Abstract
Ranging from food security to nuclear safety to biodiversity conservation, governments have created vast bureaucracies to alleviate risk in the modern age. These organizations are in the perilous business of managing uncertainty and they typically define risk in narrow, ostensibly objective terms — for instance the number of expected deaths per 1000 people or cases of cancer in a delimited geographic area. Due to the seeming pervasiveness of public concern, contemporary societies spend tremendous sums of money and mobilize vast armies of professional personnel to reduce hazard exposure. Especially prominent in this battle are experts in arcane fields such as toxicology, environmental chemistry, epidemiology, and nuclear physics. In particularly thorny cases, social scientists — most commonly economists — are enlisted to handle the human dimensions of risk. Unsurprisingly, most large industrial corporations have on staff specialists with similar qualifications, for example to keep firms in compliance with their pollution permits. Despite its tremendous diversity and scope, nearly all of the work within this domain can be defined as constituting the determination of ‘acceptable risk.’
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Notes
A. Giddens, The Consequences of Modernity ( Cambridge: Polity Press, 1990 ).
More recent calls to shift the burden of proof onto the perpetuators of environmental harm has been termed the ‘precautionary principle.’ See T. O’Riordan and J. Cameron, Interpreting the Precautionary Principle (London: Earthscan, 1994).
This transition of environmental organizations was particularly profound in the United States. See M. Dowie, Losing Ground: American Environmentalism at the Close of the Twentieth Century ( Cambridge: MIT Press, 1996 ).
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Recent efforts to bridge the divide include L. Laudan, Beyond Positivism and Relativism: Theory, Method, and Evidence ( Boulder, CO: Westview Press, 1996 )
G. Delanty, Social Science: Beyond Constructivism and Realism (Milton Keynes: Open University Press, 1997). For contributions by environmental sociologists that attempt to promote a new consensus see R. Murphy, Rationality and Nature: A Sociological Inquiry into a Changing Relationship (Boulder, CO: WestviePress, 1994);
C. New, ‘Sociology and the Case for Realism,’ Sociological Review, 43 (4) (1995): 808–27;
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On the historical factors that have shaped American sociology see T. Haskell, The Emergence of Professional Social Science: The American Social Science Association and the Nineteenth-Century Crisis of Authority ( Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1977 ).
D. Gasman, The Scientific Origins of National Socialism: Social Darwinism in Ernst Haeckel and the German Monist League ( London: MacDonald, 1971 ).
On ecological modernization refer to A. Moll, The Refinement of Production: Ecological Modernization Theory and the Chemical Industry ( The Hague: CIP-Data Koninklijke Bibliotheek, 1995 ).
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Cohen, M.J. (2000). Environmental Sociology, Social Theory, and Risk: an Introductory Discussion. In: Cohen, M.J. (eds) Risk in the Modern Age. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-1-349-62201-6_1
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