ABSTRACT
This chapter explores Cultural theory states that it aims to explain risk not from the thoughts, intentions and strategies of individuals but as a phenomenon shaped by social and cultural processes. The risk analysis focuses on how future conditions can be calculated as the results of cause and effect relationships. If risk is to be perceived and managed, it first must be identified and then it must be communicated. In order to understand what role personal, local experience plays in the assessment of information derived from the generalised knowledge of distant expert communities. It makes an analytical distinction among three basic modes of knowledge about risk: everyday experience, science-driven scenarios and collective narratives. The chapter is for the conceptualisation of risk not as a phenomenon in itself but as a frame that produces contexts that link together a risk object, an object at risk and an evaluation of the possible human consequences.
