Introduction

Policy Futures in Education

Risk theory and education: 2015, Vol. 13(5) 561–576
! Author(s) 2015

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DOI: 10.1177/1478210315572519
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Steve Bialostok
University of Wyoming, USA

Raymond Williams’ (1976/1983) Keywords carries the subtitle, ‘‘a vocabulary of culture and
society.’’ The wordlist took ‘‘key words’’ in contemporary social and political debate and
used their philological history as a means of engaging with their contradictory contemporary
uses and meanings. For Williams, meanings of words change in relation to the changing
political, social, and economic circumstances of the times. Words with previously
understood and commonly accepted meanings take on new and significant meanings in
response to new social movements and political concerns. Contemporary Western
preoccupation with risk is historically unique, and never made either edition of Keywords.
The use of risk in ordinary vocabulary became more common in the late 1970s, with a sharp
increase in occurrence beginning in the 1980s.1 Social science only began using risk as a unit
of analysis after the English publication of Ulrich Beck’s (1992) Risk Society. The inclusion
of risk in New Keywords (Bennett et al., 2005) reveals the concept to be one of the most
significant ideas to have emerged in society over the past 30 years. Risk frames identities,
shapes social relations and institutions, and extends decision-making and other forms of
power to some groups while excluding these things from others.
This issue takes up the lens of risk with empirical and theoretical articles that focus on the
ways in which risk is enacted through a broad context of education. Re-embedding the
analysis of risk into education is crucial for at least two reasons. First, discourses of risk
are produced by and woven into the fabric of schools. Risk lives in and through educators,
students, and the policies that govern them at local and national levels, independent of
political ideology or party affiliation. Second, while scholars have examined and
deconstructed racial and social class pedagogical and policy implications of the ‘‘at-risk’’
category, contemporary theories of risk have been almost completely neglected; hence, the
role that education plays in management and prevention of risk—as well as with the
production of risk taking—needs to be conceptualized within sociocultural theories and
perspectives on risk. Thus, this symposium seeks to address the meaning and institutional
implications of risk, and the ways risk is imagined and interpreted by individuals,
educational institutions and their attenuate policies.

Corresponding author:
Steve Bialostok, University of Wyoming, Laramie, WY, USA.
Email: SMB@uwyo.edu
562 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

The meanings of risk

Risk is a central topic in the field of education, but Ulrich Beck’s neologism—the risk
society—has become the lingua franca across an extraordinarily wide and diverse range of
scholarship: politics (Sidnell, 2004), security (Seddon et al., 2008), social work (Webb, 2006),
business regulation (Alemmano et al., 2013), climate change (Culver et al., 2011),
criminology (Mythen and Walklate, 2011), terrorism (Aradau and Van Munster, 2007),
welfare (Briggs, 2013), and youth (Woodman, 2009). These approaches capture the
complexity of the varying factors that influence risk responses in different social and
cultural contexts, revealing risk to be a requisite way of understanding contemporary
uncertainties and our times. Humans are embroiled in—and forced to negotiate with—a
matrix of day-to-day uncertainties in work, relationships, leisure, and family life. Experts
warn of the risk of pandemic diseases, and—as I write this—the United States Congress
debates a Terrorism Risk Insurance Act. If Umberto Eco is correct, and 70% of our
knowledge comes from watching Hollywood movies, then most of us fear that
terrorism—homegrown other otherwise—is just around the corner, or perhaps that snakes
really can potentially run loose on a plane. Discourses of risk frame our understanding of
our world, although it can be easier to describe the perils of living in such a society consumed
with risk than it is to define the actual term (Strydom, 2002). The sociology of risk typically
introduces the topic in the following manner:

In everyday lay people’s language, risk tends to be used to refer almost exclusively to a threat,
hazard, danger or harm: we ‘‘risk our life savings’’ by investing on the stock exchange, or ‘‘put
our marriage at risk’’ by having an affair. The term is also used more weakly to refer to a
somewhat negative rather than disastrous outcome, as in the phrase ‘‘If you go outside in this
rain, you’ll risk catching a cold.’’ In this usage, risk means somewhat less than a possible danger
or a threat, more an unfortunate or annoying event. Risk is therefore a very loose term in
everyday parlance . . . Risk and uncertainty tend to be treated as conceptually the same thing:
for example, the term ‘‘risk’’ is often used to denote a phenomenon that has the potential to
deliver substantial harm, whether or not the probability of this harm eventuating is estimable.
(Lupton, 1999: 8–9)

