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Review: Risks, Identities and the Everyday

This volume of essays focuses on ‘risk’ in the context of everyday life. The chapters look at how people use risk to create identities for themselves, how they disregard risk when there are other possibilities at stake, and how an initial awareness of a risk can result in a future avoidance of risk awareness, rather than avoidance of the extant risk itself. Most of the chapters effectively use a poststructuralist analysis of ‘risk in the everyday’ to place concepts such as agency, identity formation and a Foucauldian focus on refl exivity in opposition to the potentially disempowering thesis behind Beck’s Risk Society (1992). It is this combination of social theory and empirical research which makes this volume both appealing and useful when thinking about the effect of ‘risk’, a concept which has become ever prevalent in the probation service, in the context of wider society and individual agency. The mainly theoretical introductory chapter concentrates on, and then deconstructs, Beck’s thesis, thus providing the impetus behind the creation of a volume of essays which aims to explore how ‘socio-cultural contexts matter in relation to how risks are interpreted, and utilised by individuals’ (p. 4). Drawing on Lupton and Tulloch’s work on how voluntary risk taking can be used to create identities for oneself, the editors argue that although risk has been used as a tool for analysing society there has been insuffi cient consideration of how risk is an ‘embedded discourse’ and that the matter of ‘choice’ has not been fully explored. The most relevant chapters in terms of probation work are Merryweather’s chapter on how young men create identities for themselves through ‘risk-talk’ and Laverick’s chapter on how people with a history of violence approach the decision to commit a violent act. Merryweather’s analysis of focus group data demonstrates that starting a fi ght, for example, may not be an indication of the most violent offender, but that other discourses (never walking away from a fi ght once it has started, for example) may Reviews