Simon Carter

MRC Medical Sociology Unit
Glasgow, United Kingdom
isb002@lancaster.ac.uk

 

Beck, Ulrich. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage, 1992.

 

At 0123 hours (Soviet European Time) on Saturday 26 of April 1986, reactor number four of the Chernobyl nuclear power complex exploded, rupturing the reaction vessel and causing major structural damage to the plant buildings. The subsequent release of radioactive material caused acute radiation sickness in 200 individuals, 28 of whom subsequently died (Spivak 1992). The immediate effects of the catastrophe were therefore comparable to a minor air disaster, yet the possible long-term consequences went far beyond those suggested by such a comparison. A plume of radio-nuclides (i.e. strontium-90, iodine-131, and caesium-137) spread westwards over Europe presenting a danger that was invisible and therefore beyond direct human powers of perception. As a result, those living within “fallout” zones became aware that they might be suffering irreversible damage but, at the same time, they were dependent on the knowledge of “experts” to find out–a knowledge that was mediated through institutions, argument and causal interpretations and was therefore “open to a social process of definition” (Beck 88).

 

The Chernobyl tragedy is just one, albeit particularly dramatic, example taken from a long list of other “invisible risks” in which the danger posed is socially disputable. For example, from within the nuclear economy we could add the names Windscale (now renamed Sellafield), Kyshtym, Three Mile Island and Oak Ridge and, moving outside this domain, we could point to concerns over food additives, pesticides, ozone depletion, air and water pollution, and AIDS. The project that Ulrich Beck has set himself is to ask what a society may look like in which disputes about these “new risks” are increasingly pushed to the fore?

 

Beck’s thesis is, however, more than just another sociological or anthropological examination of the breaks and shifts in the meaning attached to risk, within or between cultures (for an account of this type see Douglas and Wildavsky). The full title of Beck’s newly translated book is Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity (originally published in German as Risikogesellshaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne, 1986) and the title resonates with the central theme of his work–that we are in a period of transition not towards postmodernity but towards a second modernity in which the logic of industrial production and distribution (i.e. wealth) is becoming increasingly tied to the logic of “the social production of risk.” As he says:

 

Just as modernisation dissolved the structure of feudal society in the nineteenth century and produced the industrial society, modernisation today is dissolving industrial society and another modernity is coming into being.(10)

 

In the first modernity, or industrial society, concerns focused on the distribution of wealth but, according to Beck, as material inadequacy was reduced, or at least isolated, we moved to a more complex modernity, or risk society, where consideration has to be given to the distribution of risks–a move from class position to risk position, from underproduction of goods to overproduction of harm. These are qualitatively different conditions. In the former, one is dealing with “desirable items in scarcity” but in the latter, where it is a question of the risks produced by modernisation, one has an undesirable abundance. “The positive logic of acquisition contrasts with a negative logic of disposition, avoidance, denial, and reinterpretation” (26).

 

Of course it could be argued that industrial society has always been engaged in a contest with risk and danger. Yet these risks were construed as external to the project of modernity. Thus a distinction was drawn between civilisation (safe) and nature (dangerous). Scientific rationality sought to put into discourse those dangerous spaces and therefore make them predictable–in short to “tame” chance (see Hacking). Beck’s point is that the externalisation of risk is no longer possible because it is increasingly apparent that many hazards are a by-product of the same techno-scientific rationality that initially promised progress, development, and safety. Today’s risks are yesterday’s rational settlements (and here we could cite all forms of pollution, including nuclear fallout).

 

Within the risk society, though, risk is distributed according to a dual process. On the one hand, the traditional inequalities of strata and class in the West are broken up by the “boomerang effect,” whereby “sooner or later the risks also catch up with those who produce or profit from them” (37). And while this may primarily entail a threat to life and limb it can also “affect secondary media, money, property and legitimation” (38). On the other hand, new international inequalities are established by the industrialised states attempting to export their risks to the third world. Here Beck points to the accident at a chemical production plant in the Indian city of Bhopal and the selling abroad, in developing countries, of pesticides. “There is a systematic attraction between extreme poverty and extreme risk” (41). But even here, ultimately, the boomerang effect strikes back at the source of risk (for instance in the importation of cheap foodstuffs contaminated with Western pesticides). The risks of modernisation, therefore, undermine the bounds of the nation state as established in the industrial society. Risk societies “contain within themselves a grass-roots developmental dynamics that destroys boundaries” (47).

 

For Beck these developments have implications for our conception of identity. In particular, he suggests many of the traditions and ideas of the enlightenment are breaking down–the old “truths” no longer hold. He sums this up simply in the following section:

 

To put it bluntly, in class positions being determines consciousness, while in risk positions, conversely, consciousness (knowledge) determines being. Crucial for this is the type of knowledge, specifically the lack of personal experience and the depth of dependency on knowledge, which surrounds all dimensions of defining hazards.(53)

 

For instance, within the industrial or class society, the threatening potential is knowable (i.e. the loss of one’s job) without any special cognitive means, “measuring procedures,” or consideration of tolerance thresholds. “The affliction is clear and in that sense independent of knowledge” (53). Yet within the risk society the situation is reversed. Those who are victimised–by, say, pesticide contamination–cannot determine their status by their own cognitive means and experiences. Within this new situation “the extent . . . of people’s endangerment [is] fundamentally dependent on external knowledge” (53). But, as we saw above, the externalisation of risk knowledge, into the hands of risk experts, is a social process thwarted by public disputes and disagreements between experts and public and among the experts themselves. The relationship between cause and effect, so central to scientific rationality, is suspended.