Society is characterized by uncertainty: dangers, hazards, and threats, and a proliferation

of risks. We so frequently defend ourselves against potential harms large and small that
we practice risk avoidance almost without thinking; washing hands, buckling seatbelts,
locking doors, taking vitamins are but a few risk-related behaviors that occur without
much conscious reflection. Sometimes the risks we take are voluntary, while others are
imposed upon us. Risks can be personal or public. Risks can be local, such as responding
to a tornado early warning system, whereas climate change and pollution are global risks
and therefore increasingly shared. Whether visible, invisible, technological or natural,
calculable or incalculable, whenever human beings engage in purposeful, future-
oriented action they encounter the possibility of a mishap and try to control for that
possibility (Garland, 2003). Attempting to cross a busy highway requires that I consider
the future uncertainty of a potentially negative outcome. Since it is unknown if I will
cross safely, I use my practical knowledge to estimate the odds of a safe crossing, thus
managing the risk. But in general, modern societies rely upon experts, scientific
knowledge, and risk-managing institutions specially designed for this purpose (Giddens,
1991).
Bialostok 563

The histories of risk

The Oxford English Dictionary’s contemporary definition of risk as ‘‘exposure to the
possibility of loss, injury, or other adverse or unwelcome circumstance’’ belies the term’s
long and complicated history. Although there is a lack of consensus about the actual origins
of the word, the roots of risk are most likely in the Italian risco, a derivative of the verb
riscare meaning to run into danger. Humans have, of course, always lived in an uncertain
and dangerous world, but fate (fatum) and chance (tyche) provided ancient explanatory
systems for shortages of food, epidemics, rampant death, and various other misfortunes
and mysteries of nature. The notion of risk did not make its appearance in common
language until the mid-sixteenth century, originating from the Spanish maritime word
meaning ‘‘to run into danger on a rock.’’ Here, risk was linked to maritime trade and the
safety of ships, as well as their financial investment and sailing into uncharted waters (Ayto,
1993; Giddens, 1991).
The beginning of mathematical probability has been traditionally located with the 1654
correspondence between Blaise Pascal and Pierre de Fermat regarding the mathematics of
games of chance (Hacking, 1986). In the seventeenth century, Swiss mathematician Jacob
Bernoulli extended the use of probability beyond games of chance to methods of demanding
a sufficient amount of real life information to compute a probability about the future.
Bernoulli’s law of large numbers ultimately led to the creation of the modern protocols
for testing new drugs, opinion polling, and stock market decision-making. But
determinism and vagaries of nature eventually eroded, and the ability to ‘‘see that the
world might be regular and not subject to universal laws of nature’’ (Hacking, 1986),
came only after the development of nineteenth century statistics and quantification. The
emergence of an ‘‘avalanche of numbers’’ at the beginning of the nineteenth century
began an epistemological shift that changed the way Americans and Europeans thought
about people, bringing in new forms of social control. As society became increasingly
statistical, new types of laws came into being—analogous to the laws of nature—but now
pertaining to people. These new laws were expressed in terms of probability. They carried
with them the connotations of normalcy and of deviations from the norm. The cardinal
concept of the psychology of the Enlightenment had been, simply, human nature. By the end
of the nineteenth century, it was being replaced by something different: ‘‘normal people.’’
The laws of chance, unlike the preceding laws of nature, emerged from gathering statistics
on large populations. Risk began to order reality in a calculable form. By the nineteenth
century, risk was in common usage among an insurance industry concerned with the
prediction of, and insurance against, future risks (Garland, 2003). ‘‘Until the 1850s no
company would underwrite a policy covering windstorm or theft. By the end of the
century specialized insurance business for industrial and commercial risks had been
established’’ (Outreville, 1998: 21). Risk eventually developed with the opportunistic
reasoning associated with banking, and investments, meaning the mathematical estimation
of the probable consequences of investment decisions for borrowers and lenders. Over time,
the calculation of risk probabilities ‘‘derived from statistical models based on aggregate
populations’’ (Garland, 2003) extended to numerous areas of social and commercial life
throughout the twentieth century (Adams, 1995). The Employment Liability Assurance
Corporation was created in England to cover the civil responsibility of employers. In
1889, the Mercantile Accident Insurance Company of Glasgow issued the first theft
insurance contract (Outreville, 1998). Railways and other mechanically driven machinery
564 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

