RISKSOCIETY《风险社会》.pptx

Risk SocietyTowards a New Modernity;CONTENTS;1、The author;2、The influence;Becks book has had an enormous influence. First, it had little short of a meteoric（疾速的） impact on institutional social science. In1990 the biannual conference of the German Sociological Association was entitled The Modernization of Modernization?in oblique reference to Becks thesis of reflexive modernization. ;Second,this book phayed a leading role in the recasting （重塑）of public debates in German ecological politics.Ulrich Beck is not just a social scientist but what the Germans call a Schriftsteller,a word that loses much of its meaning when translated into English as essayist or non-fiction writer.The personal and essayistic style of Risk Society -though it is a quite accessible book in the German -has made it an immensely difficult book to translate. ;Risk Society consists of two central interrelated theses. One concerns reflexive modernization and the other the issue of risk. (1)Risks are defined as the probabilities of physical harm due to given technological or other processes. Hence technical experts are given pole position to define agendas and impose bounding premises a priori on risk discourses. A small group of sociologists and anthropologists from beyond the cultural pale of this hegemony have made three observations in particular. ;First, such physical risks are always created and effected in social systems,for example by organizations and institutions which are supposed to manage and control the risky activity. Second, the magnitude of the physical risks is therefore a direct function of the quality of social relations and processes. Third, the primary risk, even for the most technically intensive activities (indeed perhaps most especially for them), is therefore that of social dependency upon institutions and actors who may well be -and arguably are increasingly - alien, obscure and inaccessible to most people affected by the risks in question.;(2)Reflexivity is excluded fro