 

But this leads to a situation in which the very divide between expert and non-expert becomes turbid and amorphous. Those people living with “invisible” hazards “bang their heads against the walls of scientific denials of the existence of modernisation risks” (61). This leads to what Beck characterises as a learning process in which victims no longer believe risks to be acts of fate. Elsewhere, Beck has illustrated this process by describing the way in which those who are suffering are required to demonstrate “that they are sick and what has made them sick . . . and in an inversion of the normal legal process, are obliged to provide proof of poisoning themselves” (100). These people become “small, private alternative experts in the risks of modernisation” (61).

 

This, in some ways, is similar to an argument put forward by Patton in relation to those people living with AIDS. In earlier stages of history those people suffering from illness were largely silenced by the knowledge formations which establish an unreachable boundary around scientific medical “wisdom.” But the advent of the AIDS epidemic has led activists, at least in the United States, to themselves gain considerable medical proficiency. The circulation of newsletters and self help books provides information about clinical trials, including criteria of inclusion and exclusion, to those people living with AIDS. In addition, “underground” drug trials, using experimental products ordered through offshore pharmaceutical companies, have become established in some communities. As Patton says “it is the medical knowledge of the person living with HIV/AIDS . . . which has become today’s ticket to experimental treatments” (52).

 

This period of acute uncertainty and risk, in which the promises of techno-science are seen to have failed, may lead one to suspect that Beck has a pessimistic and bleak view of our future. But Beck is an optimist and this is expressed in what he sees as the possible potential of the learning process. It may now be that risks are no longer accepted passively by those who have to live with them. In his recent extensive commentary on Beck’s work, Lash has summarised this process of reflexive modernisation. Of course, the first modernity, or industrial society, by definition was reflexive. Yet there are, among others, two possible forms of reflexivity: it can be the self-monitoring of a social system or, on the other hand, a self-monitoring by individuals. The industrial society would “consist of a mixture of self-monitored (and modern) and heteronomously monitored (or traditional) spheres of social life. Beck’s second modernity would then be much more consistently reflexive” (Lash 5). This reflexive modernisation, rather than constituting a rejection of rationality is instead an embracing of a radicalised rationality. As Beck sums the process up:

 

In contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterised essentially by a lack: the impossibility of an external attribution of hazards. In other words, risks depend on decisions; they are industrially produced and in this sense politically reflexive. While all earlier cultures and phases of social development confronted threats in various ways, society is confronted by itself through its dealings with risks. . . . This means that the sources of danger are no longer ignorance but knowledge; not a deficient but perfect mastery over nature; not what eludes the human grasp but the system of norms and objective constraints established with the industrial epoch.(183)

 

Now for some criticisms. A good place to begin may be Beck’s style. His book can only be described as a gradual slide from topic to topic in which one is never sure if one is reading a conclusion or an opening announcement. He makes statements on one page, only to then, apparently, contradict them a few pages later (but one is never totally sure.) While some writers, labelled as postmodernist, intentionally use similar devices in order playfully to resist the illusion of perfect textual coherence and univocity, with Beck one is less confident that one is being deliberately exercised.

 

For example, one of the difficulties in conceptualising the term “risk” is that the it can mean very different things in different contexts. Thus, in Beck’s argument we have, among others, two models of risk. On the one hand, within the industrial society we have those scientific understandings of risk which seek to “objectively measure” and quantify risk while, on the other hand, within the “risk society” such an objective measurement of risk increasingly becomes exposed as socially disputable–a move from risk as “object” to risk as “social process,” from knowable to unknowable risk. Added to this could be a series of less well defined and colloquial uses of the word risk (ranging from lay epidemiology to fatalistic and mystical interpretations of danger.) Hence, within Beck’s account, one word–“risk”–becomes overloaded with a plethora of often opposed meanings, and this gives his text a certain blurriness at just the point where one would hope it to be clear.

 

To be fair to Beck, this same problem is found in much of the literature on risk, a good deal of which is even less helpful than he is in defining its central term. Also, at a more general level, it does seem that Beck is, at least partially, aware of the amorphous nature of his book, as he claims that this work represents, more than anything, a personal process and admits that “the noise of wrestling sometimes resounds in this book” (9). In this respect he compares himself to a nineteenth-century observer who is on the “lookout for the contours of the as yet unknown industrial age” (9).

