This book presents various methods, methodologies, and research strategies to examine how individuals, organizations, and societies approach uncertain futures and their potential dangers. Understanding and managing risk and uncertainty is a central task of current societies which are characterized by rapid social, technological, and environmental change. These changes challenge common strategies of understanding and managing uncertain futures and their potential dangers and require new methods for their investigation. The book brings together contributions from a number of experienced and young researchers applying different research approaches to the examination of how risk and uncertainty are understood and responded to. While the book has a base in sociology, it is interdisciplinary in nature, considering the need of interdisciplinary exchange to advance understanding and management of social, technological, and environmental challenges. This includes research strategies and designs which integrate tools and approaches from psychology, history, linguistics, anthropology, and gender studies, among others. Furthermore, rather than engaging in old debates of qualitative versus quantitative methods or positivist versus constructionist epistemologies, the contributions in the book engage with the practical questions of how to use available approaches and methods to advance knowledge about the social understanding and management of risk and uncertainty.
This introductory chapter is composed of three parts: after the introduction, the second part provides an overview of the domain of research on risk and uncertainty, with a particular focus on the development of research strategies, methods, and methodologies in the social sciences and the humanities. The overview spans from Mary Douglasā anthropological field studies and the development of the psychometric paradigm in social psychology in the 1960s to today.
The third part of the chapter focuses on specific challenges risk research has faced and how it has responded by modifying and advancing research methods, methodologies, and strategies. The section presents cutting-edge developments and positions the contributions to this volume in broader debates in ethnography, narrative analysis, content and discourse analysis, and survey research/statistical analysis. This section concludes by introducing the structure of the book and each chapter.
Risk Research: From Technical Calculation to Critical Thinking
This section contextualizes the chapters of the book and indicates how they can advance common methodologies and research strategies. The chapter outlines developments in risk studies and how different methodologies are associated with specific fields of research.
Risk as a concept appeared and was regularly used when the need to foresee and understand the future was no longer satisfied by religion or faith. Thus risk is intimately associated with the enlightenment and the development of modern society (Beck 1992). Cosmological understandings and the secrets of nature were replaced by rational calculation of an increasingly uncertain future (Luhmann 2008 [1993]). The etymology of the word is unclear, but even prior to the middle ages, traders already performed risk calculations that later informed regulation of maritime trade and insurance. Scientific or at least statistical calculation of future uncertainty still characterizes much of risk analysis and risk research, and over time risk analysis has become a technology for managing various issues, objects, events, and conditions in a seemingly rational and objective way, including social inequalities in welfare societies (Beck 1992; Ewald 1993). Calculations of possible futures, particularly in terms of the possibility and magnitude of (adverse) events or consequences, are still a common feature today in definitions of risk. Similarly, the intimate association between risk and rational action still permeates policy and risk research. Demographics and other statistics are key means for the analysis, and accumulated observations and practices direct attention to the populationās life, births, deaths, health, life expectancy, and the scientific categorization of human beings (race, gender, sexual practices, eating habits, etc.) (Foucault 1978). Furthermore, humans are often viewed as rational actors who will avoid risk if correct information is available. However, already in the 1960s, it was clear that people do not always act fully rationally, which means that people do not behave like experts or policymakers assume or may wish. It was then that economists and psychologists began to study this difference, and how people perceive risk.
How It All Began: Experiments, Surveys, and Ethnography
In the 1960s psychologists started to investigate what makes people act seemingly irrational, that is, not according to the (risk) information they receive (Tversky and Kahneman 1974, 1987). Through experiments, a number of so-called heuristic biases proved to explain some of the āmistakesā people make when making decisions, and since then cognitive psychologists have revealed several associations between cognition, perception, and experience, both direct and indirect. Thus, knowing the likelihood of an event taking place is one thing, and accepting this probability is a completely different one. Psychologists therefore started to investigate peopleās perceptions of risk and began developing what is known as the psychometric paradigm (Slovic 2000). Using surveys and statistical methods, risk perception studies examine subjective views of different risks, what influences perception, and how perceptions differ between individuals, groups and, in part, cultures. Perception studies have advanced knowledge about subjective understandings of risk and how they are associated with social interaction and with individuals, surroundings, past experiences and many other factors. Furthermore, statistical calculations such as frequencies and probabilities can be difficult to comprehend and therefore people respond primarily to their perception of the risk and not to the calculated, āobjectiveā, risk. Instead, the individualās own assessment and perception of possible negative consequences seems to play a greater role (Renn 1998). Research also shows that people generally place greater emphasis on the consequences of the risk than the likelihood that it will occur.
