Risk and Everyday Life.(Book review)

RISK AND EVERYDAY LIFE John Tulloch and Deborah Lupton Sage Publications, London: 2003, ISBN 0761947590; PB 152pp; USD 32.95 / AUD 29.95

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?