Embracing Risk: The Changing Culture of Risk and Responsibility (review)

Editors Baker and Simon trace the evolution of modern society into one of "more insurance for more people" and then provide a strong case that the next evolution is beginning. They contend that society is in the process of an important transformation in the approach to risk and responsibility — an approach they call "embracing risk" — and support that view by analyzing the role of insurance institutions in the distribution of responsibility. Embracing Risk captures two related cultural trends: risk spreading and a subsequent reaction against risk spreading, which has resulted in efforts to make people more individually accountable for risk. In that discussion they identify a whole set of value-laden questions facing society including one important focus on the interrelatedness of the resulting scheme. They remind us that one person's security can (and does) promote another person's risk.

The book's eleven chapters are united under the banner of the sociology of insurance and risk. The essays are intended to reflect a variety of efforts to bring into view changes along two axes: changing ways of governing risk and changing ways of doing the sociology of insurance and risk. The editors see the embrace of risk more as recognition of the limits of risk spreading than as a wholesale replacement for it. The editors claim that the book focuses less on what is a risk than on the use of risk in the social construction of reality.

The book is treated in two parts. The first part focuses on the interplay between risk and insurance in various historical and social contexts. The second chapter by Baker explores shifting relationships between risk, insurance and responsibility, including how ideas about responsibility and risk shape insurance and vice versa. Deborah Stone's essay in Chapter 3 introduces the concept of the moral opportunity of insurance which, in her words, "creates social mechanisms that tend to increase what gets perceived as insurable and deserving of collective support." (p. 53). In Chapter, 4 Geoffrey Clark provides an historical look at gambling and the development of the modern insurance regime in 18^th century England. Developing the theme chronologically, Pat O'Malley follows with an examination of the governance of insurance in the 19^th and 20^th centuries that explores changing ideas about the moral development of the working poor. Chapter 5 discusses the role of insurance in the active construction of individual and social responsibility. Carol Heimer's perceptions in Chapter 6 see expanding insurance regimes as a coercive force that reinforces social class differences by restricting choices available to those that cannot access insurance. She also turns the tables on insurers by characterizing the insurance institution as a moral hazard threat because they seek to minimize what gets classified as loss. The final chapter in Part One finds Martha McCluskey exploring the relationship between differing visions of insurance and the increasing inequality within and among societies. She looks at workers compensation, the IMF, and the Federal Reserve. It explicitly asks who insurance companies protect. "Who takes the risk and who gets the security?"

The second part of the book focuses on the concept of embracing risk in fields outside of insurance. In particular, it examines how risk thinking plays out in areas in western society by Simon's discussion of risk and security in the context of extreme sports, Rose's discussion of the modern mental health systems community, and Ericson and Haggerty's examination of the police as agents of a risk society. Through these diverse examples, the editors attempt to demonstrate that risk is not objective, but rather a socially constructed concept.

The concluding chapter by François Ewald suggests that the logic of government may be moving beyond risk to precaution. He discusses the shift in the 19^th century from providence and individual responsibility to a 20^th century view of prevention and solidarity. Now, in the 21^st century, he sees...