 

Yet the structure of his book does leave certain sections “out on a limb.” In chapter 4, for example, which concerns gender relations, Beck argues that men have practised a rhetoric of equality, without matching their words with deeds. On both sides, he says, the ice of illusions has grown thin; with the equalisation of the prerequisites (in education and law) the positions of men and women become more unequal, more conscious, and less legitimated (104). While it is good to see a male social theorist giving serious attention to questions of gender, it is not fully clear how this chapter is built into, or relates to, the rest of his thesis. Indeed, in his shorter articles on risk society, Beck scarcely mentions gender at all.

 

One can also criticise certain parts of Beck’s argument. For Beck, we are at the point of transition between two historical epochs–between the industrial and the risk society. Yet he does not adequately deal with how far along this transition we have passed. In this respect his vision of a new modernity appears somewhat illusory. For instance, his claim that the industrial society has brought about a reduction in material inadequacy cannot sit well with the experiences of many living in the deprived areas of any large city or substantial sections of the third world population. And the boomerang effect of risk re-distribution has a long way to go before there is any real equalisation of risk distributions. To give one example, we are all exposed to a certain level of “engineered radioactivity,” and catastrophes such as Chernobyl and Three Mile Island demonstrate that radioactivity, in these cases, does not very faithfully respect the class or wealth of its victims. Nevertheless, in most cases it is easy to identify systematic unevenness in the distribution of risk exposures. Recent studies of cancer “hot spots” linked with the workers at nuclear plants and their children (see Epstein, also Gardner et al.) have shown that risks may still be localised to particular geographic spaces or specific groups.

 

And Beck’s optimism about the prospects of a radicalised rationality does not even serve to dispel his own empirical evidence of reasons why we should all be gloomy about prospects for the future. On the next to last page of the book Beck outlines some practical steps towards a reflexive modernisation: Only when medicine opposes medicine, nuclear physics opposes nuclear physics, human genetics opposes human genetics or information technology opposes information technology can the future that is brewed up in the test-tube become intelligible and evaluable for the outside world (234). This might be a reasonable starting point, but there is little evidence that anything like this is about to happen. As Bauman has observed, in commenting on Beck’s work:

 

And yet we are told repeatedly that it is the same science (in company with technology, its executive arm) who brought us here, who will get us out. Science has made all this mess, science will clear it. But why should we trust it now, when we know where the past assurances have led us?(25)

 

Yet, having said all this, I would stress that Beck’s work is well worth examining–and not just by those interested in the sociology of risk, but by anyone with an interest in social theory and politics. While his claim that we are entering a new risk society may be premature, I think that, at a restricted local level, we may be seeing a reflexive modernisation as specific risks become politicised by certain social actors (in particular by the new social movements or associations).

 

In terms of a social understanding of risk, Beck’s book represents a novel and innovative contribution to a field of enquiry that has become somewhat stale in recent years. It is a field largely dominated by cognitive psychologists (see, for example, Slovic et al., or Tversky and Kahneman), and I must agree with Beck’s assessment of cognitive psychological work on risk when he ironically describes the way these researchers view the lay public:

 

They [the public] are ignorant, of course, but well intentioned; hard-working, but without a clue. In this view, the population is composed of nothing but would-be engineers, who do not yet possess sufficient knowledge. They only need be stuffed full of technical details, and then they will share the experts' viewpoint.(58)

 

There is no such condescension in Beck’s Risk Society, which, whatever its weaknesses, is an engaging and provocative book. At the very least it provides us with some new formulations and some fresh terms to bring to bear on debates about “development,” “progress,” and the risks that attend them.

 

Works Cited

 

• Bauman, Z. “The Solution as problem.” The Times Higher Education Supplement, 13 November 1992.
• Beck, U. “On The Way to the Industrial Risk-Society? Outline of an Argument.” Thesis Eleven (1989): 86-103.
• Douglas, M., & Wildavsky, A. Risk and Culture: an essay on the selection of technical and environmental dangers. Berkeley and London: U of California P, 1983.
• Epstein, P.R. “Soviet nuclear mishaps pre-Chernobyl.” The Lancet (1993): 341, 346.
• Gardner, M.J., Hall, J., & Downes, S. “Follow up study of the children born to mother resident in Seascale, West Cumbria.” British Medical Journal 295 (1987): 822-827.
• Hacking, I. The Taming of Chance. Cambridge: Cambridge UP, 1990.
• Lash, S. “Reflexive Modernization: The Aesthetic Dimension.” Theory Culture & Society 10 (1993): 1-23.
• Patton, C. Inventing AIDS. New York: Routledge. 1990.
• Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Facts and Fears: Understanding Perceived Risk.” Societal Risk Assessment: How Safe is Safe Enough? Ed. R.C. Schwing & W. A. Albers. New York: Plenum Press, 1980.
• Slovic, P., Fischhoff, B., & Lichtenstein, S. “Perceived risk: psychological factors and social implications.” Proceedings of the Royal Society of London 376 (1981): 17-34.
• Spivak, L.I. “Psychiatric aspects of the accident at Chernobyl nuclear power station.” European Journal of Psychiatry 6 (1992): 207-212.
• Tversky, A., & Kahneman, D. “Judgement Under Uncertainty: Heuristics and Biases: Biases in Judgements reveal Some heuristics of Thinking Under Uncertainty.” Science 185 (1974): 1124-1131.