popular and expert discourses. An apparatus of expert research, knowledge and advice has developed around the concept of risk: risk analysis, risk assessment, risk communication and risk management are all major fields of research and practice, used to measure and control risk in areas as far-ranging as medicine and public health, finance, the law, and business and industry. Indeed, the use of the term ‘risk’ appears to have been increasing in the past few decades. One study of the occurrence of ‘risk’ in academic journal article titles found an exponential growth between 1966 and 1982, particularly after the early 1970s (Inhaber and Norman 1982, cited in Short 1984: 712). A more specific search of some medical and epidemiological journals published in the United States, Britain and Scandinavia also found an increasing frequency of the use of the term over the years spanning 1967 and 1991, in which the late 1970s again marked the beginning of a period of rapid growth in the use of the term which accelerated in the late 1980s (Skolbekken 1995).

I undertook my own research to explore trends in the use of the term ‘risk’ in one Australian newspaper. I used the Factiva news media database to search for appearances of ‘risk’ in The Australian newspaper, a broadsheet which has a national focus. I looked at each year between 1997 and 2011 to see how many articles or headlines used ‘risk’ over that 15-year period. It is interesting to note that each year the number of uses of ‘risk’ gradually rose, reaching a peak in 2011. In 1997, 3,317 mentions of ‘risk’ appeared in the newspaper. Four years later, in 2001, this number had risen to 3,577, by 2006 to 5,280 and by 2011 ‘risk’ was used 7,724 times in articles or headlines published in The Australia...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• 1 Introduction
• 2 Theorizing risk
• 3 Risk and culture
• 4 Risk and reflexive modernization
• 5 Risk and governmentality
• 6 Risk and subjectivity
• 7 Risk and Otherness
• 8 Risk and pleasure
• GLOSSARY
• REFERENCES
• INDEX