This text explores the way we perceive risk and integrate change into our lives - insisting that these are the essential forces driving policy development today.
An analysis of the condition of Western societies that will take its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial, and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern
Twenty years ago Ulrich Beck published Risk Society, a book that called our attention to the dangers of environmental catastrophes and changed the way we think about contemporary societies. During the last two decades, the dangers highlighted by Beck have taken on new forms and assumed ever greater significance. Terrorism has shifted to a global arena, financial crises have produced worldwide consequences that are difficult to control and politicians have been forced to accept that climate change is not idle speculation. In short, we have come to see that today we live in a world at risk. A new feature of our world risk society is that risk is produced for political gain. This political use of risk means that fear creeps into modern life. A need for security encroaches on our liberty and our view of equality. However, Beck is anything but an alarmist and believes that the anticipation of catastrophe can fundamentally change global politics. We have the opportunity today to reconfigure power in terms of what Beck calls a 'cosmopolitan material politics’. World at Risk is a timely and far-reaching analysis of the structural dynamics of the modern world, the global nature of risk and the future of global politics by one of the most original and exciting social thinkers writing today.
This panoramic analysis of the condition of Western societies has been hailed as a classic. This first English edition has taken its place as a core text of contemporary sociology alongside earlier typifications of society as postindustrial and current debates about the social dimensions of the postmodern. Underpinning the analysis is the notion of the `risk society'. The changing nature of society's relation to production and distribution is related to the environmental impact as a totalizing, globalizing economy based on scientific and technical knowledge becomes more central to social organization and social conflict.
Risk society and beyond traces the evolution of Ulrich Beck's ideas as expressed in Risk Society (1992) and expands into previously unforeseen risk areas, such as genetics and cyberspace.
Ecological Politics in and Age of Risk by Ulrich Beck is an original analysis of ecological politics as one part of a renewed engagement with the domain of sub-politics.
Beck examines the politics of the risk society. He starts from the assumption that the ecological issue, considered politically and sociologically, is a systematic, legalized violation of fundamental civil rights and, from this position, adduces that the ecological conflict, politically speaking, is the successor to the industrial conflict. One of his central concerns is to illustrate just how the establishment, but expressing as much concern over the environmental issues as the radical groups who first raised them, has endeavored to take over the debate and then effectively stifled it. Beck argues that the vested interests have developed a strategy of avoiding discussion of accountability by bringing mega-risks to the foreground so that containable risks are hidden in their shadow. He concludes by arguing that only by bringing the discussion back to the accountability issue as informed by social sciences can the political initiative be wrested back from the vested interests.
This book presents Ulrich Beck, one of the world’s leading sociologists and social thinkers, as a Pioneer in Cosmopolitan Sociology and Risk Society. His world risk society theory has been confirmed by recent disasters – events that have shaken modern society to the core, signaling the end of an era in which comprehensive insurance could keep us safe. Due to its own successes, modern society now faces failure: while in the past experiments were conducted in a lab, now the whole world is a test bed. Whether nuclear plants, genetically modified organisms, nanotechnology – if any of these experiments went wrong, the consequences would have a global impact and would be irreversible. Beck recommends ignoring the mathematical morality of expert opinions, which seek to identify the level of a given risk by calculating the probability of its occurrence. Instead, man’s fear of collapse should offer an opportunity for international cooperation and a cosmopolitan turn in the social sciences.
This book provides a comprehensive and thorough interpretation of Beck's theory of the (world) risk society, from its original formulation up to his sudden death on New Year's Day 2015. Beck's entire body of work is divided into four interrelated phases, which are successively presented and discussed, namely: the original theory of risk society (from 1986 onwards); the theory of the world risk society (from 1996 onwards); the theory of cosmopolitanism and cosmopolitanization (from 1996 onwards); and the theory of 'metamorphosis', 'emancipatory catastrophism and 'global imagined risk communities' (2013–16). The book thus demonstrates how Beck’s concept of the (world) risk society has given us a new language or a special lens that enables us to better understand contemporary society’s complexity and its myriad of human-made uncertainties in terms of climate change, terrorist threats, global pandemics, economic crises, and migration crises.
In Ulrich Beck, Mads P. Sørensen and Allan Christiansen provide an extensive and thorough introduction to the German sociologist's collected works. Focusing on the theory outlined in Beck's chief work, Risk Society, and on his theory of second modernity, Sørensen and Christiansen explain the sociologist's ideas and writing in a clear and accessible way.