Risk and Sociocultural Theory — New Directions and Perspectives. - Review - book review

Organization Studies, March, 2001

Deborah Lupton: Risk and Sociocultural Theory -- New Directions and Perspectives

1999, Cambridge: Cambridge University Press. 191 pages.

This book presents a variety of new perspectives on the perception of risk and the strategies that people adopt to cope with it. Using the framework of recent social and cultural theory, it reflects the fact that risk has become integral to contemporary understandings of selfhood, the body and social relations, which is central to the work of writers such as Douglas, Beck, Giddens and the Foucauldian theorists. The contributors are all scholars in the fields of sociology, cultural and media studies and cultural anthropology. Combining empirical analyses with meta-theoretical critiques, the authors take a diverse range of topics, including drug use, risk in the workplace, fear of crime and the media, risk and pregnant embodiment, the social construction of danger in childhood, anxieties about national identity, the governmental uses of risk and the relationship between risk phenomena and social order.