arabera Meredith Gore 11 years ago
809
Risk Society
Ulrich Beck's concept of 'Risk Society' highlights how risk has become a central aspect of modern life, influenced heavily by the rapid pace and transformative nature of modernization.
arabera Meredith Gore 11 years ago
809
Honelako gehiago
Ulrich Beck's 1982 book presented the idea of the "Risk Society," essentially stating that risk is the dominant paradigm governing contemporary society.
In a risk society, the consequences and successes of modernization become an issue with the speed and radicality of process of modernization. A new dimension of risk emerges because the conditions for calculating and intuitionally processing it break down in part.
Over the past two centuries, the judgment of scientists has replaced tradition in Western societies. Paradoxically, the more science and technology permeate and transform life on a global scale, the less the expert authority is taken as a given.
Risk should be seen as a joint product of knowledge about the future and consent about the most desired prospects. When knowledge is certain and consent complete, when objectives are agreed and all alternatives (together with the probability of occurrence) are known, a program can be written to produce the best solution. The problem is technical and the solution is one of calculation. In the next instance-knowledge certain but consent contested--the problem is one of disagreement about how to value consequences; here the solution is either more coercion or more discussion. In the third case, complete consent is hampered by uncertain knowledge leads to the problem of risk being defined as insufficient information: hence the solution is seen as research. The last situation, in which knowledge is uncertain and consent is contested, is precisely how any informed person would characterize the contemporary dilemma of risk assessment.
Ecological predictions: how good do they need to be?
How does accuracy impact the importance of communicating risks?
What about instances where further ecological research may not improve accuracy?
The iimplications can be serious or implications can be small.s
Consider oil spill in a bay. Ifan ecologist were to predict the spill might kill two ducks most people might not consider this serious. In contrast, if the prediction were that the spill might kill thousands of ducks, this would be a serious situation. The practical difference mattes, but how much. What would be the difference between 940 and 960 ducks being killed?
Yellowstone fires in the summer of 1988. The best an ecologist could do would be to say that due to the accumulation of fuel resulting from fire suppression, there would be a high probability that some people would be killed or injured by an accidental fire and that surrounding businesses would suffer some losses. Because an ecologist could not predict the exact number of people that would be killed or the exact value of the economic damage, does this lesson the importance of warning that a dangerous fuel accumulation had occurred?
Scientists should be careful about feeding the illusion that they can increase their predictive capability. Rather, they should emphasize that our predictions are about as good as possible. Scientists should emphasize they will never be able to produce perfect knowledge. By so admitting, they can shift the responsibility for action to the social and economic sphere. Ecologists should no longer allow politicians to use the lack of certainty as an excuse for not taking action.
Fact-value dilemma: arises b/c of methods used in risk analysis; none of the methods employ explicitly ethical criteria, even though they are laded with evaluative assumptions. Ought or ought not assessors to employ risk evaluation criteria that are overtly normative? Or should they insert explicitly norms into cost benefit analysis? At the heart of this dilemma is the assumption that methods of risk evaluation must be either primarily factual and scientific or predominantly ethical and political.
5 challenges of risk evaluation
Standardization dilemma: arises because many analysts ague that assessment procedures and risk-evaluation theories ought to be standardized, yet when procedures are standardized the assessor is unable to take into account persons’ claims about special or unique needs, circumstances, or merits. Standardization forces one to assume 1) that the sameness of expenditures guarantees sameness of protection; 2) that sameness of protection guarantees equality of protection; 3) that all discrimination is ethically indefensible and that there are never any morally relevant grounds for discrimination.
Contributors dilemma: how to assess numerous small hazards. all citizens are subject to many small hazards, etch of which is allegedly acceptable, yet together such exposures are clearly unacceptable. Forces assessors to assume and not to assume that the whole risk faced by an individual is greater than the sum of the parts of that risk.
De Minimis dilemma: society must declare some threshold below which a hazard is judged to be negligible. a zero risk society is impossible and some standards needed. sometime to minimal standard is able to provide equal protection from harm to all citizens. Forces us to choose between average and equal protection; between efficiency and ethics.
Consent dilemma: imposition of certain risks is legitimate only after consent is obtained from the affected parties. occurs because those who are able to give legiitimate consent are those who likely never will do so
Zero-risk bias is related to the concept of cognitive closure and can be explained in the tendency to think in terms of proportions rather than differences. When a risk is reduced to zero, 100% of the risk is removed. The idea occurs because individuals worry about risk and eliminating it entirely means there is no chance of being harmed. What is economically efficient and possibly more relevant however, is not bringing risk from 1% to 0% but from 50% to 5%.
