Anthony Giddens

Central problems in social theory : action, structure and contradiction in social analysis

Preface Introduction 1. Structuralism and the Theory of the Subject 2. Agency, Structure 3. Institutions, Reproduction, Socialization 4. Contradiction, Power, Historical Materialism 5. Ideology and Consciousness 6. Time, Space, Social Change 7. The Prospects for Social Theory Today Notes and References Index

Risk and Responsibility

level. Risks only exist when there are decisions to be taken, for reasons given earlier. The idea of responsibility also presumes decisions. What brings into play the notion of responsibility is that someone takes a decision having discernable consequences. The transition from external to manufactured risk is bringing about a crisis of responsibility, because the connections between risk, responsibility and decisions alter. This is a crisis of responsibility with negative and positive features, roughly corresponding to the negative and positive aspects of risk. Given the inherently ambiguous nature of most situations of manufactured risk, and the inherent reflexivity of these situations, responsibility can neither easily be attributed nor assumed. This applies both where responsibility means limiting risk (as in ecological risks, or health risks) and where risk is an energising principle (financial markets). Several consequences follow: 1. The emergence of what Beck calls ‘organised irresponsibility’. By this he means that there are a diversity of humanly created risks for which people and organisations are certainly ‘responsible’ in a sense that they are its authors but where no one is held specifically accountable. Various questions then come to the fore. Who is to determine how harmful products are, what side effects are produced by them, and what level of risk is acceptable? How can ‘sufficient proof’ be determined in a world full of contested knowledge claims and probabilities? If there are damages to be paid, or reparations made, who is to decide about compensation and appropriate forms for future control or regulation? Much of the ‘social interrogation’ of risk and responsibility takes place through the prism of external risk and simple modernisation. This is true, for example, of anyone who expects an actuary to predict risk, and therefore assess responsibility, on the basis of past trends; or of anyone who supposes that one can simply turn to experts to provide solutions. Coping with situations of organised irresponsibility is likely to become more and more important in the fields of law, insurance and politics, but this won’t be easy to do precisely because of the rather imponderable character of most circumstances of manufactured risk. The dilemma of scaremongering versus cover-ups is a direct indication of the deep seated nature of the problems involved here. 2. Some say that the most effective way to cope with the rise of manufactured risk is to limit responsibility by adopting the ‘precautionary principle’. The notion of the precautionary principle seems to have first emerged in The Modern Law Review [Vol. 62 8 s The Modern Law Review Limited 1999 Germany in the 1980s, in the context of the ecological debates that were carried on there. At its simplest, it proposes that action on environmental issues (and by inference other forms of risk) should be taken even though there is scientific uncertainty about them. Thus in the 1980s, in several Continental countries, programmes were initiated to counter acid rain, whereas in Britain lack of conclusive evidence was used to justify inactivity on this and other pollution problems too. Yet the precautionary principle isn’t always helpful or even applicable as a means of coping with problems of responsibility. The precept of ‘staying close to nature’, or of limiting innovation rather than embracing it, can’t always apply. The reason is that the balance of benefits and dangers from scientific and technological advance, and other forms of social change, is imponderable. We may need quite often to be bold rather than cautious in supporting scientific innovation or other forms of change. This having been said, variations on the precautionary principle can nevertheless be a significant way of reintroducing responsibility. One variant of the principle, for example, is that firms producing goods should think through the whole product cycle before those goods are released onto the market or relevant technical processes utilised. Thus in the Brent Spar episode, the company putting up the oil platform in the first place had not adequately thought through to the final point of effective and reasonably safe disposal. 3. Situations of manufactured risk shift the relation between collective and individual responsibility in many risk situations. Although in many circumstances individuals cannot be held culpable, this is not the same as non-culpability in conditions of organised irresponsibility. In the latter case, this results from viewing responsibilities through the lenses of external or passive risk. Consider, for instance, health risks. Many people get ill through no fault of their own. But a large proportion of illnesses are related both to lifestyle practises and to wider conditions of the ‘created environment’. It doesn’t make any sense to suppose that liability in these circumstances can remain wholly with the collectivity, whether this be government or an insurance company. The active assumption of responsibility, as in attempts to reduce levels of smoking, becomes part of the very definition of risk situations and therefore the attribution of responsibility. Something quite similar applies to our responsibilities towards future generations. When most risk was external, such responsibility was relatively limited: nature was largely intact. Our responsibilities to future generations now are thoroughly infused with decisions we have to take resulting from our transformation of nature. 4. These considerations are relevant to one of the major political issues of our times, the future of the welfare state. The history of the welfare state in all countries is a tangled one. The welfare state emerged in some part as a means of holding back the aspirations of the poor and of controlling them – it had some of its roots in the political right. In recent years, however, as described earlier, the left has appropriated the welfare state as its own project. The debate around the welfare state has therefore concentrated to a considerable degree upon its role in limiting or reducing inequality. But the welfare state is more correctly seen as a form of collective risk management. The idea that the welfare state should be understood as a ‘safety’ or ‘provident’ state has been raised most forcefully in the writings January 1999] Risk and Responsibility s The Modern Law Review Limited 1999 9 of the French thinker Francois Ewald. The welfare state is tied into the basic suppositions of modernity – that security comes from the ever more effective control by human beings of their material and social environments. The crisis of the welfare state is usually represented as a fiscal one. If the welfare state is in trouble, it is because people won’t pay the taxes needed to fund welfare systems properly. There is some validity to this, but it is more illuminating to see the crisis of the welfare state as a crisis of risk management. The welfare state was built up on the presumption of external or passive risk. If you become unemployed, fall ill, become disabled or lose your home, the welfare state will step in to protect you. Welfare systems must now confront large areas of manufactured risk, shifting the relation between risk and responsibility. It isn’t surprising that there is now a great deal of talk about the need to connect rights with responsibilities. Unconditional rights might seem appropriate when individuals bear no responsibility for the risks they face, but such is not the case in situations of manufactured risk. 5. Where a society hasn’t got effective means of dealing with organised irresponsibility, the result isn’t always that no one is held culpable. On the contrary, the price of manufactured uncertainty is probably closely associated with the emergence of the ‘litiginous’ society. Where a common ‘contract of responsibility’ has broken down, culpability can appear everywhere. Here indemnity has effectively been separated from causality. I might be held responsible, for example, if someone is hurt through slipping on my garden path. 6. The theme of responsibility has to be integrated with a concern for the two sides of risk. The negative and positive sides of risk are still often discussed as though they were separate from one another. This translates into a division between two large bodies of literature. It is a remarkable fact that most of those who write about environmental risk make no reference at all to the literature on financial or entrepreneurial risk, or vice versa. Two of the most influential books to have been written about risk over the past ten years, for example, are Risk Society by Ulrich Beck and Against the Gods written by Peter Bernstein. Yet these books make no reference at all to one another. The fact that risk is often a positive or energising phenomenon is relevant to most of the situations of risk and responsibility discussed above, not just to economic risk. Thus to create a more effective welfare state, it is important that in some situations people are psychologically and materially able to take risks albeit in a ‘responsible’ way. It isn’t a good outcome for the individual or the wider society where a person is stuck on benefits or unwilling to take the risk of plunging into the labour market. The same applies to someone caught up in a dysfunctional or violent relationship. Risk is not only closely associated with responsibility, but also with initiative and the exploration of new horizons – something which takes us back to our starting point when the notion was first developed in post-

