Risk Society
Beck's account of late modernity as organized around manufactured risks rather than scarcity.
Risk Society was articulated by Ulrich Beck in his 1986 Risikogesellschaft (English translation 1992 as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity) and elaborated in subsequent works including World Risk Society (1999). Beck's central argument is that the dominant logic of modernity has shifted from the distribution of goods (the 'scarcity society' organizing around production and class conflict over material resources) to the distribution of bads — particularly manufactured risks produced as side effects of industrial modernity itself: nuclear-energy risks, environmental contamination, climate change, GMO risks, novel epidemics. These risks are characterized by being: invisible to direct sense; transboundary (don't respect national or class boundaries); produced by the success of industrial modernity rather than its failures; subject to social-scientific knowledge claims that are themselves contested; and creating new political dynamics that don't reduce to class. Beck distinguished 'first modernity' (industrial society, organized around classes) from 'second modernity' or 'reflexive modernization' (risk society, organized around manufactured risks and individualization). Beck's framework has been substantially influential in environmental sociology, science and technology studies, and discussions of late-modern political dynamics, with the COVID-19 pandemic offering substantial real-world illustration of risk-society dynamics. Critics have argued the framework is more programmatic than empirical, and that classical class and inequality concerns have not been displaced by risk in the way Beck claimed.
Core components
- Shift from scarcity society (distribution of goods) to risk society (distribution of bads)
- Manufactured risks as side effects of industrial modernity
- Risk characteristics: invisibility, transboundary nature, scientific contestability
- Reflexive modernization
- First vs second modernity
- Individualization thesis
- Connection to environmental sociology
- Critique of classical class-conflict framings as adequate to contemporary social structure
- Cosmopolitan implications of transboundary risks
Primary use case
Environmental sociology and analysis of climate change, technological risk, nuclear policy, GMO controversy; foundation for substantial work on reflexive modernization; reference framework in late-modernity sociology; analysis of pandemics, financial crises, and other systemic risks; basis for arguments about cosmopolitan governance of transboundary risks; influence on STS and risk-perception research.
Common criticisms
- More programmatic than empirically operationalized — Beck's grand thesis about modernity-shift is hard to test rigorously
- classical class and inequality concerns have not been displaced by risk in the way Beck claimed (classical inequality continues to drive much social conflict, and risks are themselves unequally distributed)
- individualization thesis has been challenged as overstating the dissolution of class structures
- reflexive-modernization claim that society has become reflexively aware of its own risks has been argued to be optimistic about deliberative capacity
- the framework's European context shaped specific framings that don't always travel
- tension between Beck's later cosmopolitan turn and the framework's original European focus
- commercial and academic popularization has produced 'risk society' as label without engaging the systematic theoretical commitments
- competition with other late-modernity framings (Bauman's liquid modernity, Giddens's reflexive modernization) creates which-when ambiguity.
Lineage
- Siblings
- Liquid Modernity, Structuration Theory