RISK IN CULTURAL PERSPECTIVE

Almost without exception, attempts to understand human behavior related to technological risks take as their starting point an event, activity, or a statement of probability and magnitude that is assumed to be the stimulus for human responses. This paper advocates a radically different approach in suggesting that the key to understanding perception, communication, and management of technological risk lies in understanding how various institutional or organizational cultures lead human agents actively to select different issues for attention as risks, while ignoring other candidates for concerns that actuarially could be as dangerous to life or limb. Societal conflict about technological risk is a clash between world views and rival expectations of societal fairness. Guidelines for recognizing different cultures are presented along with exemplary cases from choice of electrical generating technologies and global climate change.