Review: Risks, Identities and the Everyday
| Author | Jake Phillips |
| DOI | 10.1177/0264550509346098 |
| Published date | 01 March 2010 |
| Date | 01 March 2010 |
| Subject Matter | Articles |
Risks, Identities and
the Everyday
Julie Scott Jones and Jayne
Raisborough (eds)
Ashgate, 2007; pp. 148; £50, hbk
ISBN 978–0–75464–861–1
This volume of essays focuses on ‘risk’ in the context of
everyday life. The chapters look at how people use risk
to create identities for themselves, how they disregard risk
when there are other possibilities at stake, and how an
initial awareness of a risk can result in a future avoidance of risk awareness,
rather than avoidance of the extant risk itself. Most of the chapters effectively
use a poststructuralist analysis of ‘risk in the everyday’ to place concepts such as
agency, identity formation and a Foucauldian focus on re exivity in opposition to
the potentially disempowering thesis behind Beck’s Risk Society (1992). It is this
combination of social theory and empirical research which makes this volume both
appealing and useful when thinking about the effect of ‘risk’, a concept which has
become ever prevalent in the probation service, in the context of wider society and
individual agency.
The mainly theoretical introductory chapter concentrates on, and then decon-
structs, Beck’s thesis, thus providing the impetus behind the creation of a volume
of essays which aims to explore how ‘socio-cultural contexts matter in relation to
how risks are interpreted, and utilised by individuals’ (p. 4). Drawing on Lupton
and Tulloch’s work on how voluntary risk taking can be used to create identities for
oneself, the editors argue that although risk has been used as a tool for analysing
society there has been insuf cient consideration of how risk is an ‘embedded dis-
course’ and that the matter of ‘choice’ has not been fully explored. The most relevant
chapters in terms of probation work are Merryweather’s chapter on how young men
create identities for themselves through ‘risk-talk’ and Laverick’s chapter on how
people with a history of violence approach the decision to commit a violent act.
Merryweather’s analysis of focus group data demonstrates that starting a ght,
for example, may not be an indication of the most violent offender, but that other
discourses (never walking away from a ght once it has started, for example) may
Reviews
Copyright © 2010 NAPO Vol 57(1): 89–94
DOI: 10.1177/0264550509346098
www.napo.org.uk
http://prb.sagepub.com
The Journal of Community and Criminal Justice
89
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