The British Journal of Sociology 2010 Volume 61 Issue 1

Agency, reflexivity and risk: cosmopolitan, neurotic

or prudential citizen?1 bjos_1301 45..62

Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

Abstract
The purpose of this paper is to critically examine the turn to risk within sociology
and to survey the relationship between structure and agency as conceived by
popular strands of risk theorizing. To this end, we appraise the risk society, culture
of fear and governmentality perspectives and we consider the different imaginings
of the citizen constructed by each of these approaches. The paper goes on to
explore what each of these visions of citizenship implies for understandings of the
structure/agency dynamic as it pertains to the question of reflexivity. In order to
transcend uni-dimensional notions of citizenship and to reinvigorate sociological
debates about risk, we call for conceptual analyses that are contextually rooted.
Exampling the importance of knowledge contests around contemporary security
threats and warnings of the deleterious effects of pre-emptive modes of regulation
that derive from the ‘risk turn’ within social science, we argue for a more nuanced
embrace of reflexivity within risk theorising in order to facilitate a more dynamic
critique of the images of citizenship that such theorizing promotes.
Keywords: Risk; agency; reflexivity; citizenship; security

Introduction

In the last two decades the concept of risk has assumed paradigmatic status
within the social sciences. Indeed, the explanatory potential of risk appears to
have become heightened in a world marked by transgressive events such as the
9/11 terrorist attacks, the sharp descent into global financial crisis and escalat-
ing environmental problems (see Beck 2009; Jenks 2003). In so far as the ‘turn
to risk’ within sociology has been well documented (see Arnoldi 2009; Lupton
1999; Mythen and Walklate 2006b; Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2006), in this paper
we wish to explore the implications of one discrete aspect of the inflection
towards risk: the relationship between structure and agency as reflected in

Walklate and Mythen (School of Sociology and Social Policy, University of Liverpool) (Corresponding author email: [Link]@
[Link])
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 ISSN 0007-1315 print/1468-4446 online.
Published by Blackwell Publishing Ltd, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford OX4 2DQ, UK and 350 Main Street, Malden,
MA 02148, USA on behalf of the LSE. DOI: 10.1111/j.1468-4446.2009.01301.x
46 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

understandings of citizenship. In order to do this we shall first trace the differ-

ent ways in which risk has been conceptualized within sociology. In the second
part of the paper we examine what each of these interpretations of risk has to
say about the structure/agency dynamic particularly in relation to reflexivity, as
it is expressed in respective constructions of the citizen and citizenship. In the
third section we explore the different inferences that each of these conceptions
of citizenship has for sociology and for understandings of wider society. In
order to ground this discussion, our illustrative thematic of concerns around
safety and security shows how different constructions of risk and citizenship
helps (or fails to help) make sense of these issues. By implication then, we
agree with Furedi’s (2007: 137) observation that contested issues of safety and
human security remain central in expressing ‘the difficulties that Western
culture has in making sense of its experiences’.
Sociology as a discipline has long sought to understand the effects of changing
social structures on individual and collective practices. A substantial body of
sociological research has had this relationship as its engine and driver, with the
diffuse impacts of the media, economy, work, education and the criminal justice
system on the self, identity and agency being issues of wide debate. While such
forms of analysis remain at the heart of the sociological project, in response to
changing social conditions, contemporarily the concept of risk has become
central to discussions about the structure/agency dynamic. In so far as modern
citizens may – to a greater or lesser extent – have become inured to living with
risk, it needs to be recognized that the current fixation with risk within sociology
is relatively novel and unprecedented. Prior to the 1980s, academic interest in
risk was largely concentrated in the natural sciences, rather than the social
sciences.2 However, a number of focal incidents in the 1980s – among them the
Chernobyl reactor explosion, the BSE crisis and growing awareness of the
threat of HIV/AIDS – raised vital questions about risk and its distribution for
sociologists to grapple with (see Beck 1992; Lupton 1999).
Over time, the increasing sophistication of scientific and technological tools
has allowed expert institutions to identify – and hence forced individuals to
micro-manage – risks that would perhaps have remained unknown in the past
(see Arnoldi 2009: 87; Mythen 2004: 4). Further, it has become evident that the
very processes set in train by capitalist techno-scientific development are
themselves producing an assortment of potential dangers, exemplified by envi-
ronmental harms, nuclear and chemical weapons and global financial crisis. In
an age in which social anxieties are mass mediated, the general public have
become more sceptical of expert systems and willing to challenge expert
opinion on risk issues (Beck 2009: 90; Giddens 1998). Given that the last thirty
years have been characterized by flux, uncertainty and rapid social change, it is
unsurprising that sociologists have been busy trying to decipher what all this
might mean for the self, identity and everyday lived experience. Since the
publication of Beck’s Risk Society (1992), taken up and complimented by the
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 47

influential work of Giddens (1994, 1998, 1999), key areas of sociological

inquiry – including class analysis, interpersonal relationships, crime and
welfare – have drawn upon and been influenced by risk society theory. In
addition, contributions within the constructionist tradition by Furedi (2002;
2005) and scholars deploying Foucault’s pioneering work (Dean 1999;
O’Malley 2004) have sought to enhance understanding of the construction,
governance and power of risk. Such diverse offerings indicate that risk is an
elastic and contested sociological concept. It is to an appreciation of these
differential interpretations that we now turn.