increased the chance of bodily injury and loss of property, for which insurance offered relief.
The first automobile insurance policy was written in 1888 ‘‘as an extension of the forms used
for the protection of owners of horse drawn carriages’’ (Outreville, 1998: 21). By the end of
the twentieth century, automobile insurance began its expansive and rapid history of growth.
Once insurance was present, potential problems were addressed for those at risk for those
circumstances. Risk thinking brings the future into the present and makes it calculable
(Rose, 1999), and creates the belief in the transformability of a radically indeterminate
world into a manageable one (Reddy, 1996).

The politics of risk and education

Before presenting the several theories of risk, I want to discuss the politics of risk that has
played a central role in education at a variety of contexts and levels. Following the
assumption that one important role of schools is to prepare students for college and/or
the labor market, there is a significant amount of risk involved in pursing education for
that purpose. Jobs and related financial compensation present uncertainty. Some will find
jobs with high compensation while others will not. One never knows if an adequate number
of jobs will exist in one’s field, at the time one is ready to take them. Some college graduates
hope that earning an advanced degree will improve job prospects and pay, but uncertainty
still reigns.
Risk has long plagued schools’ attempts to manage student health and safety. Educating
students about the ‘‘high risk activities’’ of sex, drugs, and alcohol use is fraught with
controversy because it may be too risky to teach about responsible drinking or using
contraceptive options, since some fear that education encourages behavior. At least one
program, Reducing the Risk (RISK), attempts to manage uncertainty around sexual
behavior through abstinence-only health education pedagogy. Concerns about school
safety have led many to assert that schools themselves are sources of risk. Shootings,
reports of bullying, and different forms of violence have led to many new security
measures. The overall poor quality of school lunches is said to contribute to increased
risk of developing health problems such as obesity. Media reports claim that schools are a
‘‘minefield of health hazards’’ and among the most ‘‘dangerous places.’’ Additionally,
packing children together while providing them little physical activity is said to contribute
to health problems, although health experts offer ‘‘lots of suggestions on things we all can do
to minimize risks’’ for children in schools (Healy, 2011).
But the politics of risk have played out most notably in the various national education
policies that have skillfully used risk to reorganize education to fit the needs of the American
economy. The 1983 A Nation at Risk: The Imperative for Education Reforms scared the
public by constructing public schools as sites of crisis, thus can be seen as a market-
oriented educational reform movement. A Nation at Risk shifted educational policy from
achieving educational equity to notions of school excellence and preventing risky personal
behavior in students. Decades later, Obama’s Race to the Top targeted ‘‘high need’’ students,
defined as those ‘‘at risk of educational failure . . .’’ Most recently, former New York City
School Superintendent Joel Klein and former Secretary of Defense Condoleezza Rice (Klein
and Rice , 2012) co-chaired a Council on Foreign Relations task force which released a
report blaming public schools for the nation’s economic problems and endangering national
security. Rice’s ‘‘clarion call to the nation’’ (p.xiv) claimed that ‘‘educational failure puts the
United States future economic prosperity, global position, and physical safety at risk’’ (p. 4).
Bialostok 565

Schools no less sheepishly deploy the ‘‘at risk’’ label to manage unruly student
populations. Educational experts such as psychologists, counselors, social workers,
special educators, and speech specialists evaluate and assess students at all levels to
determine possible risks of learning deficits, developmental delays, autism, hyperactivity,
depression and learning disabilities. Some refer to anticipated negative trajectories and
outcomes; others use the term to refer to youth currently experiencing emotional,
behavioral, educational and psychological challenges (Nakkula and Toshalis, 2006). In
both cases, the term implies a dimension of identity, that is, ‘‘at-risk youth.’’ As Ian
Hacking (1986: 223) writes: ‘‘Counting [populations] is no mere report of developments.
It elaborately, often philanthropically, creates new ways for people to be. People
spontaneously come to Et their categories.’’ The logical extension is the (usually
unstated) concern that at-risk students, without intervention, will drop out and turn to
drugs, crime, and violent behavior. Reducing at-risk populations, in theory, reduces their
impact on society and ensures safety and security. Nadesan (2009: 39) points out, in the
wake of the 2007 shootings on the campus of Virginia Tech, ‘‘psychiatric authorities are
under increased public scrutiny for their role in protecting public safety through the
identification and monitoring of risky individuals.’’
One approach to this topic comes in the form of theoretical frameworks for
understanding the relationship between at-risk students and their schools. Most of this
work suggests how local and state policy can address at-risk student populations.
Scholarship varies here, but almost always involves identifying the characteristics of the
at-risk student. For example, Palmo and Palmo (1989: 45) write:

