ABSTRACT
A conceptual framework is proposed within which the notion of risk as normally used in risk assessment (RA) could be enlarged in line with the real substance of social issues of technology policy, to help avoid RA's threatened irrelevance to social decisionmaking. This chapter argues that the social model corresponds logically with an entirely rational rejection of the narrow confinement of the 'rational' agenda of risk and policymaking, to matters only of physical risks and effects. Thus the social organization of at least some modem technologies may cause them inevitably to be not only internally incoherent, unable to find a viable level between fantasy and demoralization, but externally conflictual too, because their structural need for high morale and commitment tends to generate authoritarian and dogmatic attitudes. There are conflicts between different groups affected by a technology; these require 'public participation' in order for their values to be constructively expressed and taken into account.