Theoretical perspectives on risk

For analytical purposes it is possible to identify different emphases in a broad

church of risk literature that includes the risk society thesis, the cultural
symbolic approach, the culture of fear perspective and the governmentality
perspective. Each of these perspectives offers a different interpretation of risk
and places a different accent on the relationship between the individual and
society. From the vivid realism of the risk society thesis in which humanity is
forced to confront the hazards created through economic, social and techno-
scientific processes, to the governmentality position in which technologies
of risk regiment and responsibilize the individual through the construction of
restrictive discourses. What these perspectives have in common is the view
that pre-occupations with risk are wedded to capitalist modernization and the
burgeoning cult of expertise. As Lupton (2006: 13) states: ‘expert knowledges
are central to neo-liberal government, providing the guidelines whereby citi-
zens are assessed, compared against norms and rendered productive’. Much of
the activity of neo-liberal government involves encouraging people to volun-
tarily become ‘good’ citizens (qua Foucault 1980) and/or responsible citizens
(qua Garland 2001). Nevertheless, as empirical work has suggested, consider-
able lacunae and tensions emerge between expert knowledge and lay knowl-
edge in the quest of neo-liberal government to achieve compliance (see Wynne
1996; Tulloch and Lupton 2003).3 One of the underlying problems for risk
theorizing is to probe exactly why and where these fractures occur. Can risk
theorizing facilitate an understanding of such social gaps and tensions, or does
it simply contribute to their creation? Whilst recognizing that there are simi-
larities between sociological perspectives on risk, we wish to debate what the
particular perspectives identified here imply for our understanding of the
citizen and the wider structure/agency dialectic.
In the risk society oeuvre, Beck (1992, 1995, 1999, 2009) has documented the
sweeping effects of risk on everyday life and warned of the dangers of ignoring
mounting global threats. The risk society thesis is predicated on the changing
nature of threats affecting distinct social epochs (Beck 1995: 78). The ‘natural
British Journal of Sociology 61(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
48 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

hazards’ (e.g. drought, earthquakes and flooding) and accidents (e.g. work-
place injuries, fires) common in pre-industrial and industrial cultures are said
to have been supplanted in the risk society by a growing collection of ‘manu-
factured uncertainties’, created by human industry in the economy, science and
via the institutionalization of society. Beck identifies fundamental differences
in the make-up, scope and effects of these different forms of danger. Given that
natural hazards and accidents are essentially local – being limited by time,
space and place – deleterious consequences can be reduced by institutional
actions and procedures. By contrast, manufactured uncertainties are global,
unpredictable and defy institutional regulation. Paradoxically, it is the very
advancement of economic, scientific and technological systems that generates
rather than alleviates manufactured risks. In the world risk society, anthropo-
genic risks supersede hazards, both in terms of social consequences and politi-
cal focus. In Beck’s terms, modernization becomes a ‘problem for itself’,
making the risk society a uniquely ‘self-critical’ society (Beck 2009: 110).
This embedding of risk as a universal social feature heralds a move away
from the commonality of need toward the commonality of anxiety. Instead of
being captured by the statement ‘I am hungry’, the risk society is defined by the
maxim ‘I am afraid’ (Beck 1992: 42). As a direct result of not being able to deal
with or alleviate this fear, expert systems lose control and public trust in
institutional structures declines (Giddens 1994, 1998). For Beck, the inability
of social institutions to manage manufactured risks signals a shift in political
and social values from a positive logic based on the acquisition of ‘goods’ to a
negative logic predicated upon avoidance of ‘bads’. This transformation means
that the principal problems in contemporary risk societies do not stem from a
dearth of goods, such as income, housing and health care, but are borne out of
a glut of bads, such as environmental pollution, crime and terrorism. Such a sea
change in social logic has important ramifications for social cohesion and
notions of safety: ‘the dynamics of risk society are beyond status and class
because global threats ultimately affect everybody, even those responsible for
them’ (Beck 2009: 22).
While the escalation of catastrophic risks provokes uncertainty and anxiety,
Beck believes that such feelings and emotions have the capacity to be translated
into socially progressive action through political mobilisation. The public in
effect constitute a ‘global community of threats’ and media staging of risks
becomes central in provoking public sympathies and political conflicts (see
Beck and Sznaider 2006: 13; Beck 2009: 8). Though Beck has been criticized for
conflating agency and structure (see Archer 2007), the potential for mobiliza-
tion has become a pivotal aspect of his work. Critical to this argument is the idea
that the socially and politically explosive character of risk and its mass visual-
ization in the media means that nobody is able to secrete themselves away from
risk, nor ignore the observable demise of the natural habitat and the conflicts
that this provokes. The motion into the world risk society thus unleashes a
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 49

