This is a really important book that should be required reading for anyone consciously grappling with RISK in any serious way, or in any professional capacity. John Adams sets out modestly but determinedly to seek enlightenment about a subject that everyone knows something about but of which no one has yet given a comprehensive and coherent account. He picks up the baton of ‘RISK’ passed on through the literature of the old masters of sociology and anthropology; the writings of Durkheim, Marks, Malinowski, Parsons, Thompson, Wildavsky and others. He does a wonderful job in challenging the received wisdom and consensus of the last 50 or so years. He dismantles one assumption after another to reveal the serious flaws, contradictions and short comings and limitations of today’s risk management practices.
Through his expositional approach, he helps the reader to discover unexpected fragilities within widely accepted risk metrics and processes. He turns his critical attention to the conceptualization of risk, its definition, research and the debate about professional applications. His critical analysis of the many ways in which risk judgements find expression in people’s behavior at work and in their everyday lives and in social and industrial policies is honest, painstaking and forthright; truly illuminating, often surprising and occasionally shocking. Confidence in once unchallengeable institutions is called into question; not only the banks and insurance companies, but the compliance and safety bodies, international corporations and even the Royal Society. In his journey of discovery he finds fragments of truth, articles of blind faith, distorted logic and bureaucratic gobbledygook that contribute to a disconcertingly confusing picture.
The author doesn’t claim to offer a complete resolution to these issues, but through his concepts of risk compensation, risk thermostat and the positioning of risk as culturally determined, he does a remarkable job of tidying things up. He identifies the main issues and suggests the kind of approach required to continue the task. The author is an academic a geographer and a philosopher applying a creative and enquiring mind to problems that challenged Fyodor Dostoevsky, Max Born and Albert Einstein.
As a personality psychologist, it isn’t surprising that I would see things from a different perspective but there are many ways of conceptualising and interpreting observed behaviour. How people behave and why do they do it is a matter of everyday concern to everybody and we each come to it from our own perspective. Teacher, social workers therapists of all kinds, volunteers in homelessness centres, thoughtful and aware people; all will be observing behaviour and asking themselves ‘why?’. The fact that thoughts and insights can be expressed differently doesn’t necessarily lead to profound disagreement. We are all talking about the same things, the same observations, the same subject matter but in different ways. The source material, behaviour, is the same for every one and the most prominent features of human nature are likely to feature in all those insights and formulations.
Geoff Trickey, March 2018