Introduction
pp. 1-9
in: Sean Watson, Anthony Moran (eds), Trust, risk and uncertainty, Berlin, Springer, 2005Abstract
From the early 1990s onwards writers like Ulrich Beck and Anthony Giddens, among many others, have brought home to English-speaking audiences the new conditions of risk and uncertainty faced by everyone living in the contemporary world. Beck, with his pioneering Risk Society (1992), established the notion that risk is increasingly globalised and the unavoidable condition of late modern life. Giddens worked a nearby vein, emphasising in books such as The Consequences of Modernity (1990) the importance of risk and uncertainty as evermore pervasive aspects of the way that we live our lives, relying on expert systems and established levels of ontological security simply to get by. Writers like Zygmunt Bauman (1991) have emphasised the inevitability of, and the difficulties, dilemmas and resistances to, living with doubt, ambivalence and uncertainty (see also Beck, 1997).
