Environmentalism in a Risk Society

Abstract

Since Daniel Bell’s post-industrial theorising in early 1960s America, social theorists have produced a quite staggering series of analyses claiming to have uncovered ‘the secret of these new times’. Sociologists are now familiar with theories of the post-industrial society (Bell 1974), the programmed society (Touraine 1971, 1981), the self-service economy (Gershuny 1978), postmodernity and postmodernisation (Lyotard 1984; Bauman 1992, 1993; Crook et al. 1992), post-Fordism (Amin 1994) and neo-Fordism (Aglietta 1987), disorganised capitalism (Lash and Urry 1987), the information society (Castells 1996), the knowledge society (Stehr 1994) and the post-traditional society (Giddens 1994, 1999), to name only the most well-known. And we now have Ulrich Beck to thank for introducing us to the ‘risk society’ (Beck 1992). The impression cannot be avoided that although sociologists agree that we are in the midst of some significant social transformation, they do not agree on what this is.