Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

Modern society is undergoing a deep-rooted structural change. This change concerns both the internal relations between all parts of society and external relations with nature. During the nineteenth century, the industrial and technological revolution shook up the structures of a society that had been shaped traditionally by crafts and agriculture. In the same dramatic way, the “second modernity” or “risk society,” as Ulrich Beck (1992) calls the period at the end of the second millennium, transforms the nucleus of the industrial society. New technologies confront society with problems that are connected to the term “risk” ( Perrow 1987 ). This is not so much because the quantitative amount of dangerous situations has increased – this amount might have been relatively higher in earlier societies. However, what has significantly changed is the fact that social actors and institutions are being made accountable for those dangers. The new quality of the risk society consists of socially generated risks – or, at least, of the increase in assigning dangers to social behavior. Socially caused dangers will regularly produce more social conflict than inevitable natural disasters. In this sense, science and technology contain risks for each individual, for social groups, for contemporary society as a whole, and for future generations. The examples for this diagnosis are numerous. One may ... log in or subscribe to read full text