Customer Reviews

Risk (Key Ideas)

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I found this book to be somewhat uneven, but I recommend it for three key chapters that provide very good intros to three schools of social theory and the way they regard, and are influenced by, risk.

Chapter 3, Risk and Culture, provides a good overview of the theory of the cultural anthropologist Mary Douglas. She is perhaps better known for her work on institutions, but her work on cultural and symbolic strategies interfaces well with the concept of risk. For Douglas the only way to account for preferences, or what Bourdieu would call dispositions, is through cultural learning.

Douglas has also investigated the liminal. Like Agamben (and Wendy Brown) after her, she was interested in borders; borders are constitutive sites. Thus her writing on borders, and especially her notions of purity and pollution, as functions of the level of porosity of borders, plays well with the notion of risk in today's society.

Although Douglas's work may be considered dated by some, especially her notion of grids, her concepts of risk, blame, and how perceptions of risk influence strategies at the individual and aggregate level are still influential.

Chapter 4, Risk and Reflexive Modernization, does a good 'compare and contrast' job with Giddens and Beck. Both claim that there is a specific mode or level of risk associated with the expansion of technology and its tendency to cause unintended consequences in our complex global ecology. I do not limit the term ecology to just nature in this regard, but also include culture, law, education, religions, etc. as meaning-making and meaning-maintenance activities which are always already entwined.

Chapter 5, Risk and Governmentality, explicates the work of Foucault as expressed in his later comments on governmentality. Although Foucault, in Discipline and Punish most noticeably, developed the idea of capillary power and the disciplining society throughout his career, his specific use of the term governmentality was more prominent in his later writings. It involves what Foucault saw as a shift from monarchy to state government in which the 'people' morphed into the idea of 'citizens' and especially the individual physical body of each citizen.

Now the role of the government became one of "intervention, management and protection so as to maximize wealth, welfare and productivity." p. 85-86 in Lupton. I found this chapter to be the highlight of the book; Lupton writes with more energy and clarity on Foucault. (I also recommend an excellent book, The Foucault Effect: Studies in Governmentality, ed. Burchell.)

Lupton gives us a clear understanding of her distinctions of three contemporary risk strategies (insurantial, epidemiological and case-management or clinical risk). I also appreciated her comments on the `new prudentialism', an approach which strikes me as oddly reminiscent of what some critics have identified as the `new racism'.

There is also a good section on Hybridity and Liminality in Chapter 7, Risk and Otherness. I have to say that I didn't find the remaining chapters as rewarding, yet this book is well worth the time.