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Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity by Ulrich Beck (Trans. by Mark Ritter). London: Sage, 1992, 260 pp., $33.50, paper [ISBN: 0-08039-83468].
Reviewed by Dallas Hanson, University of Tasmania, Australia
This is not a textbook on organization theory that students should rush out and buy because it fills a direct course-related need. It is instead a work of critical social theory that belongs in an academic's personal library because of the light it sheds on the impacts of change on global society. In Europe, Ulrich Beck's book is considered one of the most influential works of sociology published in the last generation. It raises fundamental issues that will have major impacts on organizations in the next decade. The book is written in a quirky essay style, and although the ideas presented are often deceptively complicated, it makes for entertaining reading. No short account of the author's ideas can be complete. This review, however, outlines the major ideas and content of the text.
For Beck, the transition from modem to late modern society is one from an industrial society to a risk society in which more and more new and dangerous hazards are produced. The transition is incomplete, so the paradigms of wealth distribution (industrial society) and risk distribution (risk society) overlap. Increasingly, though, the major problem becomes how to minimize and channel risks such as toxic waste polluted ground water, acid rain, smog, holes in the ozone layer, poisoned fish, the greenhouse effect, and so on. Beck builds a strong case that such risks are more prevalent now than ever before, that they affect everyone (smog is democratic), that many are globalized, and that they differ from the risks of modem society because they often induce systematic and irreversible harm while they remain undetectable to the senses.
Science and technology are given a major role in the analysis of risk society. Beck discusses the techniques of risk analysis...