ABSTRACT
The concept of ‘risk’ has had a meteoric rise in sociological importance over the past few years. Used as a shorthand to describe some of the most notable cultural changes of the last two decades of the twentieth century it also helps to provide an agenda for future political action. This has led to a problem because, viewed from the perspective of sociology, the concept focuses on issues of uncertainty and fear. This ignores whole areas of discussion about risk which do not concentrate on ‘not knowing’ but rather on ‘knowing and acting’. In particular, discourses developed in the health, social and educational services of the welfare state have as their intention the possibility of intervention in ‘risky’ situations to achieve the positive goals that they have set themselves. The importance of linking up these two areas of discourse around risk is not to prove one set of literature correct over another, but rather to point to the organizing role that a third area-social policy-has in relating the two conceptions of risk to the wider project of governing society. In this chapter I will attempt to show how the awareness and surveillance of risk are central features of the reworking of citizenship along communitarian lines-a reworking which puts a heavy emphasis on individual agency and choice, so long as this occurs within increasingly circumscribed limits. This shift seems to reflect social and cultural changes where the construction of self-identity and lifestyle have become paramount influences and where the collectivist vision of a universalist welfare state has become anachronistic. To underpin my argument I will concentrate on the fate of old age in modern society1
RISK SOCIETY
Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society published in English in 1992, is often cited as the most significant piece of work alerting us to the importance of ‘risk’ in constructing the parameters of late or high modernity. It has been used by figures as influential as Anthony Giddens as a basis for an analysis of modernity that goes beyond the sterile polarization of
modernity/ postmodernity and seeks to clarify what could reasonably be said about society at the turn of the millennium. At the heart of Beck’s position on risk, however, is a belief that as a result of reflexivity we now live in a society where the identification and awareness of risks (however defined) overwhelms the project of modernity. The very success of industrialism has brought pollution and ecological disaster onto the developed as well as the developing world. As is well known, the distribution of such risks is not, according to Beck, something that affects only the subaltern classes; it also affects those who have benefited from industrialization. On top of this is the problem of the interpretation of evidence of risk which, because of the speed of dissemination of information, becomes more and more difficult to establish with any certainty. As Beck points out, this gives opportunities for many different groups to pronounce on risks and to be ‘experts’. Concerns with risk, then, create the most notable feature of contemporary society; concerns which, as Beck points out, cannot be assuaged by conventional means.