‘cosmopolitan moment’ (Beck 2000; Beck and Sznaider 2006) in which ‘global
risks force us to confront the apparently excluded other, tearing down national
barriers and mixing ‘natives with foreigners’ (Beck 2009: 15). As we shall
elucidate, Beck’s thesis envisages the emergence of an informed and active
citizen galvanised by risk into the practices of ‘cosmopolitan political realism’.
In contrast to the realism implicit in the risk society perspective, Furedi’s
(2002, 2005, 2007) ‘culture of fear’ approach is heavily constructionist, hypoth-
esizing that our preoccupation with issues of risk is symptomatic of a tendency
to focus on the negative features of modernity. For Furedi, the risk society’s
frightening glut of bads engenders cultural and political paralysis. Overlapping
with Foucauldian thinkers, the culture of fear thesis posits that the language of
risk has become omnipresent in everyday life and assumed status as a filter
through which people react to and make sense of experience (Furedi 2002: 5).
As Furedi (1997: 173) states, ‘through the celebration of suffering, society
legitimises its fear of taking risks’. In contrast with Beck’s exhortations
for urgent intervention to prevent tangible global threats, Furedi believes
that risks are predominantly culturally constructed, being promulgated and
manipulated by politicians, the mass media and those working in the welfare
and security industries. Fearful populations are more easily governed and
more likely to invest in a proliferating range of security products and services.
Ceaseless media coverage of impending threats to human security and
government incitements that the public be alert encourages the individual
to become introspective and fearful. In this sense, fear is as much a way of
interpreting lived experience as it is a response to actual harms: ‘many of us
seem to make sense of our experiences through the narrative of fear. Fear is
not simply associated with high-profile catastrophic threats such as terrorist
attacks, global warming, AIDS or a potential flu pandemic . . . there are also
the quiet fears of everyday life’ (Furedi 2007: 1). In this way, risks are not
simply extant and self-evident entities. Rather, expressions of fear and anxiety
are the products of social fabrication, being defined through ‘cultural scripts’
of risk and security and reproduced in the interplay between individuals and
structures (Furedi 2007: 5). Furedi believes that the current social preoccupa-
tion with risk is dangerous in a number of ways. Firstly, so far as scientific,
technological and social developments are concerned, the balance between
positive and negative consequences becomes distorted, with the latter assum-
ing precedence. Secondly, media emphasis on high consequence, low probabil-
ity harms incites people to become more inward looking and fearful. Perhaps
more importantly for our argument, what Furedi (1997: 170) dubs the ‘fatalistic
sociology of the precautionary principle’ dis-empowers critique and encour-
ages people to do little more than try to avoid taking risks: ‘sadly, shared
meaning for most people is confined to fear of being a target rather than being
inspired to stand up for a way of life’ (Furedi 2007: 98). In this narrative, the
fragmentation of shared values privatizes meaning, rendering it ever more
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50 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

individualized in character and inducing individuals to search for ‘biographical

solutions to systemic problems’ (Bauman 2006). As opposed to Beck’s lumi-
nous silhouette of the ‘cosmopolitan citizen’ here we have the dark shadow of
the ‘neurotic citizen’ (Isin 2004).
Whilst Beck is considered to be the principal proponent of the risk society
thesis, the governmentality perspective emanates from the writing of Foucault
(1978, 1980, 1991). Although Foucault did not write explicitly about risk,
theorists inspired by his work have reshaped and extended his original analysis
in this direction. In the governmentality tradition, theorists such as Castel
(1991), Dean (1999) and O’Malley (2004) have expounded the role of neo-
liberal institutions in constructing understandings of risk that categorize
and order human behaviour. In contrast to preceding epochs the operation of
power in contemporary society is diffuse rather than direct, relying on the active
engagement of citizens (Dean 1999: 19). Governmentality essentially alludes to
the trend for the State to govern through various modes of incitement, provo-
cation and responsibilization (Denney 2005: 35). Central to the theory of
governmentality is the notion of [Link] the operation of discourse,
sets of interlocking ideas and knowledge used by experts gain credence while
others are excluded, determining what is knowable and thinkable about social
issues. Through the circulation of discourses, dominant institutions formulate
language and information that perpetuate prevailing ideas about risk. For
instance, medical, scientific and economic discourses set the bounds of public
knowledge and shape what can and cannot be said about risk (see Wales and
Mythen 2002). According to the governmentality school, expert institutions
deploy discourses of risk to filter information, buttress dominant norms and to
muffle political opposition. Discourses condition human agency by generating
‘truths’ about society that are ‘interiorized’ by individuals, inviting them to
assume ‘subject positions’ (see Foucault 1978, 1980; Mackey 1999: 127). In this
way, power relations are reproduced not by force, but by discourses that
promote self-regulation. Institutional discourses of risk disseminated by experts
provide the boundaries of acceptable action, regulating social practices and
reproducing ‘docile bodies’ that adhere to the status quo. In effect, citizens
respond to discourses by taking up subject positions that require them to
manage their own risks (see Dean 1999; Kemshall 2006).Thus prevalent cultural
discourses both lock into and strengthen the power of dominant groups and
perpetuate institutional control. Not only do institutional discourses of risk
make individuals responsible for their own safety management by becoming
‘prudential citizens’ (Rose 1999) they also encourage the attribution of blame
by attaching risk to marginalized groups. Further, the normalization of dis-
courses is central in identifying and labelling excluded persons and groups. As
Butler (2002: 44) notes, by determining ‘who is an ‘immigrant’, or an ‘asylum
seeker’, or a ‘criminal’ or ‘mad’ or a ‘terrorist’ – discourses serve to sanction the
political authority of their bearers and reinforce power and power relations’.
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 51

