Adam Burgess

‘Nudging’ Healthy Lifestyles: The UK Experiments with the Behavioural Alternative to Regulation and the Market

This article critically reflects upon the introduction of behavioural, ‘nudging’ approaches into UK policy making, the latest in a series of regulatory innovations. Initiatives have focused particularly upon correcting lifestyle risk behaviours, marking a significant continuity with previous ‘nannying’ policy. On the other hand, nudging represents a departure, even inversion of previous approaches that involved the overstating of risk, being based partly upon establishing a norm that bad behaviours are less, rather than more common than supposed. Despite substantive similarities, its attraction lies in the reaction against the former approach but must also be understood in the context of the economic crisis and a diminished sense of liberty and autonomy that makes intimate managerial intervention seem unproblematic. Problems are, in fact, substantial, as nudging is caught between the utility of unconscious disguised direction and the need to allow some transparency, thereby choice. Further, it assumes clear, fixed ‘better outcomes’ but encourages no development of capacity to manage problems, contradicting a wider policy intent to build a more responsible and active citizenry. More practically, nudging faces considerable barriers to becoming a successfully implemented programme, in the context of severe, Conservativeled austerity with which it is now associated.

Risk, time and reason

Abstract Over time, a number of alternative approaches to risk have developed and, while these co-exist, they structure time in different ways and are grounded in different combinations of cognitive rationality and affect. The initial conceptualization of risk, which remains prominent, was based on the use of knowledge from past events to provide the context for choices which minimize harm in the future. It underpins structured approaches to decision making based on use of statistics as a means of calculating the probability of future outcomes. This approach has been challenged by the development of a more forensic approach in which the emphasis is on identifying the specific causes of disasters using hindsight and from the analysis of specific cases making recommendations to prevent future disasters. While this approach has a rational basis, it also addresses the collective emotional responses to disaster and provides a cathartic function. In the late twentieth century a more precautionary approach has emerged, in which the fear of future is given precedence over evidence or lack of evidence of past harm. The precautionary approach is future oriented and casts the future principally in negative, potentially catastrophic terms.

The making of the risk-centred society and the limits of social risk research

Abstract Despite the apparent triumph of social perspectives on risk, the predominant approach to risk is less social and contextual than is often supposed. A widespread acceptance of a constructionist approach is more formal than substantive. Risk ‘objects’ and events remain given and objectified in many accounts, at the same time as they have been subject to little critical empirical enquiry. Iconic risk events such as the BSE crisis and Chernobyl have shaped academic and policy responses to risk despite the gap between their putative and actual impacts. This editorial calls for a more interdisciplinary approach able to trace the historical evolution and changing character of risk perceptions that rigorously analyses and clearly distinguishes the scientific/technical, and socially and politically manufactured dimensions of risk.

Media risk campaigning in the UK: from mobile phones to ‘Baby P’

A distinctive risk campaigning by particular British media emerged in the late 1990s through three issues: mobile phones, genetically modified organisms and the campaign to expose sex offenders. Subsequently such campaigning has become normalised and generalised, culminating with the 2008 campaign to attribute blame for the death of the murdered child, ‘Baby P’. Their distinctive evolution and characteristics are considered. Central to their success and subsequent generalisation is the encouragement provided by increasing government responsiveness and accommodation. The BSE crisis created a political orientation to engage with public anxiety that in these cases meant engagement with campaigning media.

Use of mobile phones in hospitals.