- Is there such as thing as zero risk or a zero risk society?
-is it possible?
-Zero-risk bias: valuing complete elimination of a risk, however small, to a reduction in a greater risk.
Individuals may prefer small benefits that are certain to large ones that are uncertain regardless of the size of the certain benefit
ALARA:“as low as reasonably achievable”
fluctuates with available technologies and their costs may be more reasonable goal than zero risk
1. The stagings, experiences, and conflicts of global risk permeate and transform the foundations of social life and action in all spheres, national and global.
2. World risk also exhibits the new way of coping with open questions, how the future is integrated into the present, what shapes societies assume as a result of internalizing risk, how existing institutions are changing and what previously unknown organizational patterns are emerging.
3. On the one hand, unintentional large scale risks are gaining prominence (e.g., climate change); on the other hand, the anticipation of the new kinds of threats emanating from deliberate terrorist attacks represents a persistent public concern.
4. A general cultural transformation is taking place; different understandings of nature and its relation to society, of ourselves and others, of social rationality, freedom, democracy, and legitimation--even of the individual--are developing.
5. A new, future-oriented planetary ethics of responsibility is called for that finds its advocates among new cultural movements. By appealing to such a macro-ethics, social groups and firms coordinate their activities, offer competing assessments of risk and create new identities, laws, and international organizations in economics, society, and politics. Even the military has transformed itself, at least in part, into an advocate of a post national ethics of responsibility as shown by the foreign missions in Afghanistan.
The fear business will profit from the general loss of nerve. The suspicious and suspect citizen must be grateful when he is scanned, photographed, searched, and interrogated for his own safety. Security is becoming a profitable public and private sector consumer good like water and electricity.
Fear determines the attitudes towards life. Security is displacing freedom and equality from the highest position on the scale of values. The result is a tightening of laws, a seemingly rational totalitarianism of defense against threats.
Scientific progress now consists in subverting the role of experts. The fundamental principles of science and its visualization technologies--I do not see any risk therefore no risk exists--is being challenged. More science doe not necessarily translate into less risk but makes the perception of risk more acute and risks themselves collectively visual for the first time.
We are becoming members of a global community of threats. The threats are no longer the internal affairs of particular countries and a country cannot deal with the threats alone. A new conflict dynamic of social inequalities is emerging.
Risk possesses the destructive force of war. The language of threat is infectious and transforms social inequality: social need in hierarchical, the new threat, by contrast, is democratic. It affects even the rich and powerful. the shocks are felt in all areas of society. Markets collapse, legal systems fail to register offences, governments become the targets of accusations while at the same time gaining new leeway for action.
Sometimes risk assessors tell us not to be frightened based on a technical assessment
Public often focuses on aspects of risk that experts define out of the problem
Risk perception= intuitive risk judgments made by publics as opposed to technical assessments made by experts
Both technical assessments and intuitive judgments are essential to risk management
Risk can also involve value-based judgments that people form about perceived dangers. These risk perceptions affect attitudes and behavior and can be measured in a variety of ways. According to Slovic’s psychometric paradigm (1987), for example, people perceive risks based on the presence or absence of specific factors. These factors include perceived control over a risk, the extent to which the risk elicits feelings of dread, the degree of trust in risk managers, perceived inequity of the risk (i.e., some individuals are exposed to danger while others are not), and catastrophic potential (i.e., the ability of the risk to cause significant damage or loss). This psychometric paradigm has informed descriptions of wildlife-related risk perception (Gore, Knuth, Curtis, & Shanahan, 2006; Kleiven, Bjerke, & Kaltenborn, 2004; Riley & Decker, 2000a, 2000b).
Slovic’s psychometric paradigm does not account for all of the variance in risk perception (Boyer, Badgassarian, Chaabanne, & Mullet, 2001; Marris, Langford, & O'Riordan, 1998; Sjoberg, 2000). Alternative approaches focus on individual differences, socio-cultural influences, or a combination of the two. For example, Chauvrin, Hermand, and Mullet (2007) demonstrated that perceived risk may be viewed as a function of personality traits (e.g., emotional stability, open-mindedness, originality) and that the types of hazards people perceived as risky depended in large part on these personal predispositions. Lerner and Keltner (2001) found that emotional states also influence perceived risk (e.g., fearful people perceive higher risk than angry people).