The inflection of Foucauldians on the carceral nature of society drives an

approach that emphasizes structure. In essence, the model of the panoptican
becomes universalized as people become schooled in bringing themselves to
order (Mathieson 1997).
In endeavouring to capture the spirit of the times, each of these perspectives
conceives of a different citizen and says discrete things about the capacity of
that citizen to express agency. Followers of Foucault have been accused of
overplaying the power of social structures and muting the possibility of agency,
while Beck understates the coercive potential of the State and is overly san-
guine about the capacity of risk to generate political opposition (see Mythen
2004: 178; Mythen and Walklate 2006a: 394). For his part, Furedi makes too
much play of ‘the despair and darkness in man’s (sic) heart’ (Wrong 1961: 193).
Nevertheless, despite their evident shortcomings these perspectives do convey
powerful imaginings of citizenship that have worked their way into social
science and policy agendas. Before reflecting on the connections between risk,
agency and reflexivity, it is necessary that we grasp the nature of these diffuse
conceptual imaginings.

Which citizen? Cosmopolitan, neurotic or prudential?

As Abbinnett (2000) notes, the citizen imagined by Beck is at once socially

engaged and politicized. Whilst the individualization process to be recounted
in the tale of the prudential citizen is not glossed over by Beck, for him
individualization opens up as well as closes down choice and agency (Mythen
2005: 132). Similarly, the escalation of manufactured risks may produce
anxiety, but such emotions are translated not into inert states of fear but active
political engagement. Seismic global risk incidents essentially stimulate public
challenges to expert institutions that have been rendered incapable of ensur-
ing public safety. Ultimately, manifestations of risk are potentially emancipa-
tory in that they stimulate political reflexivity and activity in single-issue
campaigns amongst concerned members of the public. In recent work Beck,
has become sensitized to the ways in which nation-states can construct ‘fake
cosmopolitanism’ for political currency and deploy ‘anticipatory risk conflicts’
to reinforce social control (see Beck 2006, 2009). Yet the liberating bent of
Beck’s thesis draws him toward emphasizing the power of citizen campaign
groups in driving forward progressive social change.
In Risk Society (1992) Beck vaunts ‘globalization from below’, championing
a system of differential or ‘subpolitics’ as a route to enhancing democracy in
western cultures. In World Risk Society (1999) and World at Risk (2009) the
growing power of global NGOs such as Greenpeace, Amnesty International
and Terre des Hommes are accentuated. Beck believes that successful direct
actions taken by NGOs highlight the abject failure of formal democratic
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52 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

parties to respond to pressing political affairs. The rapid rise of sub-political

movements raises the spectre of a more deliberative and inclusive form of
democracy through which environmental and social risks could be regulated.
For Beck, direct political actions by citizens which by-pass the formal demo-
cratic process have become a motor for generating positive social change:
Subpolitics means the shaping of society from below. Economy, science,
career, everyday existence, private life; all become caught up in the storms of
political debate. But these do not fit into the traditional spectrum of party-
political differences. What is characteristic of the subpolitics of world society
are precisely ad hoc ‘coalitions of opposites’ (of parties, nations, regions,
religions, governments, rebels, classes). Crucially, however, subpolitics sets
politics free by changing the rules and boundaries of the political so that it
becomes more open and susceptible to new linkages – as well as capable of
being negotiated and reshaped. (Beck 1999: 40)
Here the possibility of planetary annihilation is generative of anxieties, but
these anxieties are collectively shared and conduct political struggles in the
form of structured campaigns against the State, businesses and other risk
producers. Subpolitics decouples politics from government and offers a more
direct route to political engagement: ‘one can spare oneself the detour
through membership meetings and enjoy the blessings of political action by
heading straight to the disco’ (Beck 1998: 170). The major risks which society
faces – such as environmental disequilibrium, political violence and AIDS –
affect humanity as a whole. In short, the fate of one is also ultimately the fate
of all: ‘all of us who inhabit the earth – rich and poor, high and low, young
and old – live equally in the embrace of the risk society’ (Jasanoff 1999: 136).
In the risk society narrative, the universal threat of a catastrophic future that
cannot be managed by antiquated institutions activates the public, both indi-
vidually and collectively. In this sense, the failures of social structures engender
personal and public agency. Borrowing from Giddens, Beck (2009: 124) notes
that in risk societies’ ‘active citizens need to practise suitable ways of acquiring
information and to react to and process this information actively’. Activated
and energized by the prospect of global despoliation, ‘trans-national risk com-
munities’ (Beck 2000) invest their energies in fighting political causes through
NGOs, undermining national party politics, destabilizing established institu-
tional forms and harbouring the prospect of planetary salvation. For Beck, the
deleterious effects of short-term economic goals and blind technological
development give rise to the need for a ‘new future-oriented planetary ethics
of responsibility’ (Beck 2009: 15), shaped along the lines of a ‘cosmopolitan
democracy’ (Abbinnett 2000: 115).
Beck’s determination to emphasize the affirmative possibilities of a rise in
risk consciousness is not shared by those who embrace the ‘culture of fear’
perspective. For Furedi, for example, citizens are becoming anxiety ridden,
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 53