The at-risk youth is a representative of the family and symbolizes the severity of the difficulties
within the family unit. The greater the difficulties demonstrated by the youth, the larger the
number of issues that need attention within the family. Although there are examples of at-risk
youth with pathologies that do not provide an honest picture of the family’s difficulties, in most
instances the youth’s behaviors are an accurate barometer of the family’s stability.

A second approach indirectly follows Beck’s goal of realizing enlightenment ideals of

democracy. This scholarship critiques the social, structural, and racial divisions and
ideologies that produce discourses of the at-risk youth, as well as the impetus for those
inequities and disparities. Without question, the use of risk in educational settings is
steeped in racialized and social class discourses tied to the deficits of stigmatized
individuals and populations (Gadsden et al., 2009). Many scholars have persuasively
argued that the ‘‘at-risk’’ category persists as a modern code for the 1960s ‘‘cultural
deficit’’ model that localizes student performance and underachievement in the psychology
of a dysfunctional single-family household of color (Lubeck and Garrett, 1990; Swadener
and Lubeck, 1995). Compare Bereiter and Engelmann’s (1966) claim that African
Americans performed inadequately in school because they were both linguistically and
culturally deprived, with that of National Center for Family Literacy President Sharon
Darling (1992):

The culture appears to center around attitudes, interests, a style of life, and a scattering of
unorganized beliefs and superstitions so unformalized that they may be transmitted without
explanation, argument, or detailed exposition. Deliberate teaching is not a normal or
necessary part of the adult role in such cultural groups, and neither the skills not the
language peculiar to teaching are developed and maintained. (Beretier and Engelmann, 1966)
566 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

Children from educated families are exposed to print at an early age. Their parents read to them,
encourage their early ‘‘reading and scribble writing,’’ develop their language skills through
conversation and their thinking skills through questioning. Through their own reading and
attention to their children’s school activities, these parents demonstrate that they value
learning. All this happens naturally in many homes. But ‘‘at risk’’ children most often come
from disadvantaged undereducated homes, and they do not acquire the pre-literacy skills
developed by more fortunate children. As a result, they begin their schooling behind, and
may never catch up. (Darling, 1992)

Darling’s sanitization of Bereiter and Engelmann supports the results of Pica-Smith and
Veloria’s (2012) study of four education and human services undergraduate and graduate
courses. Pica-Smith and Veloria discovered that students demonstrated a deficit orientation
that contextualized risk at the individual level, with students’ definitions of ‘‘at risk’’ often
not including white youth. Kelly (2000) is correct in pointing out that discourses of youth-at-
risk can and have encompassed all youthful behaviors and dispositions, but education has
historically conflated students of color with ‘‘risky’’ while holding up white, middle-class
lives as models (McDermott et al., 2009).2 Critical humanist (or liberatory) scholarship
underscores important progressive projects intended to challenge this ideology and reduce
the institutional barriers to full student engagement in school. Their explanations reveal how
risk frames the identities and social relations of both students and teachers, extending power
to some groups while excluding decision making from others.
But of the ‘‘politics of risk’’ educational discourses are thinkable because they co-
existence among the larger body of risk discourses. Public education has been criticized
since its inception, and for hundreds of years children in and out of school were singled
out for having severe problems, but risk conspicuously advanced to a pejorative in
education—as a category of understanding—during the same historical juncture (see
Spink et al., 2007) that very public and significant intensifications of probabilistic
predictions about the future were occurring in many domains. Efforts were being made in
many fields, not the least of which was education, to transform uncertainty into calculated
risks. It was those efforts, along with major environmental catastrophes, that caught Ulrich
Beck’s critical eye.

