ABSTRACT
One major dierence between the two perspectives is that while the ‘risk society’ approach tends to take a weak social constructionist approach to risk in concert with a critical structuralist perspective, advocates of Foucauldian approaches mostly adopt a ‘strong’ version of social constructionism and a poststructuralist approach to power relations. e concept of discourse … is integral to Foucauldian theorizing. An important insight oered by Foucauldian perspectives on risk is the ways in which the discourses, strategies, practices and institutions around a phenomenon such as risk serve to bring it into being, to construct it as a phenomenon. It is argued that it is only through these discourses, strategies, practices and institutions that we come to know ‘risk’. ey produce ‘truths’ on risk that are then the basis for action. For Foucauldian writers, therefore, the nature of risk itself is not the important question for analysis. Risk is seen as a ‘calculative rationality’ rather than as a thing in itself (Dean 1999).