enervated and disempowered by risk. Isin (2004: 219) has claimed that the
culture of fear literature has many shortcomings since ‘it is well known that
affects and emotions are integral to everyday conduct. Such states are called
affects and emotions precisely because they do not fit into rational categories of
calculation and assessment. Yet they are equally important in how subjects
assess their probabilities and opportunities’ (2004: 219). A similar criticism
could be levelled at risk society theory, which leaves us looking at a rather
emotionless, rational thinking actor. Quoting Zizek (1999: 342), Isin (2004: 219)
shares the view that risk society theories,‘leave intact the subject’s fundamental
mode of subjectivity: their subject remains the modern subject, able to reason
and reflect freely, to decide on his/her set of norms and so on’. Despite Isin’s
criticisms, we would argue that the fatalism inherent in Furedi’s culture of fear
perspective – the very ‘despair and darkness’ referred to above – has strong
parallels with the culture of neurosis evoked by Isin’s own ‘neurotic citizen’.
Drawing on the notion of biopolitics, Isin goes on to suggest that there is nothing
in Foucault’s analysis that prohibits the inclusion of what he calls ‘the logic of
affect’ into rational risk assessments. In failing to recognize the power of affect,
he suggests that the social scientific embrace of risk has contributed to the
fantasy of Foucault’s bionic citizen, the rational calculator of risks.
Centring affect, through understanding the citizen as a neurotic citizen offers
another vision of the subject that stands in opposition to the bionic [Link]
neurotic citizen ‘is incited to make social and cultural investments to eliminate
various dangers by calibrating its conduct on the basis of its anxieties and
insecurities rather than rationalities, it is also invited to consider itself as part of
a neurological species and understand itself as an affect structure’ (Isin 2004:
223).4 Surmising that the neurotic citizen is the likely product of the bionic
citizen, Isin suggests that this signals a disturbed and disturbing transition since:
the neurotic citizen responsibilizes others for any adversity that may have
overtaken them. Remarkably for the neurotic citizen the other is the bionic
citizen . . . the most fundamental right for the neurotic citizen becomes the
right to angst. (Isin 2004: 233)
In effect, the neurotic subject could be rational but has effectively lost the
capacity to do so, searching instead for the perfect and safe body, absolute
security: the impossible (Isin 2004: 232). Despite the theoretical distancing
sought, this descriptor is ironically both a product of and the stimulus for
Furedi’s (2007: 172) ‘world where literally every human experience comes with
a health warning’.
The final citizen we can discern from risk theorizing is the prudential citizen
brought to life by governmentality thinkers. The notion of a prudential citizen
able to take responsibility for their health, their learning, their pension planning
and so on, took a hold not only because of her/his value in reducing the costs of
all of these things to the state, but also as a moral imperative in diminishing
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54 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

dependency. As Kemshall (2006: 65) states, ‘such prudentialism requires the

citizen to adopt a calculating attitude towards most if not all of his/her decisions,
whether these be decisions over healthy eating options or the installation of
burglar alarms.’ This compliant citizen is a sensible risk assessor conducting
affairs according to the principles of ‘well being’ and ‘actuarial justice’ (Feeley
and Simon 1992) and receives approbation for so [Link] vision of the citizen
embraces risk as a calculable and objective, thus embedding a behavioural, risk
management response to issues ranging from the fear of crime (Skogan 1986)
and crime management (O’Malley 2004) to social policy and health interven-
tions (Kemshall 2006). Such a unitary and unified understanding of risk fuels
images of a prudential citizen whose expressed fears run contra to their per-
ceived risks. For example, in the context of ‘fear of crime’, the victimization/fear
paradox suggests that risk and fear may be inversely correlated (see Maxfield
1984).As a consequence, the ‘fearful’ (historically considered to be women and
the elderly) have duly been labelled as irrational, while the ‘fearless’ (young
males) whose exposure to risk runs similarly contra to their expressed fears, are
labelled as pathological. As Lee (2007) notes, the persistent embrace of the
conceptual binaries that construct the ‘fearing subject’ (namely risk of/fear
from, subjective/objective, emotion/reason, irrational/rational, femininity/
masculinity) in which prudentialism has played such a part,masks the possibility
of a more profound understanding of people’s expressed fears and what they
represent. For example, young Pakistani Britons may be simultaneously the
fearful and the feared, aligned by the media with ‘home-grown’ terrorism, whilst
facing a rising presence of far right extremism at a time in which it cannot be
assumed that the state or the police will be there to protect them (Sharp and
Atherton 2007). Individuals within this group may, rather perversely, also be
prudential citizens responding positively to government advice as a means of
distancing themselves from being constructed as the ‘terrorist other’ (see
Kearon, Mythen and Walklate 2007; Walker 2008).
The foregoing discussion has alluded to three differently accented views of
the citizen in these risk-averse times: the cosmopolitan citizen, the neurotic
citizen and the prudential [Link] each of these accentuations have been
differently embellished in media, policy and political arenas, their origins and
shared genealogy are located in theories of risk that have achieved promi-
nence in the social sciences over the last two decades. So whilst manufactured
insecurity may have become a pervasive phenomenon that harbours possibili-
ties for political action (the cosmopolitan citizen) there is certainly scope for
returns to ‘governing through fear’ (the neurotic citizen). In so far as much
policy work has been predicated on the existence and prevalence of the ratio-
nal risk averse actor (the prudential citizen) it is a moot point as to whether
any of these constructions of citizenship actually facilitate the demand for
reflexive ‘do-it-yourself’ identities (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim 2002; Tulloch
and Lupton 2003). Consequently the question remains as to whether any of
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 55

