Confronting Uncertainties: Process Sociology Converges with the Ecological Risk Sociology of the Becks

Abstract

The ecological risk sociology developed by Ulrich and Elizabeth Beck share with process sociology common commitments to understanding the means of orientation. There has been little engagement between process sociology and the risk scholarship of the Becks. This is attributable to their perceived use of reductive concepts such as modernity/modernisation associated with the work of Anthony Giddens. In response, this chapter engages with processual critiques of the Becks and clarifies their particular strand of risk sociology. Both process and the risk sociology of the Becks confront the uncertainties of human relations via mutual concerns with the growth of knowledge processes, interdependence and power relations. The chapter concludes by demonstrating the opportunities for further engagement between process and risk scholarship. This through understanding how globalised double binds in the form of overlapping ecological, economic, violence, health and migration struggles continue to pressurise contemporary societies.

the crying need for human beings is the production of a solid body of reliable knowledge about themselves, the complex societies that they form and why people recurrently drift into crisis after crisis, including war.

—Eric Dunning spoken to Chris Rojek (2004, 343)

the concept of risk reveals the ‘difference of the century’ between what is threatening globally and what answers are possible within the framework of nation-state politics […] risk as it is understood is not a state of exception—like crisis—but is instead becoming the normal situation.

—Ulrich Beck (2013b, 69)