Abstract
Among the various approaches to analyzing people’s attitudes to risks, technologies, and their managing institutions, one can see two fundamentally different metaphysics from which nearly all approaches originate. By metaphysics I mean a closed loop—a cosmology—of taken-for-granted views of human nature, social interaction, public life, rationality, values, and ways of observing which confirm our founding assumptions and faiths.
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References
S.B. Barnes and S.A. Shapin (eds.). Natural Order. London, Sage. 1979.
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M. Thompson. “The cultural construction of nature and the natural destruction of culture.” paper to International Conference on Nature. Culture. Technology. Stockholm. Sweden. September 1983. Mimeo copy. IIASA. Laxenburg, Austria.
I have tried to make this connection through a detailed case study, B. Wynne. Rationality and Ritual: The Windscale Inquiry and Nuclear Decisions in Britain, British Society for the History of Science, Chalfont St. Giles, Bucks, 1982.
B. Wynne, “Redefining the Issues of Risk and Social Acceptance: The Social Viability of Technology,” Futures, 15 (1983), 13–32.
As offered, for example, by much mainstream risk perception literature. For a critique of this literature, see H. J. Otway and K. Thomas. “Reflections on Risk Perception and Policy.” Risk Analysis, Vol. 2, 2 (1982), 69–82.
Another psychologist has observed that in risk analysis, “we psychologists are a bit trapped by our own proficiency at being good experimentalists. We realize the importance of control and so we are drawn to those tasks in which we can exercise control. Hence our preoccupation with simple, static lotteries” (which are used as if they were real-life risk decisions), L. Lola, Journal of Experimental Psychology: Human Perception and Performance. 9 (1983). 137–144.
Also. Douglas MacLean. “Is Rationality Extensional?”, mimeo, University of Maryland. Dept. of Philosophy and Public Affairs.
As indeed in the long-standing, excellent journal of that name, and in classical works in economic history, such as Carlo Cipolla. Clocks and Culture 1500–1700, London, Collins. 1967
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Douglas and A. Wildavsky, Also: G. Mars, Cheats at Work: An Anthropology of Workplace Crime, George Allen & Unwin. 1981
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See e.g., Douglas, ref. 8, and Thompson’s postscript to H. Kunreuther and J. Linnerooth (eds.). Risk Analysis and Decision Processes: The Siting of LEG Facilities in Four Countries, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1983.
See e.g., Douglas, ref. 8, and Thompson’s postscript to H. Kunreuther and J. Linnerooth (eds.). Risk Analysis and Decision Processes: The Siting of LEG Facilities in Four Countries, Springer Verlag, Berlin, 1983.
NIMBY, the “Not In My Back Yard” theory of social protest, would have it that people only take interest in an issue when their immediate local interests such as property are threatened.
And the similar issue of political communication. See. for example, the discussions of “Communicative competence,” in P. Connerton (ed.). Critical Sociology, Harmondsworth, Penguin Books. 1978.
Wynne, op. cit., ref. 3.
For the concept of symbolic action, see, e.g., M. Edelman, Politics as Symbolic Action, London, Academic Press, 1976.
See, e.g., Douglas and Wildavsky, Risk and Culture, op. cit., ref. 8. P. Lowe and J. Goyder, Environmental Groups in Politics, London, George Allen & Unwin, 1983, describes the strategic tensions for activist group leaders. I can also testify to this process from personal experience of such a (short-lived, but intense) role.
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The standard critiques of modern technocracy, e.g. J. Ellul. The Technological Society, New York, Vintage Books. 1964
H. Marcuse, One Dimensional Man. New York, Beacon Press, 1966, tend to encourage such an exclusively monolithic view.
K.T. Erickson, Everything in its Path: The Destruction of Community in the Buffulo Creek Flood, New York, Simon & Schuster. 1976.
See also R.J. Lifton, The Broken Connection, New York, Simon & Schuster. 1979. for a psychiatric perspective adapting Freud’s original concept of instincts and defense or “blocking” mechanisms toward a more central role for images of life and death as explanatory factors for human attitudes and behavior.
Erickson. op. cit., ref. 19. p. 258.
Taken from The Financial Times, London. Supplement on Atomic Power. October 1956.
R. Daly. “The Specters of Technicism.” Psychiatry. 33(4). 1970, pp. 417–431 (quote p. 417, 421). For some earlier signs, see e.g. Roger Bastide, Sociologie et Psychoanalyse, Paris, Puf, 1950, describing the dreams of Indian tribes of automobiles breaking down; these are interpreted as a technical metaphor for sexual failure and derangement.
B. Bettelheim, “Joey: A Mechanical Boy,” Scientific American, March 1959, pp. 2–9. See also Edge’s discussion, op. cit., ref. 7, pp. 50–52.
H.J. Otway and D. von Winterfeldt, “Beyond Acceptable Risk,” Policy Sciences 14 (1982). 27–45.
B. Wynne. “Institutional mythologies and dual societies in the management of risk”, E. Ley and H. Kunreuther (eds.), The Risk Analysis Controversy, Springer Verlag, Berlin. 1982, pp. 127–143.
Nor, of course, do the system’s “managers;” but they too create elaborate but different myths to fill in the rest in a way consistent with their managerial position. It is just that these myths are different, even if they are more elaborate because they have more money and time spent on their articulation.
John McDermott, “Technology: Opiate of the Intellectuals” in A.H. Teich (ed.). Technology and Man’s Future, New York, St. Martin’s Press, 1974.
L. Winner, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1978, pp. 33–35.
L. Winner, Autonomous Technology, Cambridge, Mass., MIT Press, 1978, p. 34.
M. Crozier, “Les Developpements Futurs de la Bureaucratie,” Courier du Personnel, Commission of the European Communities, 416, 29 July 1980, pp. 13–20.
See Wynne, op. cit., ref. 3.
See, for example, the work of E. Wenk, Jr., reported in Futures, 15(1), 1983, pp. 87–90, and discussed at a seminar at the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis, Laxenburg, Austria, September 1983.
S. Turkle, “Computers as Rohrschach: Subjectivity and Social Responsibility;” Bo Sundin (ed.). Is the Computer a Tool?, Stockholm. Almquist and Wiksell, 1981, pp. 81–99.
During the research for a doctoral dissertation of Ian Welsh, to whom I am grateful for discussions concerning this point.
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Wynne, B. (1985). From Public Perception of Risk to Cultural Theory of Technology. In: Covello, V.T., Mumpower, J.L., Stallen, P.J.M., Uppuluri, V.R.R. (eds) Environmental Impact Assessment, Technology Assessment, and Risk Analysis. NATO ASI Series, vol 4. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-70634-9_31
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