Modernity

• Modernity: The evolutionary outcome of a transition from traditional

forms of social and political organization accompanying the
industrialization and urbanization of societies.
• It begins with the rejection of life as a cyclical process.
• An influential theory in this era of advanced modernization is reflexive
modernization theory (RMT).
• Reflexive modernization scholars argue that the hyper-rationality of
modernity i.e. instrumental rationality, efficiency, justice through
economic growth, and steady improvement of individual living conditions
through scientific and technical progress has lost its legitimizing power.
 Reflexive Modernization

• Reflexive modernization: The autonomous transition from industrial

society to risk society, driven by the negative, unintentional risks of
modernity.
• This transition could potentially destroy the industrial society, not
through a revolution, but through the “the victory of Western
modernization”.
• It entails “a radicalization of modernity”, which breaks up the
premises and contours of industrial society and opens paths to
another modernity.
 Disenchantment with ‘Modernity’

• The disenchantment is reflected in four separate but complementary social

processes
• Dominance of negative side effects: Environmental degradation, unprecedented
risks, inequitable distribution of resources, and a flattening of life satisfaction.
• Individualization of lifestyles and social careers: Lack a collective identity (such
as social class), social orientation, and ontological security
• Pluralization of knowledge camps and values: Antithetical systems of competing
knowledge claims, moral judgment codes, and behavioral orientations.
• Absence of overarching objectives and goals: All collective actions are challenged
driven by political choices that are incongruent with individuals’ beliefs, values, or
convictions. This leads to the need for more legitimization.
 Giddens and Beck’s arrival

• These societal changes, emerged in the 1980s and 1990s largely

through the scholarship of the German sociologist Ulrich Beck and the
British sociologist Anthony Giddens.
• Giddens launched his career in the 1970s. Giddens’s contribution to
RMT began with his publication of ‘The Consequences of Modernity’
in 1990.
• Three key questions surrounding ‘Risk society’ are raised regarding
social order, risk knowledge, and institutional and political
responses.
 1. Social Order: Reflexive Modernization

• What social order emerges in advanced modern societies where

technological and ecological risks are virtually everywhere?
• The risk society is an amalgam of three related elements
1. Risk;
2. Reflexive modernization; and
3. Detraditionalization and individualization.
 Social Order: Reflexive Modernization

• For both Beck and Giddens, risks are manufactured uncertainties.

• Beck’s early work (e.g., Beck 1992c) focused almost exclusively on the
unintended consequences of decision making. Eg. Nuclear power
plants hazards, global warming. However, after 9/11 (e.g., Beck
2009b) also emphasize the importance of intended consequences. Eg.
Terrorism
• Risk no longer circumscribed spatially or temporarily rather they
transcend all boundaries.
 Social Order: Reflexive Modernization

• For Beck the “Risk society” is the decaying remnant of industrial

society; The beginning of a new stage of modernization referred as
“reflexive modernity” and later as “second modernity”.
• Beck and Grande argue that nation-states must shift from a national
paradigm to a cosmopolitan paradigm within this “second age of
modernity” where we recognize and reintegrate “the other”.
 Five major characteristics of Risk in
Contemporary era

• Transboundary effects: Modern risks transgress sectoral, social, national, and

cultural boundaries
• Globalizing effects: Risks tend to affect everybody and frequently involve irreversible
harm. E.g. Climate change
• Increase of penetrating power: Risk tend to penetrate and transform social and
cultural systems significantly and to change social behavior. E.g. GM crops
• Incalculable nature: Due to the lack of boundaries and the complex global
consequences of taking risks, the instruments and tools for calculating risks are
inadequate and inaccurate
• Lack of accountability: victims of risks are being unduly burdened without their
consent, without any institution or person being accountable for future damage. E.g.
Car exhaust
 Reference

• Beck, U., 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage Publications.

• Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Standford
University Press
• Rosa. Eugene A., Renn, O. and McCright, Aaron M. (2014)Chapter “Reflexive
Modernization Theory and Risk: The Work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens”
in The Risk Society Revisited: Social Theory and Risk Governance, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press
Prerequisite/Recapitulations

Lecture # 3
 World Risk Society

• We live in a risk society not only because innumerable decisions

produce intended and unintended consequences, but also because
“the idea of the controllability of decision-based side effects and
dangers which is guiding for modernity has become questionable
mainly because of three reasons:
• Global ecological threats
• Global financial crises
• Terrorism
prompting Beck to shift from “risk society” to “world risk society.
 World risk society

• World risk society acknowledges

1. The global scope of risks,
2. Questions our notion of “society,”
3. Challenges the legitimacy of nation-states, and
4. Forces what he calls “cosmopolitanism”
 Risk Knowledge: Reflexive Scientization
and Unawareness

• What is our knowledge about these risks?