New guidelines are less restrictive but still overcautious

Constructing sexual risk: ‘Chikan’, collapsing male authority and the emergence of women-only train carriages in Japan

Women-only train carriages have been introduced in Japan as a response to widespread groping (chikan) by men. In August 2007, 155 young women completed a survey at a variety of locations in central Tokyo, mainly at the popular meeting places, Shinjuku and Shibuya. The survey involved face-to-face interviews conducted mainly by young female interviewers. The numbers involved are insufficient for rigorous statistical analysis and in this pilot study we were principally interested in further refining ideas and hypotheses for further investigation by considering results in the context of significant contemporary social trends. This article starts by considering a particular cultural context in which the issue of groping resulted in the introduction of women-only train carriages and this official antigroping measure which has been widely accepted. The article then examines womens responses to the availability of women-only train carriages, using surveys carried out in Tokyo. It concludes by considering the specific and anomalous targeting of primarily middle aged ‘salarymen’, a focus understood in the context of the collapse of the ideological power of the patriarchal corporate figure associated with the end of the Japanese economic miracle. Womens use and support for women-only train carriages is not solely dominated by anxiety over the risk of chikan. Our survey indicated that it was a symbolic rejection of a particular type of masculinity, rather than the physical separation from a risk of being groped.

‘Passive Drinking’: A ‘Good Lie’ too Far?

This article reflects on UK Chief Medical Officers (CMO) 2009 announcement that alcohol abuse should be understood as a problem of ‘passive drinking’. This was an attempt to instrumentally problematise drinking drawing on the successful campaign against ‘passive smoking’. An implausible term that originated as an anti-state interventionist joke, both ‘passive drinkings’ lack of impact but also the lack of criticism its revelation attracted are considered. This curious episode is explained in relation to the CMOs distinctive precautionary style, the growing campaign against alcohol in the UK and a wider acceptance of a contemporary politics of health risk where dramatisation has become relatively routine. Despite the failure of this initiative, a widely drawn ‘second hand effects’ case against alcohol persists. More generally, risk/harm framed argument has filled the vacuum left by the discrediting of moral-based approaches and recast a similarly polarised approach to a socially complex practice. This episode indicates a pragmatic ‘good lie’ approach toward lifestyle health risk promotion legitimised by a superficial ‘evidence based’ foundation.

Revisiting the BSE experience: Hindsight and the politicization of food

The Politics of BSE, R. Packer, London, Palgrave Macmillan, pp. 320, £50, (hbk) ISBN 13: 978-1403985293. Whats the Beef?: The Contested Governance of European Food Safety, edited by Christopher K. Ansell and David Vogel, Massachusetts, MIT Press, pp. 397, £17.95 (pbk) ISBN 13: 978-0262511926. This review essay on risk, politics and food focuses particularly on an important new insider account of how the BSE crisis was managed by one of the main civil servants involved. The management of BSE remains a decisive experience in the modern politics of risk that cautions generally against ever downplaying possible risks, and more specifically doing anything ‘unnatural’ with food. It led to the contemporary politicization of food and with it the insistence on only the organic, local and sustainable. What emerges from this new account is how the interpretation of the BSE experience on which current assumptions rest is very selective and laden with hindsight bias. Through revisiting BSE and the real contexts in which decisions were made, this essay raises important questions both about the politics of risk in general and the new consumer lifestyle politics of ‘only natural.’

Real and phantom risks at the petrol station: The curious case of mobile phones, fires and body static

Abstract This case study examines the alleged hazard associated with mobile phone use at petrol stations and suggests that it is a phantom risk. Understanding its persistence in the absence of evidence, a number of factors are outlined. A precautionary safety regime enforced by oil companies in the UK established a restriction on mobile use on station forecourts that had the effect of confirming a danger. Warning signs in mobile phone handbooks had a similar effect and led to further restrictions at petrol stations. Among a number of problematic consequences, most ironic has been to distract from the real cause of the increased number of petrol stations fires at, particularly, American petrol stations. Investigations have identified the real cause; body static generated through vehicle re-entry while refuelling. This episode suggests the need for clarity about the precise reasons behind any restrictions on the use of a popular device that is already established as a potential, but invariably unconfirmed, health hazard.

The Shock of a Social Disaster in an Age of (Nonsocial) Risk

The distinctly socially differentiated impact of the New Orleans flood stands in marked contrast to the nonsocial character of disasters and inquiries we have become accustomed to in the “risk society.”