The term “Risk Society” is a neologism coined by German sociologist Ulrich Beck, in his book Risk Society: Toward a New Modernity, first published in German in 1986 and translated into English in 1992. There is a long-standing tradition in intellectual thought of choosing society labels—e.g., Acquisitive Society, Open Society, Affluent Society, Civic Society, Post-Industrial Society, and so on—to capture the dominant theme or spirit of an age, or what Germans call its zeitgeist. Beck’s “Risk Society” is just such a label; its intent is to underscore his position that society, in this era of advanced modernity, is dominated by the ubiquity of risks, not only as the dominant consciousness of the age but also as the challenge that threatens to overwhelm societies.

But “Risk Society” is also a theoretical frame, a master frame in the Continental Tradition (particularly the “Critical Theory” tradition) that seeks, in addition to naming the contemporary age, to provide a diagnosis of its dynamics, to underscore its uniqueness from its predecessors, and to focus analytical attention on it. The frame comprises three inter-related components: risk, individualization, and reflexive modernization. Beck sees a dynamic that is driven by an increase in risks and in the ability of science to detect increasingly minute risks, leading to a fundamental re-ordering of social positions in society, and to a transformation in the cultural meanings of risk.

Separating the present era from its past are new species of risk that, unlike in the past, are no longer circumscribed spatially or temporarily. Beck argues that the risks of nuclear radiation, many modern technologies, the greater mobility of diseases, global warming, invasive species and many other challenges expose virtually all people around the globe to common risks. World society, then, is now World Risk Society, to cite the title of one of Beck’s many follow-on books on the topic.

The social order in the early days of modernization was centered on economics, especially the distribution of economic output, i.e., who got what. That distribution was directly tied to social class, with those at the top getting more and those at the bottom getting less. In Beck’s view, this order of things has been turned on its head in the contemporary era. Beck argues that, in the “Risk Society,” the concern is no longer with the distribution of “goods” but with the distribution of “bads”—namely, the realization of untoward risks. Because many risks (e.g., nuclear fallout) do not respect class boundaries, everyone is, therefore, equally at risk. This dissolving of social class means that social actors are “individualized,” thrown on their own without the collective identity of social class.

In the “Risk Society,” science, the principal institution for identifying and analyzing risks, is drawn into an untenable, Janus-like position. By engaging in its traditional role of generating new discoveries and new technologies, science inevitably creates and adds to existing risks. At the same time, science is the principal institution for detecting and analyzing risks, especially those that are subtle. This misalignment of science’s roles is recognized by the, now, “individualized,” free-floating social actor who undertakes actions, such as in a social movement, to continuously pressure and reinvent scientific and social institutions.

Both in terms of his arguments about the social distribution of risks and his claims about the role of science, Beck’s views differ substantially from those of many other social scientists who have grappled with risk issues. Perhaps the best-known proponent of the alternative viewpoint may be James Short. In his presidential address to the American Sociological Association, he focused on what he called “risks to the social fabric,” seeing the most important and socially salient of present-day risks as being precisely those that did not put everyone in society equally at risk. Other social scientists who have found Short’s perspective to be more fruitful than Beck’s include Kai Erikson and a number of the authors in the cross-Atlantic dialogue on risk issues edited by Cohen, as well as authors who focus on environmental justice ***WE NEED AN ARTICLE OR TWO ON THIS TOPIC!*** Most of these authors have focused on, and documented, risks that could scarcely be said to circle the globe, as did the fallout from Chernobyl, but that threaten “the social fabric” precisely because they affect certain people and places far more than others.

As noted by Freudenburg, part of the reason traces back to a more differentiated view of science. Many of the authors working in Short’s tradition see science and technology as being generally helpful, but with exceptions that are deeply troubling. The reasons have to do with the fact that social scientists working in Short’s tradition trace their intellectual roots back to earlier traditions of European social thought, associated with Emile Durkheim and (especially) Max Weber, perhaps the best known theorist of rationality in the modern era. What made the world a “rational” one, in Weber’s view, was not that the denizen of modernity could be expected to know more about the world around us, but very nearly the opposite:

Unless he is a physicist, one who rides on the streetcar has no idea how the car happened to get into motion. And he does not need to know. He is satisfied that he may ‘count’ on the behavior of the streetcar… but he knows nothing about what it takes to produce such a car so that it can move. The savage knows incomparably more about his tools. (Weber [1918] 1946:138–139)

As Freudenburg added, specialization has increased so much since the invention of the streetcar that perhaps the most salient risks of contemporary life are those associated with what he has called “recreancy,” or institutional failure—“the failure of institutional actors to carry out their responsibilities with the degree of vigor necessary to merit the societal trust they enjoy.” Citizens of an increasingly interdependent world, accordingly, need to be able to ‘count’ on not just the physical machinery they use, but also whole armies of specialists, most of whom they will never meet and who are expected to have forms of expertise that ordinary citizens may not be competent to judge, let alone have the ability to control.

The idea of “reflexive modernization,” on the other hand, is not just central to Beck’s “Risk Society,” but is also a keystone to the thinking of a number of other European thinkers—Anthony Giddens, Scott Lash, Barbara Adam—who wish to also distinguish the contemporary age from its predecessors.

Beck followed up Risk Society with a large and growing number of books and many articles in professional journals resulting in a body of literature devoted to explications and elaborations of his master frame, rather than fundamental changes or challenges to it. While risk is the grist for a wide variety of disciplines—psychology, economics, geography, engineering, public health—in theorist Beck’s mill, that grist is molded into virtually the most comprehensive framing of risk available.

