Although the meaning and usefulness of Erving Goffman’s work are still being debated today, few would doubt the importance of his contributions to the sociological study of the self, emotions, deviance, and social interaction. Less well known to most contemporary sociologists is his effort to provide a sociological account of voluntary risk taking—participation in gambling, high-risk sports, dangerous occupations, certain forms of criminal behavior, and the like—activities he classified as ‘action’. While Goffman’s study of action anticipated the expansion of volitional (...) risk taking in Western societies in recent decades, most contemporary research on this trend has been guided by a different concept—the notion of ‘edgework’. Contrasting the action and edgework approaches along three key parameters—fateful action versus corporeal edges, embodied semiotics versus embodied experience, and dramaturgical reflexivity versus hermeneutic reflexivity—reveals how the action and edgework concepts capture conflicting motivations for voluntary risk taking. Finally, this article considers how Goffman’s action framework can be reoriented to contemporary social conditions and integrated with the edgework perspective to yield a multidimensional theory of risk agency in late modern society. (shrink)

Grant Gillett's (2009) provocative essay exploring the neuroethical implications of a holistic or relational approach to brain science is indicative of some promising interdisciplinary trends withi...

The utilization of alternative medical therapies and practitioners has increased dramatically in the U.S. in the last two to three decades. This trend seems paradoxical when one considers the rapid advances taking place in biomedical knowledge and technology during this same time period. Observers both inside and outside of the medical profession have attempted to explain the rising popularity of alternative medicine by proposing that it signals a growing sense of dissatisfaction and disenchantment with professional biomedical practices on the part (...) of the lay public. This paper challenges this thesis and offers an alternative explanation, arguing that the rise of alternative medicine is a consequence of the success and expanding influence of biomedicine rather than its failure and declining authority. The argument presented draws primarily on Ulrich Beck’s “risk society” perspective and theory of “reflexive modernization,” with specific attention to his analysis of the “reflexive scientization” process. The application of this perspective allows us to understand the emergence and development of alternative medicine as an unanticipated consequence of the process of reflexive biomedicalization in the late modern era. (shrink)

Increasing attention to existentialist thought by criminologists and other social scientists in recent decades has created an opportunity to envision new possibilities in critical theoretic inquiry that extend well beyond the classical formulations of this tradition. In this essay, I draw on existentialist ideas to outline a critical perspective rooted in recent developments associated with Ulrich Beck's notion of "risk society" and the related theory of reflexive modernization. I argue that, though the detraditionalization consequences of reflexive modernization give greater scope (...) to agency in the risk society, transcendence in the existentialist sense is found in the hermeneutic reflexivity one experiences in high risk practices I call "edgework". Finally, I explore several options for using existential transcendence in hermeneutic reflexivity as a reference for critical analysis and, in doing so, suggest an alternative to Beck's own critical approach—cosmopolitanism—as a foundation for a critical theory of the second modern social order. (shrink)