2. Ulrich Beck
● Ulrich Beck is the contemporary theorist of
modernity.
● He is a German sociologist who has written
extensively about risk and globalization.
● He argues that the risk which is inherent in
modern society would contribute towards
the formation of a global risk society.
● In a modern society, there is technological
change.
3. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity
According to Beck…..
● “A society in which the unknown and unintended
consequences come to be a dominant force in history
and society.”
● “In the risk society,the past loses the power to
determine the present.Its place is taken by the
future,thus,something non-existence,invented,
fictive as the ‘cause’ of current experiences and
action.”
● “It is a Catastrophical Society’ in which the
exceptional condition threatens to become the
norm.”
4. What is Risk Society?
● According to Pramod K.Nayar Contemporary critical theory has
had to negotiate with massive environmental disaster, industrial
disaster, 9/11 and other cataclysmic events. Much contemporary
social theory examines the role such events play in culture. One of
the most influential of such theories is that of the risk society.
● According to the British sociologist Anthony Giddens, a risk
society is "a society increasingly preoccupied with the future (and
also with safety), which generates the notion of risk"
5. Defining risk Ulrich Beck says:
● Industrial society has created many new dangers of risks unknown in
previous ages.
● The risks associated with global warming are one example.
● In the present era of industrialization, the nature of risk has
undergone tremendous change. Earlier, there was no absence of risk.
● But these risks were natural dangers or hazards.
● There was earthquake, there was epidemic, there was famine and
there were floods.
6. Speciality of risk society
❏ In classical or industrial society the ideal was equality. And,
the notions of welfare, humanism, freedom and equality were
inspired by enlightenment.
❏ This ideal is abandoned in the new modernity. In classical
modernity people achieved solidarity to attain equality.
❏ But, in contemporary advanced modernity, the attempt to
achieve solidarity is found in the search for the largely
negative and defensive goal of being spared from danger and
risk.
7. Covid-19 in “Risk Society”
● Today, social risks have become part of our daily lives
as human beings.
● The German sociologist Ulrich Beck defined them as
the systematic way of dealing with the perils and
insecurities resulting from modernization.
● He attributed this issue to a broad change, which he
called “reflexive modernization”, where the
unintended and unpredictable impacts of modern life
on modernity take place.(Mansouri Fardin)
● In the risk society, the people’s concerns are shifted
from natural disasters to the perils resulting from
human activities, which are often global and
widespread (Turner 2002).
8. Continue….
● Risk society does not merely arise from the reality that daily
life has generally become more dangerous; the problem is
more about fading the borders of uncontrollable risks.
● In the context of pandemic diseases, and in particular, COVID-
19, which can be defined as a disease of the risk society, this
uncontrollable border fading is noticeably visible—from all
developing to developed countries.
9. ● Beck wrote “risk may be defined as a systematic way dealing with
hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernization
itself.”
● Beck carried on explaining that risks are spread within globalized
industries.
● Most common examples of such risks in modern societies are
pollution, biological weapons, and nuclear and chemical
contaminations, and “diseases of civilization.”
10. ● Based on Beck’s theory, such interconnectivity is
full of risks that the society has failed to identify
and act upon proactively.
● For example, pollution and health hazards and
terrorism show that the tools to proactively tackle
such risks are not available or are not well
developed.
●
● In addition, risks from social interconnectivity and
interdependence continue to happen largely
because they are not easily visible and
calculable, but more importantly, there is no
accountability.
11. ● Social progress and the development of risks without being able to
localize responsibility reflects Beck’s reference to a “boomerang effect” in
the sense that the consequences of social progress are backfiring and
strike all people regardless of social class, even those who actually
produced them.
● As Lash and Wynne write in the introduction of Beck’s book on risk
society, “We are therefore concerned no longer exclusively with making
nature useful or with releasing mankind from traditional constraints, but
also and essentially with problems resulting from techno-economic
development itself.”
12. Power Relations, Visibility, and Responsibility in the
Management of Covid-19
● In the case of Covid-19, governments largely relied on experts in
epidemiology, virology, and public health to restrict the spread of the
virus.
● The measures had to do with staying home, working from home,
washing hands, and use of antiseptic.
● These measures did not aim to tackle any other consequences such as
economic and psychosocial and they were formulated by experts who
did not involve people in discussions, even though the measures
could be easily conceptualized by people without expertise in the area
of controlling pandemics.
13. ● Through the process of formulating and implementing the measures,
a risk which was previously presented as invisible was turned into
visible, responsibility and accountability had now an owner, and two
opposing groups were symbolically constructed.
● The risk of Covid-19 became visible in the sense that it was a virus
that existed out-there and could spread through the help of people
who did not comply.
● So the invisible enemy was turned into an enemy with allies, whose
spread increased when people’s sociality increased.
14. Covid-19 and Social Inequalities
● Beck wrote “the worldwide equalization of risk positions must not
deceive us about new social inequalities within the affliction by risk”
and “some people are more affected than others by the distribution
and growth of risks, that is, social risk positions spring up.”
● Covid-19 discriminates as it is affecting more people from lower
socioeconomic classes, ethnic minority groups, and women
(Rollston and Galea 2020). People with low paid jobs are at greater
risks of unemployment and some ethnic minority groups live in
houses and areas with poor hygiene.
15. ● Based on Beck’s theory of the risk society, the point here is the
process of producing, distributing, and managing risks and not if the
measures indeed control the spread of the virus.
● What the Covid-19 pandemic showed was that humanity was not ready
to respond evenly and comfortably.
● The discussion of Beck’s risk society shows that humanity is still not
ready for a third Covid-19 wave or for a new pandemic.
16. Conclusion
● Beck’s theory of risk society were used to explain the production,
distribution, and management of Covid-19.
● Covid-19 was produced and distributed by social progress due to
globalization and it has been managed by experts without the
involvement of lay people in decision making and without taking into
account structural inequalities.
● Through the use of language, experts strategically legitimated their
limited knowledge of Covid-19 as the only form of acceptable
knowledge and portrayed lay people as responsible for the potential
failure to control the spread.
17. References
● Beck, Ulrich, and Mark Ritter. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity.
London: Sage Publications, 1992
● Fardin, Mansouri. “Risk Society and COVID-19.” Covid19 Information, 19 Jan.
2021, www.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/pmc/articles/PMC7814519.
● Giddens, Anthony, and Christopher Pierson. Conversations with Anthony
Giddens: Making Sense of
Modernity.1998.https://books.google.co.in/books/about/Conversations_with
_Anthony_Giddens.
● Nayar, Pramod K. An Introduction to Cultural Studies. 2008.
● Rollston,L. Rebekah, . “The Coronavirus Does Discriminate: How Social
Conditions Are Shaping the COVID-19 Pandemic.” HARVARD MEDICAL
SCHOOL PRIMARY CARE REVIEW, 19 Oct. 2021,
info.primarycare.hms.harvard.edu/review/social-conditions-shape-covid.
● Turner BS. Orientalism, postmodernism, and globalism. London: Routledge;
2002.
