ABSTRACT
In the past few decades, it is argued, the organisation of many fields of government and social life – and in particular the government of crime and ‘social problems’ – has been reshaped around techniques and models of risk management. The principal characteristics of risk in this sense are associated with the management of potential harms: risk identification; risk reduction; and risk spreading. Studies of criminal justice, psychiatry, health, industry, unemployment and the environment have all charted and attempted to explain this phenomenon of governmental planning around issues such as the dangerousness of criminals and of the mentally ill, environmental risks, traffic and industrial accidents, the centrality of insurance and so on (for example, Adams 1995; Green 1997; O’Malley 1998; Ericson and Haggerty 1997; Feeley and Simon 1992; Simon 1987; Beck 1992; Douglas 1992).1 In this literature, the ‘risk society’ – a society substantially organised around risk management – is identified as a comparatively recent phenomenon, generally dating from the 1950s or 1960s.
