Sunday, 29 July 2012 08:27By Michael A Peters, Truthout | News Analysis
(Photo: Dice, Money via Shutterstock)If anything, the original thesis concerning the "risk society" articulated by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck (1992) has taken on a new imperative after September 9/11, especially in relation to questions of security at all levels - national, personal and institutional.[1] Beck was the first to put the notion of risk on the sociological agenda focusing on environmental, health and personal risk. The transition for Beck is not from "industrial society" to "post-industrial" or "postmodern society," but to "risk society" where the driving logic is no longer class politics as an organizing principle, but rather socially manufactured risk and risk management. No longer are inequalities of wealth and income paramount (although such inequalities remain), the chief problems are now environmental hazards, which cut across traditional inequalities.
As Beck explains, "Risk may be defined as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization itself" (Beck, 1992: 21). He elaborates, "In contrast to all earlier epochs (including industrial society), the risk society is characterized 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" (Beck, 1992: 183). In risk society, Beck argues, societal courses of action or policies based on calculated risk have been deliberately taken based on the assumption and paradigm of our technological mastery over nature. While Beck coined the term, British sociologist Anthony Giddens (1990, 1991) usefully relates the analysis of "risk" to the concept of "security." Modernity for Giddens is a double-edged process, for while it has greatly increased individual choice (and freedom), it has done so at a cost which points not only to the "globalization of risk" (such as nuclear war or changes in the international division of labor) but also in terms of "institutionalized risk environments" - that is, new risks that arise from the nature of modern social organizations.
In the field of education, there has also been some talk of risk. Arguably, notions of "at-risk youth" and "nation at risk" pre-date Beck's and Giddens' uses of the term. "Nation at Risk" was the title that the US National Commission on Excellence in Education set up by the Secretary for Education, T. H. Bell, under the chairmanship of then- University of Utah President David Pierpont Gardner, in 1981. The commission chose to point to a new "Imperative for Educational Reform" (its subtitle). The risk is conceived as a national one, calculated against the future of America's pre-eminence as a world leader both economically and technologically. It is a multi-natured risk that places an onerous burden on education as the basis for the nation's future economic and technological competitiveness.'
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