Socio-cultural theories of risk perception examine the patterns and structures of relationships between and within individuals, organizations or groups as well as the worldviews that arise as a function of those relationships (Marris et al., 1998; Sjoberg, 1998, 2000; Slovic & Peters, 1998). For example, people with egalitarian worldviews tend to express concern about social inequalities associated with environmental risks, and people with hierarchical worldviews are more likely to be concerned with threats to law, order, and government authority (Steg & Sievers, 2000). The social amplification of risk framework (SARF) (Kasperson et al., 1988) draws on psychological, sociological, and cultural perspectives of risk perception and behavior to examine how and why hazards, once they enter communication networks (e.g., through mass media), can become amplified or attenuated. SARF has proven useful to understanding the role of media coverage in eliciting high or low levels of perceived risk related to wildlife (Gore, Siemer, Shanahan, Schuefele, & Decker, 2005). A social network contagion theory of risk perception (Scherer and Cho 2003) recognizes that individuals adopt the attitudes and behaviors of others in their social network and with whom they communicate (Burt 1987).
Process to characterize nature and magnitude of health risks to humans (e.g., residents, workers, recreational visitors) and ecological receptors (e.g., birds, fish, wildlife) from chemical contaminants and other stressors that may be present in the environment.
Stressors may adversely affect specific natural resources or entire ecosystems, including plants and animals, as well as the environment with which they interact.
In practice, risk assessment is supposed to be a scientific process to the fullest extent possible
Task of identifying and exploring, preferably in quantified terms, the types, intensities and likelihood of the (normally undesired) consequences related to a risk. Risk assessment comprises hazard identification and estimation, exposure, and vulnerability assessment and risk estimation.
Identify costs and benefits of risk
Subtract costs from benefits
do benefits outweigh the costs?
Values may be quantitative or qualitative
$$, lives, trees, resources
Commonly used in conservation: Shayka and Hitzuzen (1997) CBA is often used in conservation. For example, millions of acres of erodible land soon will be removed from the Conservation Reserve Program. Farmers may adopt different soil conservation measures on lands leaving CRP, or they may revert to erosive crop production. Conservationists are concerned about the sustainable future use of the most erosive and downstream-damaging croplands. Planting trees on these lands could be one economically viable choice. CBA of CRP, white pine plantations and row crop plantations suggest that white pine plantations are a viable option for some CRP lands in the Midwestern US.
CBA can be used to estimate social costs and benefits including adjustments for federal subsidies, social time preference, and external or downstream water quality impacts to evaluate the net social welfare of row crops, CRP and white pine plantations from a societal accounting stance. CBA can also help estimate private opportunity costs and benefits of various alternatives from the farmer’s perspective.
Plot of risk frequency versus consequence; coordinates of each point on a plot can be determined each point corresponds to a different value for the risk exposure. Facilitates comparison of different risk management options maps changes in risk given varying factors.
Forward-looking analysis that starts with initiating event and proceeds forward, looking for possible consequences or subsequent events resulting from the initiating event. Considered highly suitable for decision analysis, uses inductive logic, mainly used for pre or post-incident application.
Also called fault tree analysis that involes backward analysis (begin with a system hazard or failure, and traces backward, searching for possible causes of the hazard) appropriate for evaluating the reliability/safety of different systems, based on deductive logic, can be qualitative or quantitative, widely accepted method
Identification
some public or societal hazard
Estimation
level and extent of potential harm associated with hazard
Evaluation
acceptability of the danger, relative to other hazards
Hazard identification
qualitative nature of potential adverse consequences
strength of evidence of effect
Dose-response
relationship between exposure and consequence
Exposure quantification
factors that influence exposure
frequency, magnitude, effect of exposure
Risk represents the perceptual and cognitive schema in accordance with which a society mobilizes itself when it is confronted with the openness, uncertainties, and obstructions of a self-created future and is no longer defined by relition, tradition, or superior power of nature but has evn lost its faith in the redemptive powers of utopias.
The speed of development in the natural sciences (e.g., human genetics, nanotechnology) overwhelms cultural imagination and is especially affected by public dramatization of risks. Corresponding fears, which are direct to a still non-existent future are difficult for science to diffuse. Under certain conditions, politicians feel compelled to impose restrictions beacuse public discourse concerning risks take on a dynamic of their own.
Ambiguity is a hallmark of hazardousness and it is ever-present. Risk opens up a world within which there are no clear distinctions between knowledge and non-knowing, truth and falsehood, good and evil. A single, undivided truth is fractured into hundreds of relative truths resulting from the proximity to and dismay over risk. Risk reflects the response to uncertainty, which nowadays cannot be overcome by more knowledge but is instead a result of more knowledge.