• The quintessential risks of advanced modernity—for example, genetically

modified organisms, nanotechnology, and climate change—are increasingly
complex in their causes and effects
• science has entered a second, highly reflexive phase in which it is
confronted with the products and problems of its own creation.
• science becomes more and more necessary, but at the same time, less and
less sufficient for the socially binding definition of truth” (Beck 1992c: 156).
• Different sectors of society—most notably, risk producers and risk bearers
—employ their own scientists to raise or refute charges
• In the risk society, producers and bearers of risk conflict with each
other (and debate among themselves) over relations of definition that
are largely unchanged from modern industrial society, which are
inadequate for the risk society (Beck 1995).
• By relations of definition, Beck (1999: 149–150) means the standards,
rules, and capacities that facilitate the identification and assessment
of risks. Among these are the standards of proof, burden of proof, and
standards of compensation.
 Institutional and Political Responses: Subpolitics

• How can societies develop the institutional and political means for
governing and managing risk effectively?
• Beck envisions a space for public participation in risk decisions.
• Between the remnants of scientific voices is an increased role for
citizens to identify, assess, and manage technological and ecological
risks: “its goal would be to break the dictatorship of laboratory science
. . . by giving the public a say in science and publicly raising questions”.
• In risk society, knowledge claims about risks need to be negotiated
among scientists, political stakeholders, and laypeople—in effect, a
negotiation among different epistemologies.
• Beck both describes and prescribes a wider and deeper democratization. many
new risks (e.g., nuclear power plants, climate change) have a democratizing
power, since exposure to these risks cuts across established social divisions. As a
result, they create the potential for new alliances that provide heightened
opportunities for public participation.
• risk governance and management: it is a call for greater public involvement and
for the extension of democratic processes in assessing and managing risks. By
relying on the sciences alone and the inordinate role of experts, democratic
societies have failed to provide viable institutions for the democratic governance
and management of risks.
• Risk producers should bear the burden of proof, and standards of proof should be
revised via public participation in an ecological democracy (Goldblatt 1996: 172).
• large-scale technological and ecological disasters overwhelm nation-
states’ political and economic institutions and delegitimize their
assurances of security in the risk society.
• this failure of nation-states (via legitimation crises) is occurring at the
same time as the globalization of risks.
• The latter, magnified by global media coverage, means we are
increasingly recognizing that “we are all trapped in a shared global
space of threats—without exit” (Beck 2009b: 56). Again, this is what
Beck refers to as “cosmopolitanism”.
• Via the process of cosmopolitanism, social actors begin to realize that we are
all neighbors sharing the world, which may prompt them to reintegrate “the
other” first into our line of sight, and then into our moral consideration.
• He believes that mass media—particularly television news— help to raise the
risk consciousness of individuals, and thus to empower social movements,
through dramatic coverage of catastrophes (Beck 1992a, 2009b).
• Beck (1999) maintains that, because of their longevity, organizational assets,
and focus, social movements play a central role in this democratizing process.
• He believes that NGOs have the capability to act across borders and truly
globally.
• Cosmopolitan influence can be exercised by subpolitical actors
because they are not bound to national territories or regional
confinements.
• Indeed, much domestic and foreign policymaking over the past
several decades has been shaped from below by grassroots pressure
from environmental, women’s, and peace movements that are
transnational in scope.
• reflexive modernization necessitates an even more fundamental reinvention of
politics. For Beck (1994b, 1997b), this means subpolitics.
• emergent structural element where political processes are conducted outside
• established representative institutions at social sites previously deemed
nonpolitical: “the decoupling of politics from government” (Beck 2009b: 95).
• While the agents of traditional politics are almost always collective agents
focusing their attention toward nation-states, the agents of subpolitics are diffuse,
ad hoc networks of individuals acting within an emerging global civil society.
• Bypassing existing political institutions, subpolitics shapes political action from
below through spontaneous, ad hoc individual participation in political decisions
 Reference

• Beck, U., 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage Publications.

• Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Standford
University Press
• Rosa. Eugene A., Renn, O. and McCright, Aaron M. (2014)Chapter “Reflexive
Modernization Theory and Risk: The Work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens”
in The Risk Society Revisited: Social Theory and Risk Governance, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press
Prerequisite/Recapitulations

Lecture # 4
 Giddens and Social Order: Manufactured Uncertainty and
Institutionalized Risk Environments

• What social order emerges in advanced modern societies where

technological and ecological risks are virtually everywhere?
• With The Consequences of Modernity, Giddens explained the essential
dynamics of the modern era and launched his contribution to RMT.
• three characteristics of modern social institutions that, for Giddens
(1990), explain why they are qualitatively different from those in
earlier eras
 Three Distinctive Characteristics of
Modern Social Institutions

1. Extreme rapidity of change

2. Vast extensiveness of change (i.e., near-global reach)
3. “Intrinsic nature of modern institutions,” some of which did not
exist in earlier eras (e.g., the nation-state)
 Three Factors Explaining the Dynamism of Modernity

• Separation of time and space (e.g., worldwide diffusion of mechanical clocks and standardization of
calendars)
• Disembedding of social systems via two mechanisms: symbolic tokens (e.g., money) and expert systems
(e.g., science)
• Reflexive ordering and reordering of social, political, and economic relations (e.g., reflexivity in knowledge
and reflexivity in action)
• Giddens (1985, 1990, 1991) argues that modernity represents a discontinuous break from past eras.
• Central to Giddens’s characterization of modernity is his analysis of the contemporary era’s four core
institutions.
• Giddens (1990) to identify industrialism as the main force that transforms traditional societies into modern
ones.
• The defining features of industrialism, which—through its application of science and technology—is the key
driver of widespread technological and ecological risks in modernity
• he argues that we are experiencing the modernization of modernity—captured in his terms “high modernity”,
“late modernity” (Giddens 1991: 3), and “radicalized modernity” (Giddens 1990: 149–150).
• Two factors producing the erratic character of modernity are unintended consequences (aggravated by
systems complexity) and the reflexivity or circularity of social knowledge, whereby new knowledge alters the
nature of the world (Giddens 1990).
• Giddens (1985) argued that modern environmental problems were caused by the conjunction of industrialism
and capitalism, before he shifted to assign primary blame to industrialism.
 Institutional Dimensions (and High Consequence
Risks) of Modernity (Giddens 1990b: 59, 171)

• Capitalism: Capital accumulation in context of competitive labor and product markets (high-consequence
risk: collapse of economic mechanisms)
• Industrialism: Transformation of nature; development of built environment (high-consequence risk:
ecological decay or disaster)
• Military power: Control of means of violence in context of industrialization of war (high-consequence risk:
nuclear conflict or large-scale warfare)
• Surveillance: Control of information and social supervision (high-consequence risk: growth of totalitarian
power)
 Core Features of Industrialism
(Giddens 1985: 139)

• Inanimate sources of power are mobilized in the production and circulation of commodities
• Mechanization of products and economic processes such that there are routinized processes creating a flow of
produced goods
• The use of inanimate sources of material power in either production or in processes affecting the circulation
of commodities
• Workplaces are centralized, wholly devoted to productive activity, and separate from the domestic locale
 Reference

• Beck, U., 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage Publications.

• Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Standford
University Press
• Rosa. Eugene A., Renn, O. and McCright, Aaron M. (2014)Chapter “Reflexive
Modernization Theory and Risk: The Work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens”
in The Risk Society Revisited: Social Theory and Risk Governance, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press
Prerequisite/Recapitulations

Lecture # 4
• In traditional societies, danger derived primarily from an extrinsic, often capricious nature— that is, the
vagaries of climate and natural disasters often controlled the destinies of humans. However, Giddens does not
consider these as constituting risks. Rather, he terms them “external threats.”
• According to Giddens (1990), the phenomenon of risk is “manufactured uncertainty,” a point underscored by
the fact that the word “risk” came into common usage only in the modern period.
• The uncertainty people feel in modern times is manufactured through human activities and decisions
(Giddens 2003c). Hence, risk is an inevitable element in a system that depends on human decision making
and domination over nature (Giddens 1991).
 The Risk Profile of Modernity

