ABSTRACT
Ulrich Beck in his Risk Society thesis (Beck, 1992) suggests a move away from Industrial Society with its focus on the production and distribution of wealth towards a risk society in which there is an increasing concern about the costs of attaching to development. The costs may be measured in risksnot simply in the form of dangers but made up of wider uncertainties and consequent insecurities (Giddens, 1999) attaching often to developments in science and technology that mark out modernity. Not least among the uncertainty is how, where and upon whom such risks may materialise given their random nature and realisation. While we focus still on production, the production of manufactured risk is starkly drawn to our attention and in the words of Lash and Wynne (1992) we see a shift from the distribution of goods in industrial society to the distribution of ‘bads’ in risk society.
