Reflexive Modernization and the Rise of Risk Society

Risk and Social Change

Reflexive Modernization and Risk Society

• Increasing Risks
• Increasing possibilities, options, decision-making alternatives
• Increasing reflexivity (reflexive modernity)
• Increasing the feeling of taking risks (Risk Society)

Reflexive Modernization: Beck, Giddens, and Lash

Reflexivity

• Beck: Focused on the role of unintended dynamics of modernity (non-knowledge), which are what cause the unintended risks.
• Giddens: It is precisely this knowledge that creates most of the manufactured risks that affect us (such as nuclear energy) and that replace the natural ones (such as earthquakes). Because of the knowledge...

Reflexive Modernization and Risk Society

Increasing the Feeling of Taking Risks (Risk Society)

Crisis of Meaning – Disenchantment

Individualization: Building Own Biographies with Others

Reflexive Modernization: Beck, Giddens, and Lash

• From industrial society to risk society
• Abandoning instrumental rationality (experts who know and lay people who do not know):
• “De-monopolization of expert knowledge” (Beck)
• End of traditional authorities (doctor, politician, teacher, priest, father…):
• De-traditionalization (Lash)

The risk society is not an option, but the result of modernization, of a classless capitalism that leads us to deepening and individualization of social inequalities, making social crises seem like personal ones. One of the consequences has been the replacement of class struggle with gender struggle.

• Sub-politics: “Transforming society from below”, outside institutions (Beck)
• “Beyond left and right”. Democratization of democracy (Giddens)
• Beck: Disenchantment (from the collective meaning)
• Lash: De-traditionalization (questioning the traditional authorities)

Types of Living Together/ Co-habitation/ Family

• Marriage / Gay marriage
• Single parent family
• Reconstituted family
• Multicultural families
• Co-habitation
• LAT (living apart together)
• Just Women

Reflexivity

• Beck: Collateral effects.
• The consciousness (the knowledge) determines the being.
• Individualization is not atomization, isolation, solitude, and disconnection. This is a process toward new lifestyles. It is compulsory and takes place at the same time as the globalization process.
• Globalization and individualization as two sides of the same coin.