Social Theory Today

Introduction: Anthony Giddens and Jonathan H. Turner. 1. The Centrality of the Classics:. Jeffrey C. Alexander. 2. Behaviourism and After:. George C. Homans. 3. Symbolic Interactionism:. Hans Joas. 4. Parsonian Theory Today:. In Search of a New Synthesis: Richard Munch. 5. Analytical Theorizing:. Jonathan H. Turner. 6. Structuralism, Post--Structuralism and the Production of Culture: Anthony Giddens. 7. Ethnomethodology:. John C. Heritage. 8. Structuration Theory and Social Praxis:. Ira J. Cohen. 9. World--Systems Analysis:. Immanuel Wallerstein. 10. Class Analysis: Ralph Miliband. 11. Critical Theory: Axel Honneth. 12. Sociology and the Mathematical Method: Thomas P. Wilson. Index.

Sociology : a brief but critical introduction

An introduction to sociology. It incorporates discussion of recent developments in both social theory and empirical social research - developments to which Giddens has directly contributed.

Emile Durkheim: Selected Writings

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Time, Space and Regionalisation

Most social analysts treat time and space as mere environments of action, and accept unthinkingly the conception of time, as mensurable clock time, characteristic of modern Western culture. With the exception of the recent works of geographers — of which more in a moment — social scientists have failed to construct their thinking around the modes in which social systems are constituted across time-space. I want to argue that investigation of this issue is one main task of what I call the theory of structuration; it is not a specific type or ‘area’ of social science, which can be pursued or discarded at will. It is at the heart of social theory, and should hence also be regarded as of very considerable importance for the conduct of empirical research in the social sciences.

ELITES IN THE BRITISH CLASS STRUCTURE

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Power, the Dialectic of Control and Class Structuration

In this discussion I shall seek to draw some connections between certain aspects of the theory of structuration and the analysis of class structure in capitalist societies. The theory of structuration is based upon the following claims: that social theory (which I take to be relevant equally to each of the social scientific disciplines: sociology, anthropology, psychology and economics, as well as history) should incorporate an understanding of human behaviour as action; that such an understanding has to be made compatible with a focus upon the structural components of social institutions or societies; and that notions of power and domination are logically, not just contingently, associated with the concepts of action and structure as I conceptualise them.1 I shall not be concerned to substantiate these claims, but shall attempt rather to trace out a few of their implications for issues that I take to be important to class analysis.

La estructura de clases en las sociedades avanzadas

En la sociologia contemporanea el problema de la estratificacion, y dentro de el, el problema de las clases, es un tema de renovada vigencia. A. Giddens va a realizar un exhaustivo analisis de la estructura de clases centrando el problema de las sociedades economicamente desarrolladas. Durante el desarrollo del trabajo, Giddens realizara continuas alusiones a Marx y a Weber, como pilares ideologicos de las tendencias actuales sobre el problema de la estructura de clases.

Hermeneutics and Social Theory

‘Hermeneutics’ — the theory of interpretation — has only recently become a familiar term to those working in the social sciences, at least in the English-speaking world. On the face of it this is an oddity, for the hermeneutic tradition stretches back at least as far as the late eighteenth century; and the term ‘hermeneutics’ derives from the Greeks. But this neglect is less odd than it appears, since the hermeneutic tradition was most firmly established in Germany, and many of the key texts remain untranslated into English. The concept of verstehen, the unifying notion of the hermeneutic tradition, became most widely known in the English-speaking world through its adoption by Max Weber. As such, it was subject to scourging attack by those associated with what I shall call the ‘orthodox consensus’.1 The controversy about verstehen in the English-speaking literature,2 however, largely by-passed some of the most significant questions raised by the hermeneutic tradition. Weber was only influenced in some part by that tradition, drawing his methodological ideas more strongly from the work of Rickert and the ‘Marburg School’.