Further reading

• Beck, Ulrich, Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity, Sage Publications Ltd (September 3, 1992) ISBN: 0803983468
• Cohen, Maurie J., ed., Risk in the Modern Age: Social Theory, Science, and Environmental Decision-Making. London: MacMillan, 2000. ISBN: 0312222165
• Erikson, Kai T., Everything in Its Path: The Destruction of Community in the Buffalo Creek Flood. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976
• Erikson, Kai T., A New Species of Trouble: Explorations in Disaster, Trauma, and Community. New York: W.W. Norton, 1994. ISBN: 0393035948
• Freudenburg, William R., “Risk and Recreancy: Weber, the Division of Labor, and the Rationality of Risk Perceptions.” Social Forces 71 (#4, June 1993): 909–32.
• Short, James F., The Social Fabric at Risk: Toward the Social Transformation of Risk Analysis, American Sociological Review 49 (December 1984): 711–725.
• Weber, Max, “Science as a Vocation.” Pp. 129–56 in H.H. Gerth and C. Wright Mills, tr. and ed., From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. New York: Oxford ([1918] 1946).

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Flying west across the continent, the traveler notices a dramatic change in the American landscape—from wet to dry, from green forests and cornfields to sagebrush plains and harsh deserts with only scattered stands of trees at the higher elevations. For more than a century now we have called that dry half of the continent the West. It starts on the Great Plains and stretches over a thousand dusty miles to sun-baked Los Angeles and an anomalous fringe of temperate rain forest in the Pacific Northwest.

Today, millions of people live here, but they tend to concentrate in a few places—oases where water is delivered—rather than spreading out on the ground. In fact, much of this region is still unsettled (with fewer than two people per square mile) and likely will never become settled. That fact is not due to any of the historical forces we commonly talk about—Puritanism, the Enlightenment, capitalism, slavery, or television—although they all have had their influence on this region. No, the relative emptiness of much of the West is due to the persisting power of nature to set terms to human life.

Each set of people who have come into this country has had to deal with those environmental realities. Only the Spanish-speaking immigrants from the Iberian Peninsula, which is similarly arid, came with much experience; other immigrants from ancient or modern Asia, Africa, or northern Europe have had a lot more to learn. Growing numbers of Americans began to encounter the arid West in the 1820s, journeying along the Santa Fe Trail, and in the 1840s, when the Mormons arrived in Utah while hundreds of thousands of other citizens plodded farther overland to find California gold. They debated the West’s promise: would it set a rigid limit on the country’s growth, a “Great American Desert” that had little to offer, or would it be redeemable by agriculture and other forms of labor?

In 1878 John Wesley Powell, who led the first exploration of the upper Colorado River and the Grand Canyon, published a government report on “the arid region,” which he defined as the territory west of the hundredth meridian. That line approximates the point where rainfall drops to less than twenty inches per year on average, which was not enough to sustain the leading domesticated crops. Powell recommended sweeping changes in the public land laws to allow small, irrigated farms and livestock ranches, but also to encourage a less individualistic way of living on the land. Americans must learn to work together, he argued, if they wanted to see the West support secure, prosperous homes, and always they must worry about the threat of monopoly over the vital natural resource of water.

The twentieth century has launched massive projects to control and manage the scarce water supply, most dramatically with the dedication of Hoover Dam in 1935. Thousands of large and small dams, canals, reservoirs, and aqueducts eventually captured the water from far-apart rivers and transported it to agriculturists and to city consumers. Still, the West remains predominately brown, barren, and starkly defiant. Americans may have constructed a “hydraulic civilization” here, a society dependent on large-scale hydraulic engineering for survival, but they have not really turned scarcity into unlimited abundance. The battle to control water, which has been at the heart of the West’s history, goes on, and none of the engineering marvels is secure or permanent. The fact that huge numbers of people now live here, that aridity did not stop the westward movement dead in its tracks, does not mean that, in the end, nature had no power or influence over American history, or is no longer a threat to the future.

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The International Council for Science (ICSU), in conjunction with the World Meteorological Organization (WMO), has designated 2007-2008 an International Polar Year. Activities are designed to focus the attention of the public and the scientific community on the need for greater understanding of the complex interrelationships between the geophysical and climatological processes that occur in the Earth’s high latitudes and their effects on the rest of the globe. Many of the changes seen in the polar regions are more dramatic and sudden than those seen in lower latitudes. They provide, therefore, a wonderful natural laboratory for examining the nature of those changes and the relationship between climate changes and the general ecology of the region, as well as human social structures. Ceremonies around the world on March 1, 2007, marked the beginning of this multinational and interdisciplinary effort which is uniting over sixty nations in a common goal.

To gain a precise picture of the state of the polar regions as a benchmark against which changes can be measured, and to quantify past and present environmental and social changes for the purpose of improving projections about the future, are among the goals.

The United States National Committee for the International Polar Year has a broad vision for America’s participation. With the National Science Foundation acting as the lead agency, the goals include:

• initiating sustained efforts aimed at assessing the large-scale environmental changes that take place;
• beginning new studies of the human-natural systems that impact social, economic and strategic interests;
• designing and implementing polar observational networks that will provide a long-term and multi-disciplinary perspective; and
• encouraging public engagement with the scientific community to increase general scientific literacy in the population, and specifically to build support for continued research into the least densely inhabited lands on Earth. An example is the Census of Antarctic Marine Life which endeavors to catalogue the amount and location of living resources in the region.

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