The theories of risk

The natural sciences have always favored a theoretical approach to risk that defines and
calculates, whereas the social sciences take a sociocultural paradigm that examines how risks
are socially constructed. Put simply, science views risk as an objective entity whereas social
science—including psychology—views the ways that institutional practices shape how we
perceive risk. In general, social science—and especially sociology—have put forth three
seminal theories of risk: (1) the risk society, as theorized by German sociologist Ulrich
Beck and British sociologist Anthony Giddens; (2) the cultural approach, most commonly
associated with Mary Douglas; and (3) the governmentality approach rooted in Michel
Foucault’s brief writings on the topic.

The risk society

The sociological grand narrative of an emergent risk society links modernization (or
‘‘detraditionalization’’) with a constellation of humanly produced risks that have led to
Bialostok 567

radical transformations in social structures, thinking, and politics. Giddens characterizes this
thinking as distinct property of modernity, having emerged as a consequence of the
Enlightenment, the product of the fifteenth-century Italian Renaissance. But it was Beck
who was responsible for bringing the concept of risk into prominence, claiming that if risk
itself is not objectively omnipresent, then the perception of risk intruding upon our lives and
the things we value necessitates prophylactic action. Beck described two forms of danger.
The first of these are ‘‘natural hazards’’ such as droughts, earthquakes, and flooding that
were common to pre-industrial societies and unavoidable acts of nature. The second form of
danger are those humanly created ‘‘manufactured risks’’ such as nuclear power and
environmental pollution that are the effects of contemporary capitalist development in the
realms of business, science, technology, and medicine. Natural hazards are localized, but
manufactured risks are global, unpredictable, and resist regulation.
For Beck (1992), modernity was an age of industrial progress in a relatively stable,
knowable and scientifically calculable world. Existence was based around distribution of
wealth and class-based identities, with nation-states in control of their own territories,
believing in social progress and that science produced beneficial knowledge. Modernity’s
self-destructive tendencies forced an emergence of a second modernity in the latter period of
the twentieth century organized around the production and distribution of global risks
(Beck, 1999). Beck’s risk society is marked by the attempt to limit, manage and navigate
through a series of hazards, anxieties, uncertainties and incalculable dangers posed by
modernization. Individuals try to control their own riskiness by using expert knowledge,
and faith in prediction models remains more or less intact. Nevertheless, the miserable
failure of risk management at the Fukushima Daiichi Japanese nuclear plant inevitably
chips away at the trust in expert systems, and certainly confirms Beck’s belief that
modernity has become a problem for itself.
Giddens (1991) claims that the risks modern society faces outstrip the tools and
technologies used to assess and tame them, producing a ‘‘runaway world’’ of
‘‘dislocation’’ and multiple uncertainties. Globalization disrupts traditional and regional
bonds; solidarities of class, family, and nation give way to a multiplicity of lifestyles. New
alliances form between old class opponents who express concern in the form of new social
movements rather than traditional channels. Battles rage over the adverse consequences of
everyday technologies and other scientific information. This major structural shift in society
pushes individuals in a position where identity is their task. In Beck’s risk society individuals
no longer rely on old social categories to provide meaning: ‘‘Life loses its self-evident quality;
the social ‘instinct’ substitute which supports and guides it is caught up in the grinding mills
of what needs to be thought out and decided’’ (Beck and Beck-Gernsheim, 2002: 7).
Beck and Giddens characterize the risk society in terms of reflexivity, albeit with slightly
different meanings. For Giddens (1991), the ‘‘reflexive project of the self’’ involves an
increase in the level of awareness of risk and uncertainty, and the attempt to colonize the
near and distant future leads to individual self-confrontation. Individuals, in a continuous
process of self-monitoring and self-surveillance, become pushed to negotiate their place and
identity. Reflexivity is the individual response to risk society’s uncertainty.3 Beck shares
many of Giddens’ concerns, but Beck emphasizes the notion of reflexive modernization as
the overriding diagnostic category of our time. Reflexive modernity is the unforeseen
consequences of modernity’s victory. Beck (1999) recognizes that knowledge plays an
important role in reflexive modernity. However, since risk is the unintended consequences
of industrial modernization, the ‘‘medium’’ of reflexive modernization is ‘‘reflexive
568 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