these images sufficiently resolve one of the key paradoxes of risk theorizing:
namely the complex relationship between agency and structure.

Risk, agency and reflexivity: problems and possibilities

One of the key shortfalls of risk theorizing has been its inability to articulate
a meaningful relationship between structure and agency (See Mythen and
Walklate 2006b). Much of the work discussed above has fallen into the trap of
conflating agency either with responsibility (prudentialism), or affect (neuro-
sis), or political confrontation (cosmopolitanism). This paradox is defined by
Archer (2007: 41) as one in which there is a failure to transcend the dualisms
of subject/object, structure/agency and thus to recognize each as constitutive
of the other.5 As Archer states, this raises the difficulty of how reflexivity can
happen at all: how might individuals reflect upon themselves and their circum-
stances, and make decisions accordingly? Her critical comments on Beck and
Beck-Gernsheim (Archer 2007: 35) that ‘their lack of interest in the process of
reflexivity itself, in the types of subjective deliberations linking different per-
sonal concerns to correspondingly different biographical outcomes’ could be
made equally of the ‘culture of fear’ and the governmentality [Link],
as Archer goes on to observe contemporarily: ‘personal reflexivity acquires an
unprecedented importance in how we make our way through the world’ and it
does so ‘by mediating deliberatively between the objective structural oppor-
tunities confronted by different groups and the nature of people’s subjectively
defined concerns’ (Archer 2007: 61). If we centre a vision of reflexivity of this
kind as the focus of our analysis in understanding the relationship between
risk, agency and structure, what kinds of questions might we be permitted to
ask? The terrain of response is vast, but for the moment we wish to centre on
one key concept that might be pursued somewhat differently if reflexivity were
made central to risk theorizing in this way: security.

As Zedner (2003) has observed, the quest for security is a somewhat paradoxi-
cal one given that the more reassurance given the more anxious and needy
people may become. There is some truth in this assertion, yet it invokes a
rather top-down view of security, reflecting a pre-occupation with the role of
the state in the delivery of security that formally includes the security services,
the criminal justice process and governments in constructing and maintaining
mechanisms and processes designed to ensure security for us all in the course
of securing the state (qua Jessop 2002). But as Loader and Walker (2007: 7)
observe, security is more than this: security is a ‘thick public good’. This means
that security is ‘a constitutive public good – one whose actualization or aspi-
ration is so pivotal to the very purpose of community that at the level of
self-identification it helps to construct our ‘we-feeling’ – our very felt sense of
British Journal of Sociology 61(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
56 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

‘common publicness’ (Loader and Walker 2007: 164). So following on from

this, as Hughes (2007) suggests, asking who it is that gets to be safe/vulnerable,
under which circumstances and why, becomes important. For example, a sense
of security might look somewhat different for a woman living in a violent
relationship whose sense of security on a routine daily basis may only be
sustained through her own capacity to provoke the violence that she knows
through experience is coming her way (see Kirkwood 1993). At least through
provocation she will retain the small power of deciding when it is going to
happen. This is perhaps an example of a rather unpalatable internal conversa-
tion, but a real one nevertheless: a different kind of prudentialism? A contrary
example might be a victim of identity theft. Such an experience will carry
structural consequences for the individual that are likely to impact upon their
financial security, but these are unlikely to impede on their sense of self-
identity which will remain ‘secure’. In other words, security, what it means, how
it is or is not achieved, the extent to which it is mediated by our exposure to
and interaction with a whole range of socio-economic, cultural, political and
technological processes will be multi-faceted and multi-layered and shared
with others. This ‘thick security’ posits an understanding that is more than the
sum of the parts that might comprise an additive human security: top down
plus bottom up (qua Kaldor 2007).
In this example the centring of reflexivity produces an understanding of
security that is not necessarily a top-down, externally driven commodity or a
bottom up production of community partnership, but the result of an internal
conversation,our ability to mull over,think about,and act or not act accordingly.
Viewed in this way, centring reflexivity challenges both the policy agendas that
have flowed from the risk turn in the social sciences and the nature of that risk
turn in and of itself. Put simply, the risk perspectives that we have addressed in
this paper and the associated visions of the citizen attempt to totalize human
experience in a context in which, the social power of uncertainty (risk) is all that
we can be assured of. Moreover the grasp that risk theorizing has on the social
sciences and its associated conflation of agency and structure, however that is
manifested, has unwittingly done a disservice to our ability to make critical
sense of the relationship between risk and agency and has implicated the social
sciences themselves as culpable in the production of this relationship. In the
light of this observation, what inferences can we drawn from the different
conceptions of citizenship here for sociology and for wider society?
It is evident that competing risk theories focus on divergent aspects of risk
and carry assorted assumptions about how risk is comprehended and managed
by individuals and social institutions. The risk society focus on pressing envi-
ronmental dangers that are socially catastrophic reflects a deep-seated realism.
This said, in recent work Beck (2009: 88) has aligned himself with weak
constructionism, most notably through stronger recognition of differential
impacts and perceptions of risk and the role of the media in ‘staging’ risk. The
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 57

