Risk, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century

D. Curran

• Publisher: Palgrave Macmillan
• Year: 2016
• ISBN:
  9781137495570
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Social Theory
• Index: Social Sciences

Risk, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century provides a groundbreaking new analysis of the increasingly important relationship between risk and widening inequalities. The massive, and often unequal, impacts of contemporary risks are recognized widely in popular discussions – be it the fall-out from the 2008 financial crisis or Hurricane Katrina – yet there is a distinct neglect in social science of the overall systemic impacts of these risks for increasing inequalities. This book moves beyond this lacuna to identify novel intersections of risk and inequalities. It shows how key processes associated with risk society – the social production and distribution of risks as side-effects – are intensifying inequalities in fundamental ways. In articulating how risk is intensifying both the social sources of suffering of the least advantaged and the power of the most advantaged, this book realizes a significant rethinking of risk, power, and inequalities in contemporary society.

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 Which Risk Society, and for Whom?
• 2 The Sociology of Risk and the Ineliminability of Realism
• 3 Risk Society and Systematic Social Theory
• 4 Thinking with Bourdieu, Marx, and Weber to Analyse Contemporary Inequalities and Class
• 5 Risk Society and the Distribution of Bads
• 6 Risk Illusion and Organized Irresponsibility in Contemporary Finance
• 7 Conclusion: Beyond the Quiet Politics of Risk
• Notes
• References
• Index