unawareness.’’ Beck states, ‘‘unawareness can be known or not known, concrete or

theoretical, unwillingness to know or inability to know’’ (Beck, 1999: 121).
Numerous critiques of the risk society have challenged much of Beck’s analysis on several
grounds: the distinction between traditional and nontraditional societies; that globalization
straight-jackets nation-states; that temporary risks are entirely new; that structural instead of
neoliberal agendas force modernity; the supposed under-regulated form of risk management;
the transition from a class society to a risk society; the social and class bias of the reflexive
identity, are all points open to debate. Matten (2004: 372) suggests, ‘‘Beck’s ideas are more
of a provocative and conceptual nature rather than empirical proof of certain social
changes.’’ Undoubtedly, institutions organized in relation to fear, risk assessment and
provision of security characterize Western culture. In his analysis of Beck, Wilkinson
(2010: 47) argues that Beck’s interest in risk is shaped by his conviction that modern
individuals, capitalist markets and nation-states must change their practices and ‘‘engage
in a project of planetary survival for a common good of humanity across the globe.’’

Cultural theory
A cultural theory approach to risk maintains that risk is always a social invention, the
intersection of values, beliefs, and perceptions. British anthropologist Mary Douglas’s
‘‘risk culture’’ has influentially developed a connection between group membership and
one’s world view, on the one hand, and the perception of risk on the other (Douglas,
1982). Prior to thinking about the materiality of risk, individuals encounter threats with
prior beliefs and assumptions (Mythen, 2008), suggesting that, in contrast to Beck’s thesis,
there are no actual increases in risks in contemporary times, nor are risks ‘‘out there’’ as an
objective reality. People perceive risks; their worry about becoming victims of crime, or
cancer, or nuclear fallout are expressions of personal views about the event’s (dis)utility as
well as its probability (Garland, 2003). They are making emotionally laden value judgments
as well as cognitive claims.
For Douglas, culturally constructed perceived risks are responses to problems within the
social organization of a specific society and selected for how useful they are to the social
system. What is perceived as dangerous, and how much risk to accept, is a function of one’s
cultural adherence and social learning. Such a framework helps understand how those
seemingly ‘‘irrational’’ choices are shaped by the social context (Tansey and O’Riordan,
1999), much like Durkheim’s analysis of suicide.
Culture theory draws on Durkheim’s interest in the role of social organizations
controlling cognition and cultural categories. As each social organization is maintained by
a cultural bias covering the whole cognitive and axiological content, it is also sustained by a
particular set of risks (Douglas and Wildavsky, 1983; Kermisch, 2012). More precisely, ‘‘the
question is not which dangers are most alarming but which explanations of misfortune are
likely to function most effectively’’ in the different kinds of social organizations—that is,
which explanations of misfortune are the most effective in maintaining the social
organization (Douglas, 1985: 59). Risks are selected to serve a function in the social
system, whether tribal or twenty-first century preventive or moral panics. Risks reinforce
a group’s social cohesion and distinctions between insiders and outsiders. What one society
sees as a significant risk, another may disregard altogether. The process by which an object is
considered ‘‘out of place’’ is fundamentally cultural. ‘‘There is no such thing as absolute
dirt,’’ Douglas (1966: 2) famously said to Lord Chesterfield about the separation of purity
Bialostok 569

and pollution, which she considered the most fundamental conceptual distinction in our
thinking. ‘‘It is in the eye of the beholder.’’ In other words, things are not considered dirty in
and of themselves, but because of where they stand in a system of categories, which can
include people and non-human classes, animate or inanimate objects (Bialostok and
Whitman, 2012).
Douglas’s account posits that risks are responses to problems within the social
organization of a specific society. As social solidarity weakens, threats of disaster also
serve as resources for building social order and defending social boundaries. Rejecting the
universality of risk, or psychology as an explanatory view of risk, all modes of assessment
are biased by the social assumptions they make, and risk perception is determined by society
and culture. Societies reveal their deepest values in the priorities they set among physical and
symbolic risks.

