Book Reviews
Risk and Everyday Life
John Tulloch and Deborah Lupton
ISBN: 0-7619475-9-0 2003 152 pages Sage Publications, London
Rodney Fopp
Sociology, University of South Australia, Magill Campus, SA
Risk and Everyday Life is an extremely readable and interesting book about an interdisciplinary topic which seems to have as much currency as it provides avenues for illuminating research. Furthermore, it is no less rigorous for its readability.
This book uses the risk theory of Ulrich Beck in order to analyse the responses to 134 one-to-one interviews from 60 respondents in the United Kingdom and 74 in Australia (Tulloch and Lupton 2003: 11-12; hereafter only page numbers will be given). The interviews were conducted between 1997 and 2000 with a range of people but representative of sex, age, education and occupation. The UK respondents resided in Oxford, Coventry and Cardiff; the Australians interviewed lived in Sydney and the Blue Mountains, Wollongong and Bathurst (p.12).
Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch were interested in a number of questions in their project, including the following (p.11):
What does 'risk' as a concept mean to people and how do they see it affecting their lives? What risks do people consider most threatening or important to themselves and to members of the society in which they live? Which individuals, social groups or institutions do they see as causing or having responsibility over risk? What evidence is there for 'reflexivity' and a move towards 'individualization' in people's understandings of and responses to risks? Is risk perceived as democratising in its universal effects, as Beck sees it, or do the old 'modernist' categories of age, gender, social class and so on still play an important role in the way people understand and deal with risk?
They also ask:
What are the narratives, epistemologies, discourses, rhetorical moves, choices of 'rational arguments' and courses of action which people use to organise 'risk' as a cultural concept?
A book of 140 pages could not answer all these questions systematically. But the authors do a very good job. After two excellent introductory chapters, Researching risk in everyday life and Defining risk, the issues and questions are addressed in the four substantive chapters: Risk and border crossings; Individualisations, risk modernity and biography: the case of work; Plural rationalities: from blitz to contemporary crime; and Perceptions of time and place in a 'risk modern' city.
In addition to quotations from respondents which demonstrate their qualitative research and biographical and narrative methodology, the most intriguing aspect of the book for this reviewer was the ongoing engagement with Ulrech Beck's work. The Index lists Beck on pages one to seven, but that understates by many times the obvious sub-text. Further, after the presentation of the narrative of a particular respondent, or in the 'Concluding comments' at the end of chapters, I found myself anticipating what the authors called their 'dialogue with the ideas of Ulrich Beck' (p.132). I wondered how Lupton and Tulloch would use each narrative and their analysis: will it confirm Beck's well known perspective or provoke them to demur and extend the risk thesis?'
What I discovered was that Tulloch and Lupton found their respondents had a 'heightened awareness of risk' (p.132), particularly around the categories of finance, health and physical well-being, the nature and extent of crime, personal relationships and work (including employment and unemployment). In these domains, they say that their respondents did 'conform to Beck's notion of the egocentric, rationalist risk avoider, choosing to seek out information on risk and weighing up their options' (p.132). They also found that Beck's notion of 'individualization explains much about the disembedding aspects of everyday life, the loss of traditional ties and knowledges and the sense that 'community' is being undermined' (p.132).
The book also points to problems in Beck's analysis including challenging his 'overweening focus on the cognitive and individualistic aspects of risk consciousness and his generalising tendencies' (p.132). Tulloch and Lupton show that while their respondents did analyse and explain risk in personal and residual terms, they also adopted a 'politicized social consciousness of the structural underpinnings of risk that require government intervention' (p.132). Secondly, whereas Beck emphasised 'the universal risk actor' - as if this was the quintessential actor - Tulloch and Lupton found that 'the interviewees' responses to risk were strongly shaped via such factors as gender, age, occupation, nationality and sexual identity' (p.132). In other words, compared with their own work, they found Beck to have essentialised on this point.
Thus, while confirming Beck's analysis in certain ways, Tulloch and Lupton's analysis reveals additional dimensions. They highlight cultural facets of risk assessment and responses to it that concern non-work time and lifestyle issues which, in turn, lead to identities that are multi-dimensional in thought and action, changing and adaptive. Tulloch and Lupton argue that 'Beck's notion of risk in everyday life needs to be expanded to embrace all these shifting states and performativities'. They add, '[i]dentity is constantly built and re-built through social contact and the appropriation and consumption of cultural artefacts such as technology, the media, mass-produced commodities and expert knowledges' (p.133).
Undoubtedly, they have advanced our understanding of the issues. With this in mind it is difficult to know how to interpret the following, which seems a surprising caveat: 'In a central sense, our book, with its research focus on case studies and the voices of 'lay knowledge' is a deliberate move to avoid 'correct answers' on risk' (p.83).
This is an unfortunate and unnecessary framing of the issues. It is unfortunate because it may suggest an epistemological relativism which is belied by the authors' method, analysis and their stated findings. It is unnecessary because their methodology is sufficiently robust, and their appropriation of theory sufficiently cogent, to sustain the claims made.
I suspect the authors are making the point that they are valorising 'lay' knowledges in order to interpret how their respondents understand and handle risk. In this, the authors are successful. And without advocating a facile incrementalism, the ambiguities, pluralities and tensions within and between the 'lay' and 'expert' knowledges offer something else to be explained. It is precisely to this project that Deborah Lupton and John Tulloch have made an interesting and valuable contribution which has the potential to open doors for further research.
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