ABSTRACT
These days the language of risk appears to be everywhere in social analysis (and perhaps increasingly in everyday social exchange, too). Having broken its original bounds in economic theory and the analysis of techno-environmental hazards, this protean notion shows no sign of being reconfined. Moreover, the tendency in recent social theory to affirm that thinking in terms of risk is a pervasive condition in late modernity (Giddens 1990, 1991; Beck 1992) leads us to expect more rather than less of such talk, even if some lament the loss of conceptual specificity or precision thereby implied. 1
