Market Solutions?
Gordon Winder’s “Market Solutions?” explores neoliberal market solutions to risk within the context of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society and his personal conversation with the latter.
Gordon Winder’s “Market Solutions?” explores neoliberal market solutions to risk within the context of Ulrich Beck’s Risk Society and his personal conversation with the latter.
In “Historicizing Risk,” historian Lawrence Culver explores Ulrich Beck’s theories on the nature of risk on a temporal scale, and asks how awareness and perceptions of risk changed from the “first” modernity to now, and how that relates to the global issue of climate change.
In this issue of RCC Perspectives, a group of scholars reflect on Ulrich Beck’s influential Risk Society (1986). They seek to critically historicize the concept of risk society, considering how it might be a product of its particular time and place as well as what it means for public debate and scholarship in the early twenty-first century.
Heike Egner critiques both the pessimism and idealism in Ulrich Beck’s risk theory, highlighting the limits of global cooperation and the role of science in amplifying risk.
Cheryl Lousley critiques Beck’s abstract vision of global risk and cosmopolitanism for overlooking power dynamics essential to environmental justice.
Agnes Kneitz questions the global applicability of Beck’s risk theory, emphasizing culturally rooted perceptions and the limits of a Western framework.
Diana Mincyte analyzes how post-socialist risk discourses in Eastern Europe deflected attention from systemic upheaval, legitimizing capitalism while obscuring structural causes.