governmentality approach is founded on more unambiguous elements of con-

structionism. In the Foucauldian version, risks are defined by discursive prac-
tices that are unrecognizable outside belief systems. In its most potent form, the
governmentality approach posits that risks cannot exist outside of discourse:
‘nothing is a risk in itself; there is no risk in reality’ (Ewald 1991: 199). For many
Foucauldians, such as O’Malley (2006), this makes risk an inherently plastic
technology that has the capacity for use or abuse. Residing closer to the
Foucauldian than the Beckian position, the culture of fear approach eschews
realism and is steadfastly [Link] Beck warns about the environ-
mental consequences of anthropogenic risks, Furedi considers the power of risk
as a cultural totem and its function in the reproduction of social [Link] the
prevailing tendency amongst Foucauldian’s has also been to define risk a
conduit for power, Beck maintains that risks can aggravate power and unsettle
power holders. Rather than being an ‘ally of the powerful’, Beck (2009: 79) sees
risk as ‘an unreliable ally or even a potential antagonist, as a hostile force
confronting the power both of the nation-state and of global capital’. In support
of Beck, there does appear to be general disenchantment with the current
political system in many European countries and a broader trend of distrust in
expert systems as the recent ‘banking crisis’ and the debates following on from
the exposure of British politician’s fraudulent expenses exemplifies.
Public mobilization and protest against a range of possible harms, from the
anti-war movement to the building of airport runways and the financial
crisis – indicate that forms of political reflexivity are growing around risk issues.
Yet despite their increasingly international quality, risk conflicts do not neces-
sarily produce ‘coalitions of opposites’ and/or mutually agreeable political
outcomes. Contests over risk can easily result in value entrenchment, as parties
with irreconcilable perspectives down tools and dig in (see Sparks 2003: 202).
Contra Beck, Marx’s dull compulsion of the economic, twinned with the pres-
sure of dealing with the minutiae of everyday life, serves to ebb against reflexive
engagement with risk information and subsequent political mobilisation.
Equally, single-issue campaigns and criticisms of expert systems must not be
read-off as a deeper commitment to cosmopolitan politics or an inclination to
transform socio-political structures. If we take on board the governmentality
perspective, we must recognize that expert discourses can serve to individualize
coping strategies, promote the unwarranted attachment of political blame and
intensify strategies of surveillance. Further, as Hacking (1990) argues, dis-
courses of risk invoke reflexivity in the sense that they invite individuals to take
up certain socially acceptable positions and behaviours and to reject those
categorized as dangerous or deviant. Beck’s affirmative inclination to attribute
political reflexivity to the individual through cosmopolitan political realism
glosses over the possibility that the language of risk reinforces as well as
undermines social control. Whilst the Foucauldian critique has enriched the
general debate about risk, the discursive approach has itself been rightly
British Journal of Sociology 61(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
58 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

criticized for presenting an ahistoric and passive subject onto whom disciplinary
power is written. Along with Beck, Foucauldians have failed to fully grasp the
manner in which stratification and cultural identities influence individual under-
standings of risk. The same observation might also be made of the work of
Furedi and Isin, although as de Goede (2008) sagely observes, the neurotic
citizen has huge commercial potential due to her/his insatiability for safety.

Conclusion: checking the spectre of the future present

The criticisms above suggest that abstract theorizing about the nature and
the future effects of risk has led social theory into something of a dead end
(Lupton 1999: 6). There remains a palpable need for greater recognition of the
diversity of social subjects and an empirical fleshing out of how people con-
struct and negotiate risks under discrete conditions. Thankfully, there are
routes out of the cul de sac. One such route might involve the development of
risk theory around the impacts of not-knowing on the behaviour of both social
structure and individual agents (see Amoore and de Goede 2008; Aradau and
van Munster 2007). Beck (2009: 116) too has noted that the ‘domination of
non-knowing’ through ‘manufactured non-knowing as existential condition’ is
becoming increasingly central to social life in the twenty first century. This
refusal to acknowledge the ‘existential condition’ in risk theorizing is sup-
ported by shifting modes of risk analysis around crime and security. While risk
assessments previously predicted future outcomes based on past performance,
the calculus of risk used by politicians and securocrats has assumed a more
pre-emptive form in recent years, particularly in the regulation of national
security. The new calculus of risk does not assess the future by focusing on the
past, nor indeed the present. Instead, security assessments are being directed
by the future based question: ‘What if?’ (see Mythen and Walklate 2008). We
would argue that the creeping impact of pre-emptive modes of risk manage-
ment is one that sociologists should seek to scrutinize closely.
The threat to human rights presented by a panoply of modes of pre-crime
control – from control orders and detention without charge at one end, to
extraordinary rendition and indefinite imprisonment at the other – is deeply
troubling. As these examples illustrate, ‘What if?’ questions engender present
‘solutions’ to future risks that are extremely problematic at the level of
criminal and social justice. As de Goede (2008) intimates, projective security
mediations seek to enable action in the present by appealing to the future
dystopic. Such pre-imaginings have real consequences, not just on individuals
caught up in the associated processes, but also because the application of
pre-emptive rationality is driving a culture in which risk scaling of people,
places, and products and legal states of exception are being normalized (see
Zedner 2008). In the search for (undeliverable) absolute security, such ‘vigilant
© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)
 Agency, reflexivity and risk 59

