Risk and Everyday Life by John Tulloch Deborah Lupton

Author:John Tulloch, Deborah Lupton [John Tulloch, Deborah Lupton]
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780761947592
Barnesnoble:
Publisher: SAGE Publications
Published: 2003-08-18T00:00:00+00:00

I am dead against it. I would tend to believe the people against it, like Greenpeace or any written work that has been in the papers I have looked at. I certainly don’t believe the politicians and I certainly don’t believe big business because they are promoting it, and the only reason they are promoting it is the money. I don’t think anything should be done until the proper studies are actually proven that it is either a good thing or bad thing. I still don’t believe in genetically modifying anything.

Keith has lost his trust in big corporations and government even more than Ian has. But both Rover workers find their solidarity very centrally in their family and in the consuming patterns (houses, cars and so on) that will keep them healthy and safe. For Keith, moving to a ‘nice area’ of Oxford has meant ‘better hospitals and schools’, as well as less fear of crime. Despite Beck’s view on the disintegrating importance of the family as a structuring institution, the family has remained a ‘solidarity’ structure among manufacturing workers when few others could be found. Keith (who may soon be making the decision about whether to go abroad to work) went out of his way to conclude the interview as follows: ‘The only thing I can say and recommend is that in most cases when you make a decision you shouldn’t make that decision on your own; you should make it with family, so that you get a more balanced perspective of what you are trying to do.’

Beck’s ‘invisibility, incalculability and ambiguity of risk’ certainly exists for these manufacturing workers. But Beck needs to differentiate his different kinds of ‘invisibility’, within the different time/space co-ordinates of corporate ‘border-crossings’ (the ‘German people’), and in relation to different everyday senses of knowledge, expertise and citizenship (Ian’s GM-labelled Cornish pastie versus his use of the firm’s Internet to find out more about BMW).

Especially because of the importance of family solidarity in the face of corporate-enforced divisiveness at work (Cowley v Longbridge, Cowley v Swindon) or as British citizens, threats to the family (whether economic, educational or criminal) were major worries among these workers. Keith’s current concern about losing his Rover job was both that he would lose his family contact and that (because of diminishing house prices as a result of a whole population out of work) his family would be driven out to live in some less safe area.

In this context, another former Rover worker we interviewed emphasized very clearly the important fear of crime aspect which is almost entirely missing from Beck’s risk society:

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