Social Theories of Risk Perception: At Once Indispensable and Insufficient

Abstract

This article provides a critical comparative review of Ulrich Beck's and Mary Douglas's social theories of risk. The author is particularly concerned to highlight the partiality of their favoured renditions of the social reality of risk perception in relation to the accumulated evidence of empirical research. Their contrasting (and opposing) conceptions of the social processes through which people may negotiate the meaning of `hazard' in terms of `risk' are presented as ideal-types which are both indispensable and insufficient for explaining the cultural complexity of this phenomenon. Moreover, insofar as the lived experience of complexity may be made the object of sociological concern, it is suggested that we might be in a better position to evaluate the cultural significance of risk as a product of this experience.