visualities’ (Amoore 2007) are a response to the political impotence of not

knowing enough, and, moreover, of knowing that we do not know enough.
Perhaps then Beck (2009: 129) is actually right in his assertion that ‘the task of
the sociologist is to trace the conflicting anticipations of the worst possible turn
in their effects on human action’.
Bearing this point in mind, the creeping ‘presence of the future’ (Rasmussen
2001) does lend some support to Isin’s (2004) assertion of a functioning neuro-
politics working with a neuro-subject. Yet, contrary to this vision, whilst efforts
to govern through fear clearly exist, our minds have not all become unwitting
labourers in Tillich’s (1952) ‘factory of fear’. This does not mean that pre-
mediations that promote ‘control creep’ are in any way benign (see Innes
2000). The power of the unknown knowns seeps through layers of knowledge
from what can be said in conversations, to how theories might be constructed,
to what might be reported from research through to the wider ranging influ-
ence of politics and policy making. Unknown knowns run much deeper than
the ‘bad silences’ identified by Hallsworth and Young (2008). As Daase and
Kessler (2007: 428) state: ‘here the unknown is represented by the knowledge
that is not known because it is not supposed to be known. This not-to-be-
wanted-to-be-known knowledge is a central category of political decision
processes where information is systematically withheld or disregarded as soon
as it does not fit with operative concepts’. Ironically, the same observation
might be made about much contemporary risk theorizing since its discursive
power is manifest in many aspects of socio-cultural, economic and political life.
In conclusion, this paper has argued that, despite its paradoxical understand-
ing of the relationship between structure and agency, risk theorizing leads us
to frame our understandings of the citizen as cosmopolitan, prudential or a
neurotic. Moreover, these images ironically serve the current political and
policy context well. Such visions are themselves implicated in the processes
whereby citizens actively take on the State’s role of securitization and play to
a context in which states of exception are normalized (see Salter 2008). Con-
sequently, it is important that we look at new ways of thinking about the
relationship between agency and structure that usher in different questions
and different understandings of the contemporary condition. These different
understandings might lead us into thinking about ‘known unknowns’ that are
intimately connected to what is not supposed to be known and is knowable in
political and policy terms. Most people, most of the time, work with, on, and
through the structural conditions in which they find themselves sometimes
prudentially perhaps, sometimes neurotically, but always reflexively. In all of
this, the affluent, resource rich citizen has the capacity to wrap him/herself up
in the safety of their structural/geographical position, while the poor citizen
does not. While such structural inequalities remain it is incumbent on sociolo-
gist to reveal and challenge the routes through which such relations of power
are nurtured and sustained. In the context of the issues discussed here, this
British Journal of Sociology 61(1) © London School of Economics and Political Science 2010
60 Sandra Walklate and Gabriel Mythen

endeavour requires further interrogation of the uses and abuses of risk not
only in the economic and political realm, but also within risk theorizing itself.
(Date accepted: November 2009)

Notes

1. The authors would like to thank the informed and useful in regulating environ-
anonymous reviewers for their comments on mental risk than ‘expert’ knowledge. By
an earlier version of this paper. The faults analysing life narratives, Tulloch and Lupton
that remain are, of course, our own. An (2003) document various forms of resistance
earlier version of this paper was presented shown by individuals to the imposition of
as a Plenary Address to the British Society institutional risk rationalities.
of Criminology, Annual Conference held 4. Drawing on the Freudian premise that
in Huddersfield in July 2008 by Professor neuroses constitute an inevitable part of
Sandra Walklate. the human condition, Isin goes on to trace
2. Most notably in technical endeavours the emergence of this neurotic citizen as the
to define, assess and limit risks to the indi- subject to be managed by government in six
vidual and the environment within science, domains: the economy, the body, the envi-
technology, engineering and medicine (see ronment, the internet, the home, and the
Mythen 2004; Taylor-Gooby and Zinn 2006). borders.
3. In his study of Cumbrian sheep 5. Perhaps with the exception of Gidden-
farmers, Wynne (1996) explicates the ways sian structuration theory and the notion of
in which ‘lay’ knowledge can be more duality.

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© London School of Economics and Political Science 2010 British Journal of Sociology 61(1)