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7 - Ordering risks

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  16 September 2009

Deborah Lupton
Affiliation:
Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
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Summary

Introduction

Risk phenomena and sociocultural theory have developed a close reciprocal relationship during the past two decades. The defining text of the first defining form of the relationship is Douglas and Wildavsky's (1982) essay interpreting the expanding risk anxieties of the contemporary United States from the perspective of cultural anthropology. That of a second form is Beck's (1992) ‘sociological diagnosis of the times’ (Lash, 1994: 118) which placed risk phenomena at the heart of a transformed and radicalized modernity. To oversimplify to the point of injustice, the first form offers a ‘sociocultural’ account of risk processes while the second advances a ‘risk’ account of sociocultural processes. It will be argued that this distinction can only be analytic, that risk phenomena do structure, or ‘order’, sociocultural relations but under conditions in which broader sociocultural patterns, or ‘orderings’, have already structured risk phenomena.

The argument draws on two other related literatures that have contributed to recent discussions of risk and order. The first is the analysis of ‘governmentality-government’ and ‘regulation’ in work deriving from Foucault (1991) (see Burchell, Gordon and Miller, 1991 and Barry, Osborne and Rose, 1996a). The second is Law's (1994) discussion of the sociological problem of ‘order’ with its injunction that we must abandon ‘the idea that there is a single order … the dream or the nightmare of modernity’ (2). For Law, as for other ‘actor network’ analysts, ‘perhaps there is ordering, but there is certainly no order’ (1) (see also Latour, 1993).

Type
Chapter
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Risk and Sociocultural Theory
New Directions and Perspectives
, pp. 160 - 185
Publisher: Cambridge University Press
Print publication year: 1999

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  • Ordering risks
  • Edited by Deborah Lupton, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Risk and Sociocultural Theory
  • Online publication: 16 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520778.008
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  • Ordering risks
  • Edited by Deborah Lupton, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Risk and Sociocultural Theory
  • Online publication: 16 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520778.008
Available formats
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Save book to Google Drive

To save content items to your account, please confirm that you agree to abide by our usage policies. If this is the first time you use this feature, you will be asked to authorise Cambridge Core to connect with your account. Find out more about saving content to Google Drive.

  • Ordering risks
  • Edited by Deborah Lupton, Charles Sturt University, Bathurst, New South Wales
  • Book: Risk and Sociocultural Theory
  • Online publication: 16 September 2009
  • Chapter DOI: https://doi.org/10.1017/CBO9780511520778.008
Available formats
×