However, it was not only economic and psychometric risk research that developed during the 1960s and 1970s, but also anthropological studies known today as cultural-symbolic studies of risk. Rather than seeing risk as an objective danger that can be dealt with rationally on the basis of objective technological knowledge, early anthropological research emphasized that the risks we identify, the way we perceive them, and our responses to them are structured by our institutions and social values (Douglas 1992). Opposing rational-choice approaches, Douglas criticized the narrow decontextualized model of utility maximization provided by economics by arguing that it is our values that structure what we see as risky and how we respond to it. Douglas (1992) develops her reasoning about risk on the basis of her previous studies on danger, sin, and taboo. Real dangers are always transformed into cultural-symbolic risks since the danger is coded as threat to valued institutions. Hence, the sociocultural construction of risk is theoretically independent of its objective reality. Furthermore, it is the politicization of danger, or risk, that is linking risk to some disapproved behaviour, coding the risk in terms of a threat to valued institutions (Douglas 1992: 29). Within a particular culture/institution/community, there is a set of world views, or norms and values, that permeate our understanding of the world shaping, for instance, how we view physical events like fires, earthquakes, and diseases (Douglas and Wildavsky 1982). Thus, in a community with individualized world views, people will tend to perceive risks differently than those living in an egalitarian community. This functionalist explanation of taboo emphasizes the maintenance of social structure. Risk or misfortune demands an explanation, which starts a process of attributing responsibility. A major contribution of cultural theory of risk and Mary Douglas is showing how risk always is situated, how risk is lived with in everyday life (Boholm 2015).
Cultural theory has from the offset applied ethnographic research strategies and methods, including participatory and non-participatory observations, visual methods, and other hermeneutic methodologies exploring meaning beyond the informantās narratives. Particularly in the early days, anthropological studies were carried out in countries foreign to the researcher, but over time, cultural theory has become a theory for understanding the cultural and spatial embeddedness of risk in general. Interestingly, cultural theory is also applied in psychometric research. At first, Douglas and Wildavsky (1982) were critical of psychometric researcherās focus on individual explanations of attitudes, and argued that the cultural world views which permeate certain institutional contexts shape the individualās perception of risk, and cannot be measured on the individual level (Douglas 1970). However, in the beginning of the 1990s, Karl Dake (1991, see also Rippl 2002) introduced the first quantitative measurements of Douglasā so-called grid/group typology as a measurement of cultural world views (or cultural biases) on the individual level, an approach since broadly applied in quantitative studies of cultural theory and public perceptions of risk (Kahan et al. 2007; Olofsson and Ćhman 2015). Even though the quantitative operationalizations are established and applied in international surveys such as the World Values Survey, the critique has been harsh. For example, Lennart Sjƶberg (2000) argues that the relation between world views and perception of risk is robust, but weak, and argues that this kind of operationalization of cultural theory fails because it tries to capture the social context, which is too abstract, and because the social context is not the only determinant of risk perception. Douglas (1992) seems ambiguous about the application of the grid/group typology in risk perception studies: on the one hand, she seems to reject the whole idea of individual data as āmethodological individualismā (1992: 11), but on the other she seems to encourage such studies as long as cultural bias are accounted for, āIt would be very feasible to develop questionnaires that sorted experimental subjects according to their cultural bias before embarking on their response to probabilities of lossā (1992: 32).
The Sociological Turn: More Theory Than Practice
In the 1980s and early 1990s, a number of scholars published key sociological contributions about risk, including Ulrich Beckās Risk Society; Niklas Luhmannās Risk A Sociological Theory; Anthony Giddensā The Consequences of Modernity; Graham Burchell, Colin Gordon, and Peter Millerās The Foucault Effect; and Stephen Lyngās Edgework: A Social Psychological Analysis of Voluntary Risk Taking. The authors contributed new theoretical understandings of the role of risk in society, including social development an...