IngentaConnect Go for it!' Towards a critical realist approach to voluntary risk...

Abstract:

This paper examines a type of voluntary risk-taking, orientation to risk and risk rhetoric, which we call ‘go(ing) for it.' Although occasionally acknowledged in the field of clinical risk management, going for it receives little or no consideration in the existing sociological approaches to risk analysis. We offer a primarily theoretical discussion rather than a formal research report. We illustrate it with empirical examples derived from recent personal experiences and some of our own fieldwork data, together with other academic studies. The paper makes two central points. First, because risk analysis has been dominated to date by the problematic of identifying dangers and blame-shedding, it has lacked a model of the risk-taking agent appropriate to understanding the voluntary embracing of risk embodied in going for it. However, this type of risk-taking cannot be marginalized by an approach based on the critical realist account of human agency which shows it to be a necessary entailment of actors' commitments and priorities emergent from their necessary relations with the three orders of nature, practice and society. (Technical risk assessment, risk society theory and cultural bias theory lack this understanding of risk-taking.) The second main point is that presenting oneself as risk-taking is a moral rhetoric, given the association between voluntary risk and commitment. We argue this rhetoric mobilizes a kind of post-modern sublime sympathy of great importance as an interactional technique for generating social solidarities and the pervasive sense of living in a ‘risk society.' Living with the contemporary representations of risk sustains an emotional ‘feeling tone' of shared predicaments. The discourse of ‘plunging' expressed in emphatic instructions like ‘go for it' and ‘just do it' are analysed for what it offers to make risk-taking accountable.

Keywords: Commitments; critical realism; persons; risk; risk-taking agents; voluntary risk-taking

Document Type: Research article

DOI: 10.1080/13698570500390853

Affiliations: 1: Department of Sociology and Anthropology, University of Wales, Swansea, UK

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‘Go for it!' Towards a critical realist approach to voluntary risk-taking