Institutional Mythologies and Dual Societies in the Management of Risk

Abstract

The risk assessment fraternity is well aware by now of the limited role played by various “technical”, “rational”, or “analytical” approaches to risks in real decision making contexts^*. Reactions to this news vary from the familiar technocratic lament about the irrational ways of the world outside their rational bastions, to the vigorous celebration of the political and psychological “underworlds” which impose those limits on the technocratic perspective. Eschewing these polarized extremes, however, most people in the field are still working out their responses, as are those like myself who are really marginal to it, and who came with an already well developed experience of the sociological dimensions and instrumental limitations of scientific rationality. Given that reactions are still in the formulative stage; given the centrality of the idea of scientific rationality in risk assessment philosophies and methodologies (and in modern policy making generally); and given that appropriate responses are of practical importance in policy making; I shall attempt in this paper to outline some reasons why the sociological analysis of scientific rationality that has developed to some maturity in the last few years is directly relevant to the kinds of questions now facing risk assessment when it attempts to define where it should be heading next. In the process I shall outline some areas of research under the general area of risk assessment of technology politics that this different perspective suggests. There is a potentially important though as yet unrealized correspondence between many of the insights from the psychological research which has influenced risk analysis and the sociological analysis of scientific rationality. In presenting the latter my aim is not to upstage the former but to point out how the naturally individualistic learnings of psychology can and must be developed into sociological and anthropological frameworks for formulating questions and possibilities. If there is one central concern of this paper it is the following.