Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Disasters are sudden, unexpected, localized, rare, and acute events that disrupt the environment and social structure, and inflict substantial harm on individuals, groups, and property. They differ from accidents in the greater scale of their individual and collective impacts. Roughly speaking, such catastrophes entail over a hundred deaths in a short period of time. The sociological study of disasters dates to the late 1940s, when governments sought to comprehend the damage of World War II and started planning for potential nuclear holocaust. First at the National Opinion Research Center (NORC) and later at the Disaster Research Center at Ohio State, sociologists drew upon experience from natural disasters. Over time, disaster scholars borrowed from other subfields in the discipline. The number of disasters has increased, especially since 1990. Ulrich Beck argues that, unlike modern industrial society based upon the distribution of goods, contemporary risk society is founded upon the distribution of dangers. Science and industry are creating more and deadlier risks with impacts less limited in time and space. These physical risks are situated in social systems that aim to control them. However, many technically risky activities require society to depend upon and trust inaccessible, unaccountable, and unintelligible organizations and institutions. Scientific realism should be tempered ... log in or subscribe to read full text