The Reinvention of Politics: Rethinking Modernity in the Global Social Order (1997), World Risk Society ( 1999), Power in a Global Age: A New Global Political Economy ( 2005), and World at Risk ( 2009) all to a greater or lesser extent take up the practical and political tension of a global risk society through timely, empirical critiques of how nation-states have responded (often inadequately) to the risks and consequences emerging risk narratives around issues including: nuclear energy, political management of natural disasters, bovine-strain encephalitis (or ‘mad cow disease’), terrorism, biotechnology, climate change, financial crises, and numerous other contemporary risk discourses. The connection of a theory emerging social conditions (e.g., the risk society) to empirically verifiable transformations in gender, work, and family configurations is the primary sociological contributions of this work. This concept is made particularly clear through examples like gender and work, where trade-offs for women force them to choose between traditional institutions of work and family by examining the political and social risks of an increasingly abundant array of viable biographical choices.

Individualization as described here is a process where individual identity becomes radically decoupled from traditional social structures like work, family, geography, or even social class. Though not as widely influential as Risk Society ( 1992), Individualization ( 2002) outlines the microlevel and cultural consequences of reflexive modernity.

Individualization ( 2002), in particular, expounds theoretically upon the shift from institutional to individual responsibility for managing risk in one's own life, explicitly linking some of the risk society's key tenets with other sociological work on identity politics. Other work has attempted to broaden the theory to explain individual and household-level consequences and evidence for the emergence of a risk society, for example, microlevel investigations of risk society concepts from the perspectives of work, family, and intimate relationship among multinational Europeans are taken up in The Normal Chaos of Love ( 1995), Individualization: Institutionalized Individualism and its Social and Political Consequences ( 2002), and Distant Love ( 2014), all coauthored by Elisabeth Beck-Gernsheim. In one sense, Ecological Politics in an Age of Risk ( 1995) and World Risk Society ( 1999) more completely develop the political, environmental, and sociological ideas while building an empirical case for the risk society. Pritchard, in International Encyclopedia of the Social & Behavioral Sciences (Second Edition), 2015 Other Worksįollowing the introduction of the key concepts in Risk Society ( 1992) and Reflexive Modernization ( 1994), Beck's work has continued to build upon, develop, and empirically investigate these ideas.

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