the risk society thesis

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Ulrich Beck : a critical introduction to the risk society

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• Acknowledgements
• Introduction
• 1. Introducing the Risk Society
• 2. Risk and the Environment
• 3. Defining Risk
• 4. Mediating Risk
• 5. Perceiving Risk
• 6. Living with Risk
• 7. Risk, Trust and Reflexivity
• 8. The Politics of Risk
• Conclusions
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1 The ‘Risk’ Society Thesis and the Culture(s) of Crime Control

• Published: July 2021
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This chapter addresses three issues of philosophical and criminological significance. The significance to which we refer is the “risk” society thesis and its elaboration. This elaboration provides relevant contextual grounding for the chapters that make up this volume. In Section I, we explain how risk-as-currency (i.e., the management of human relating) is both historically contingent and made manifest through the process of reification, and we review reification’s modern, late modern and postmodern risk-as-currency incarnations. In Section II, we specify what the psychoanalytic and jurisprudential forces of reification are, and we explain how their interdependencies produce interrelated forms (i.e., reified forms) of risk management. In Section III, we speculate on what the currency of human relating and of economic exchange is in the current or ultramodern era, and we consider the ontological and epistemological captivity that follows from excessive investments in this era’s reified forms of risk management.

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The Risk Society Thesis in Environmental Politics and Management: A Global Perspective

• First Online: 01 January 2014

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• Dirk Matten 3  

Part of the book series: SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice ((BRIEFSPIONEER,volume 18))

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When finishing the manuscript to his initial book on Risk Society in 1986 Ulrich Beck could not have expected his thesis to gain such popularity in a comparatively short period of time.

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This text was first published with the same title in: Journal of Risk Research , 7, 4: 371–376 (June 2004). Permission to republish this text was granted on 16 September 2013 by Prof. Matten and by Ms. Rose Bavister on behalf of Routledge for the Taylor & Francis Group.

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The editor of this Special Issue would like to thank Ragnar Löfstedt for his support in getting the papers published. He would also like to thank the authors for their enthusiasm and effort to contribute to this Special Issue. The papers have greatly benefited from the comments and suggestions by various anonymous referees. The joy of seeing these articles published now is however overshadowed by the fact that one of the authors, Robert White, did not live to see this in print. His untimely death is a loss to us all.

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Schulich School of Business, York University, Toronto, Canada

Dirk Matten

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Ulrich Beck

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Matten, D. (2014). The Risk Society Thesis in Environmental Politics and Management: A Global Perspective. In: Beck, U. (eds) Ulrich Beck. SpringerBriefs on Pioneers in Science and Practice, vol 18. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04990-8_4

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DOI : https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-04990-8_4

Published : 23 March 2014

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