risk and culture

When densely populated urban areas face severe crises—natural disasters, epidemics, sudden unemployment, massive immigration—they often find that established mechanisms cannot respond adequately to the problems. Carl Maida argues that solutions to these problems tend to be developed within the affected communities themselves. In Pathways through Crisis, he draws on his two decades of work in ethnography and with crisis centers in the Los Angeles area to study the kinds of informal organizations that arise at the grass-roots level in order to deal with severe crises. This ground-breaking examination of responses to urban disaster suggests how both informal and formal organizations can be developed to serve people under extreme duress.

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This study explores the reasons behind the different responses of the legal systems of Europe, Japan and the USA in coping BSE, one of the major food safety crises in recent years. Making reference to the most recent advances on risk perception that cognitive and social sciences, such as legal anthropology and sociology of law, have experimented with, “Risk Perception, Culture, and Legal Change” examines the role that culture plays in moulding the process of legal change. Attention is focused on the regulative frameworks implemented to guarantee the safety of the food chain against the BSE menace and on the liability responses sketched to compensate the victims of mad cow disease, showing how both these elements have been influenced by the cultural context within which they are situated.

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Brummelhuis and Herdt provide an intense examination of sexual risk and its cultural configurations heretofore missing from the AIDS literature. The chapters on Western gay men speak to the pressing methodological, conceptual and theoretical needs in HIV/AIDS research while providing an understanding and documentation of gay men’s lives within the emerging corpus of lesbian and gay studies. Chapters on the Philippines, Brazil, Haiti and Africa explore the cultural, political and economic contexts surrounding the transmission and prevention of HIV/AIDS in these cultures.

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This reader contributes to the sociology of gambling, and offers a variety of sociological approaches, ranging from classical sociological analyses of gambling to contemporary sociological approaches to risk.

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This book explores serious issues in Youth Culture across a broad range of contexts. The matters explored are not only critical in terms of being fundamental and emerging problems in Youth Culture but they are also significant in that they present ideologies, scenarios, and seminal principals of individuals lives in frameworks which are non traditional, rebellious and alternative. The chapters presented deal with subject matter that challenge ideas within theories, methodologies and lifestyles that are confrontational, post-modern in perspective and designed to question the comfortable research zones of many traditional academics working in the sociology area. This book brings together leading academics many of whom have been cross-examining traditional views about youth culture for some time. Their work is thought provoking, innovative, entertaining and at the cutting edge of contemporary sociology. Designed for both undergraduate and graduate programs it will also be accessible for parents and community members who work with youth and their families, as it will provide a context for their experiences.

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The controversy surrounding the measles, mumps and rubella (MMR) vaccine and autism has raised unprecedented questions about the communication of health and science. Health, Risk and News: The MMR Vaccine and the Media examines how this story came to be so influential and asks if the media are to blame for unduly panicking the public. Drawing on comprehensive research—on media coverage, interviews with a range of journalists and sources, and analysis of audience opinion—this book explores how medical controversies are covered, with attention to issues of balance and objectivity, expertise, news values, risk and media effects. It will be of interest to students and scholars of media studies, journalists and health professionals.

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The question as to whether we are now entering a risk society has become a key debate in contemporary social theory. Risk and Technological Culture presents a critical discussion of the main theories of risk from Ulrich Becks foundational work to that of his contemporaries such as Anthony Giddens and Scott Lash and assesses the extent to which risk has impacted on modern societies. In this discussion van Loon demonstrates how new technologies are transforming the character of risk and examines the relationship between technological culture and society through substantive chapters on topics such as waste, emerging viruses, communication technologies and urban disorders. In so doing this innovative new book extends the debate to encompass theorists such as Bruno Latour, Donna Haraway, Gilles Deleuze, Felix Guattari and Jean-François Lyotard.

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At the world’s some 440 nuclear power plants, experts continually monitor their wide safety margins, and at signs of trouble seek out the sources and recommend changes. Too often for their comfort, and for ours, a subsequent problem reveals that these changes were ineffective or never made. Why this self-defeating pattern? What in this technology’s culture of control might undermine experts’ best intentions? What kind of problem is it to reduce operating risks?

Following brief highlights of this industry’s history over the last twenty years of accidents, near-accidents, and institutional changes, Shouldering Risks presents excerpts from interviews with some sixty experts about four relatively recent events at three U.S. plants. Drawing also on her earlier field studies at eleven plants in America and abroad, on industry documents, and others’ research, Constance Perin identifies unacknowledged elements in this industry’s culture of control; for example, control concepts for reactor design, construction, and regulation carry over to risk handling and event analysis, whose efficacy depends instead on recognizing and interpreting the significance of technical and contextual signals on daily display.

Far more than the sum of its parts, this highly knowledge-dependent technology operates along an axis of meanings, not only along an axis of functions. A culture of control is, like any culture, an intricate system of claims about how to understand the world and act in it. Here, claims pivot around the dynamics of control theory and productivity based on particular assumptions about the relationships of humans to machines, models to reality, certainty to ambiguity, rationality to experience. These four events and accident analyses show that such assumptions can confound control and produce misleading meanings.

Shouldering Risks reimagines a broader and deeper culture of control to reshape our understandings of the intellectual capital appropriate to designing, regulating, organizing, and managing this risky enterprise and, perhaps, other such technologies already here or to come.

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