Giddens's juggernaut of modernity and Beck's risk society

1. Anthony Giddens: the juggernaut of modernity

Anthony Giddens (born 1938), British sociologist, Director of the LSE 1997–2003. The relevant works are The Consequences of Modernity (1990), Modernity and Self-Identity (1991) and Runaway World (1999).

The juggernaut image

Giddens compares modernity to a juggernaut: a runaway engine of enormous power which, collectively as human beings, we can drive to some extent, but which threatens to rush out of our control. (The word comes from the chariot of Jagannath at Puri.) Riding it is exhilarating and hopeful, but we can never be fully secure, because its terrain is full of high-consequence risks.

Four institutional dimensions of modernity

1. Capitalism: capital accumulation in competitive labour and product markets.
2. Industrialism: transformation of nature, the created environment.
3. Surveillance: control of information and social supervision.
4. Military power: control of the means of violence, industrialised war.

Dynamism: three sources

• Time-space distanciation: separation of time and space from place. Social relations no longer depend on physical presence; standard clock time and maps make coordination across distance possible.
• Disembedding mechanisms: the lifting out of social relations from local contexts. Two kinds:
  • symbolic tokens, above all money, which can be exchanged across any distance;
  • expert systems: systems of technical knowledge (medicine, engineering, law) on which we depend without understanding them.
• Institutional reflexivity: social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of new information about them. Knowledge feeds back and changes what it describes.

Trust, risk and ontological security

Because we rely on abstract systems we cannot see, modern life rests on trust in them (faceless commitments), as against trust in people we deal with in person (facework commitments). The two meet at access points, where we encounter the representatives of an abstract system: the doctor, the pilot, the bank clerk. Ontological security, confidence in the continuity of self and world, is harder to sustain. In Modernity and Self-Identity the self becomes a reflexive project: individuals must construct their own biographies.

2. Ulrich Beck: risk society

Ulrich Beck (1944–2015), German sociologist, published Risikogesellschaft: Auf dem Weg in eine andere Moderne in 1986, the year of the Chernobyl nuclear disaster; it appeared in English as Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity in 1992. Later: World Risk Society (1999) and, with Giddens and Scott Lash, Reflexive Modernization (1994).

Origin of the risk society

Beck distinguishes two phases of modernity.

Industrial society solved much of the problem of material want. Its very success, through science and technology, created new hazards: nuclear radiation, toxic chemicals, ozone depletion, climate change, genetic engineering. Beck defines risk as a systematic way of dealing with hazards and insecurities induced and introduced by modernisation itself.

Features of modern risks

1. Manufactured, not natural: produced by human decisions.
2. Invisible: radiation and pollutants cannot be sensed; they exist through scientific knowledge, and so are open to social definition and dispute.
3. Global and incalculable: they cross borders and generations; they cannot be insured or fully compensated.
4. Democratic: “Poverty is hierarchic, smog is democratic.” Risks affect rich and poor, though the poor are still more exposed.
5. Boomerang effect: risks return to strike those who produce them; pesticides come back in food.

Reflexive modernisation

Modernisation is now confronting its own consequences. Society becomes reflexive: an issue and problem to itself. Science loses its monopoly over truth, since experts disagree; lay people, NGOs and protest movements challenge expert definitions. Beck calls the result sub-politics: politics outside parliaments, in laboratories, corporations, courts and citizens’ groups. He also speaks of organised irresponsibility: institutions generate risks but no one is held accountable.

Individualisation

Traditional class, family and gender roles weaken. Individuals must make their own biographies, choose careers and partners, and bear risks personally: a “do-it-yourself biography”.

Criticism

• Exaggerates the novelty of risk: plague and famine were global and catastrophic.
• Underestimates class: risks are unequally distributed (environmental justice research).
• Eurocentric: much of the world still faces scarcity first.
• Vague on mechanisms of reflexivity and sub-politics.

3. Giddens and Beck compared

How this is examined

“Explain the risk society of Ulrich Beck” (10 marks, August 2024, April 2022): background and Chernobyl, the two modernities table, features of risk, reflexive modernisation, individualisation, an Indian example and criticism. “Origin of risk society” (six marks, October 2023): the shift from scarcity to risk and the 1986 book. If Giddens is set, write the juggernaut, four dimensions, three sources of dynamism and trust.