1. Risk comes from human decisions in the created environment (technological risk) or socialized nature
(ecological risk)
2. Perception of risk as risk
3. Well-distributed awareness of risk (i.e., many of the dangers we face collectively are known to wide publics)
4. Development of institutionalized risk environments affecting the life chances of millions (e.g., investment
markets)
5. Globalization of risk leads to increased intensity (e.g., nuclear war can threaten survival of humanity)
6. Globalization of risk leads to increased extensiveness (e.g., changes in the global division of labor affects
large numbers of people on the planet)
7. Awareness of the limitations of expertise (i.e., no expert system can be wholly expert in terms of the
consequences of the adoption of expert principles)
(Giddens 1990b: 124–125)
• Giddens (1991) describes modernity as a “risk culture.”
• For Giddens (1990, 1991), the increased degree of manufactured uncertainty and the pervasive spread of risk
have led to the institutionalization of risk environments. Institutionalized risk environments are systems that
“are constituted through risk, rather than certain risks being incidental to them” (Giddens 1991: 118).
• Two qualities of institutionalized risk environments are particularly noteworthy.
• The first is that virtually everyone is exposed to risks, regardless of whether they enjoy benefits from them or
are involved in choices about their generation and acceptability (Giddens 1991, 2003c). As Giddens (1991:
22) is fond of saying, “No one can ‘opt out.’”
• The second is that, given the lingering threat of low-probability, high-consequence risks, these
institutionalized risk environments carry with them the possibility of extreme disaster (Giddens 1990), as
witnessed with climate change (Giddens 2009a, 2009b) or with the near-collapse of the world financial
economy in what has become known as the “Great Recession.”
• Globalization, for Giddens, increases the intensity and extensiveness of risks around the world. Defined as
“the intensification of worldwide social relations which link distant localities in such a way that local
happenings are shaped by events occurring many miles away and vice versa,” present-day globalization,
according to Giddens (1990: 64), is no longer a process of unidirectional imperialism.
• Instead, it is disorderly and chaotic (Giddens 2003c).24 The global spread of industrialism, however uneven
and sporadic, has produced the global spread of manufactured uncertainty and high-consequence risks
(Giddens 1990).
• Globalized risks are more intensive than traditional or local risks because the pace, scale, and consequences
are of substantially higher magnitude.
 What is our knowledge about these risks?

• Giddens identifies three reasons for the limitations of science and other expert systems in
advanced modernity, which also explains what he sees as sharp declines in laypeople’s trust in
expert systems.
• First, experts and laypeople recognize that science—as organized skepticism mobilized on the
principle of doubt—is always in flux. Giddens (2003c: 31) refers to this as its “essentially mobile
character.” What we know scientifically often changes rapidly, especially as attention is directed to
emerging risks (Giddens 1994b).
• Second, increasing specialization in science has accelerated these trends. On one level, greater
specialization means that experts—even the best of them—are laypeople on most issues most of
the time, signaling a fundamental limitation of synthetic expertise. On a deeper level, greater
specialization makes it harder to see and control consequences beyond the narrow domain of
expertise (Giddens 1991).
 What is our knowledge about these
risks?

• Most technological and ecological risks are controversial, with

competing stakeholders expressing conflicting claims. Expert risk
assessment cannot be made with the precision that laypeople
increasingly desire (Giddens 1990).
• Indeed, risk assessment itself becomes risky: “risk calculation has to
include the risk of which experts are consulted, or whose authority is
to be taken as binding” (Giddens 1994a: 87).
• New forms of manufactured uncertainty (e.g., industrialization of
animal agriculture, centralized packaging of green leafy vegetables)
seem to evoke incalculability. In fact, even whether a risk exists at all
is likely to be disputed (Giddens 2003c).
• Furthermore, to the extent that risk can be assessed and threats can be controlled,
such assessment and control can be done only for the present, because the
accuracy levels of assessment fall to zero when one tries to assess ecological risks
far into the future—such as the risks of nuclear waste whose radioactive hazards
last for as long as a million years.
• Giddens conceptualizes two related dimensions of reflexivity (O’Brien 1999),
operating at the macro and micro levels, respectively.
• First there is institutional reflexivity, or the reflexivity of knowledge and meaning
(Giddens 1991), which relates to Beck’s (1992c) reflexive scientization (Reflexive
scientization accounts for the substance or definition of what is structured and is
clearly grounded in Giddens’s (1984) earlier notion of the double hermeneutic, where
sociological concepts explaining social life routinely enter and transform the
interpretive vocabulary of laypersons. Apparently, in his scheme, scientific concepts
surrounding risk do the same.
• Giddens (1990: 38) writes, “The reflexivity of modern social life consists in the fact
that social practices are constantly examined and reformed in the light of incoming
information about those very practices, thus constitutively altering their character.”
Expert claims and scientific knowledge are especially open to revision and refutation,
as science and other expert systems are presumed to be cumulative, self-correcting
systems.
• Giddens’s second dimension of reflexivity—self-reflexivity or the reflexivity of action—where individual
social actors accentuate the monitoring of their own conduct (Giddens 1974, 1990).
 Reference

• Beck, U., 1992. Risk Society. London: Sage Publications.

• Giddens, Anthony (1990). The Consequences of Modernity, Stanford: Standford
University Press
• Rosa. Eugene A., Renn, O. and McCright, Aaron M. (2014)Chapter “Reflexive
Modernization Theory and Risk: The Work of Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens”
in The Risk Society Revisited: Social Theory and Risk Governance, Philadelphia:
Temple University Press