Governmentality
Risk was never central to Foucault’s project, but scholars have since broadened his
governmentality thesis to accommodate the ways in which the language of risk is being
used to shape and regulate economic, social, and personal activities. Risk provides a point
of entry for an investigation of the post-social strategies for governing conduct (Rose, 1999:
98). Foucault asserted that in contrast to earlier periods of civilization when power was
routinely expressed through the direct will of sovereign monarchs, contemporary
governmentality operates as both a set of organized practices and a guiding rationale. It
accords a crucial role to ‘‘action at a distance’’—that is, to mechanisms that shape the
conduct of diverse actors. Contemporary Western power filtrates through the matrix of
governmental apparatuses within administrative structures and populations. Hacking’s
Taming of Chance and The Emergence of Probability provide genealogical studies that—in
contrast to historical sociologies—locate risk as part of a particular style of thinking born
during the nineteenth century (Ewald, 1991). This style entailed new ways of understanding
and acting upon misfortune in terms of risk (Rose, 1999). Risk thinking brought the future
into the present and made it calculable, using statistical intelligibility ‘‘that the collective laws
of large numbers seemed to provide’’ (Rose, 1999: 99).
Contemporary theorists of governmentality claim that the current language of risk has been
widely adopted as a primary technique of government. Risk can be conceptualized as a form of
disciplinary power, working through and upon the individual, constituting him/her as an
object of knowledge. When behaviors and actions are labeled a ‘‘risk’’ then efforts are made
to conduct people so that they in turn conduct themselves along a select course of action and
toward a particular set of goals. Mitchell Dean (1999: 206) writes, echoing aspects of Douglas:

There is no such thing as risk in reality. Risk is a way—or rather a set of different ways—of
ordering reality, of rendering it into a calculable form . . . the significance of risk does not lie in
risk in itself but with what risk gets attached to . . . risk [should be] analyzed as a component of
assemblages of practices, techniques and rationalities concerned with how we govern . . . In the
‘‘governmental’’ account, risk is a calculative rationality that is tethered to assorted techniques
of regulation, management, and shaping of human conduct in the service ends and with definite,
but to some extent unforeseen, effects.

Wilkinson (2010) argues that the sociological importance of this perspective of risk
challenges the ways in which risk is used to draw public attention to particular types of
570 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

danger (as with Beck) or as device for maintenance of group solidarities (as with Douglas).
Instead, a governmentality approach emphasizes the ways in which the contemporary
language of risk creates new forms of subjectivity and redefines the moral outlook that we
bring to our interpersonal relationships and political expressions:

While Beck and Douglas are inclined to explain the public prominence and cultural
preoccupation with risk as a response to social processes of individualization, governmentality
theorists identify the language of risk as actively involved in promoting the process. The new
forms of subjectivity and types of social relationships that are coordinated through risk-based
government are understood to be geared towards promoting the ethic of ‘‘individual
responsibility’’ and ‘‘freedom of choice’’ across society.

Neoliberalism and risk

As a political rationality, welfare policies were structured to encourage national growth and
well-being through the promotion of social responsibility and the mutuality of social risk
(Rose and Miller, 1992). But the last decades of the twentieth century bore witness to an
intense transformation in the ways rationality of welfare and, in turn, risk, were perceived. In
the late 1970s, global trade shocked American companies out of a complacent prosperity. By
the 1980s, many companies claimed they could no longer afford to offer the guarantees they
once had (Hacker, 2008). With individualism on the rise, job security and health insurance
benefits began to fade. Claims were made that by socializing the risks faced by individuals
and households, the welfare state necessarily reduced incentives to pursue risky
opportunities. Neoliberal reforms shifted risks from government and business to workers
and consumers (Quiggin, 2007).
Neoliberalism began as a transnational political project aiming to remake the nexus of
market, state, and citizenship (Wacquant, 2009). Heads and senior executives of
transnational firms and multinational organizations, high-ranking politicians, and
cultural-technical experts replaced Keynesian economics which favored the individual with
market-friendly policies that stressed economic deregulation and welfare state devolution.
‘‘Thatcherism’’ in the United Kingdom, ‘‘Reaganism’’ in the United States, ‘‘economic
rationalism’’ in Australia all more or less argued that reductions in welfare benefits would
reduce welfare dependence.iv Accompanying neoliberalism’s economic agenda is a necessary
cultural trope that provided a ‘‘vocabulary of motive’’ (Mills, 1940) built on the model of the
entrepreneur to invade all spheres of personal and public life. As Gordon (1991: 41) puts it,

the whole ensemble of individual life is to be structured as the pursuit of a range of different
enterprises, a person’s relation to all his or her activities, and indeed to his or her self, is to be
given the ethos and structure of the enterprise form.
The enterprising self is not a liberated self, but one always being worked on and actively
maintained.5 Whereas at the start of the 1980s Baudrillard (1983) diagnosed the ‘‘end of the
social,’’ Margaret Thatcher’s magazine interview put a final nail into a social coffin:

I think we’ve been through a period where too many people have been given to understand that
if they have a problem, it’s the government’s job to cope with it. ‘‘I have a problem, I’ll get a
grant.’’ ‘‘I’m homeless, the government must house me.’’ They’re casting their problem on
society. And, you know, there is no such thing as society. There are individual men and
Bialostok 571

women, and there are families. And no government can do anything except through people, and
people must look to themselves first. (Thatcher, 1987)

Similarly in the United States, claims that inefficient government bureaucracies interfered
with free markets replaced the social logic of welfare (Peters, 2009), thereby shifting risks
increasingly onto individuals. The renewed emphasis on ‘‘personal responsibility’’ was less
an exercise in increasing individual choice, and more a means of transferring risk away from
large collective actors (such as governments or firms) to individuals, who typically have far
fewer resources to deal with disaster when it happens (Hacker, 2008). New risks began to
emerge in nearly every corner of the economy. For instance, prior to Obama’s Affordable
Health Care Act, the proportion of Americans without health insurance rose almost 25%
since the late 1980s.
The advancement and translation of new social policies to workplaces and a multitude of
other institutions such as schools shifted thinking to primarily value enterprise and activity
as signs of psychological health and well-being. A moralization of risk enabled the rational
(calculating) individual to become individually responsible and take prudent risk-taking
measures rather than be a burden on others (O’Malley, 1996). Personal risk-management
became an everyday affair. Technologies of consumption exacerbated anxieties about one’s
own future and that of loved ones, encouraged us to subdue these risks and ‘‘tame fate’’ by
purchasing insurance designed especially for us and our individual situation (Rose, 1999).
With the duty to oneself to be well (Greco, 1993), protection against risk through investing
in security has become part of the responsibilities of each active individual.
Risk continues to proliferate through private ‘‘security’’ markets that offer us burglar
alarms, gated communities, monitors for sleeping children, carbon monoxide and smoke
detectors, and severe disaster home weather kits. Lifestyle maximization, coupled with a
logic in which someone must be held to blame for any event that threatens an individual’s
quality of life, generates a relentless imperative of risk management not simply in relation to
contracting for insurance, but also through daily lifestyle management, choices about where
to live and shop, what to eat and drink, stress management, exercise, and so forth (Rose,
1999). Children’s recreational lifestyles are managed through safety experts and architects
who design playgrounds with wood chips and rubber matting, and climbing equipment to
prevent entrapments, falls, and crashes. The bacterial infestation of seemingly injury proof
indoor play areas is considered a safety risk. But then, so is the preoccupation of safety that
‘‘has stripped childhood of independence and risk taking. . .’’ (Rosin, 2014). None of this is
necessarily wrong or bad, but it is useful to appreciate the infinite contexts in which risk
thinking flourishes.

Education, risk, and neoliberalism

For the past three decades, education has been a key site in the neoliberalization of social
policy but further, operated as a technology of neoliberal government (Peters, 2009). Linking
neoliberal economics to education policy tends to reduce government’s economic inputs into
costly and ‘‘risky’’ education (Webb and Gulson, 2011). Education at all levels has been
reshaped ‘‘to become the arm of national economic policy, defined both as the problem (in
failing to provide a multi-skilled flexible workforce) and the solution (by upgrading skills
and creating a source of national export earnings)’’ (Blackmore, 2000: 134). The 1998 report
‘‘A nation still at risk’’ outlines a ‘‘risk management regime for the US education system’’
572 Policy Futures in Education 13(5)

(Peters, 2011) that describes ‘‘ten break-through changes for the 21st century,’’ including the
now familiar ‘‘national academic standards,’’ ‘‘standards-based assessment’’ and ‘‘tough
accountability systems,’’ alongside ‘‘school choice,’’ charter schools, deregulated teacher
force, differential teacher pay systems and ‘‘essential academic skills.’’ (Peters, 2011).
Similarly, ‘‘Race to the top,’’ although originating in the United States, is part of a
neoliberal thrust toward the commodification of all realms of experience (Lipman, 2011).
If the role of education was ever to develop political, social, and ethical citizens (Spring,
2013), the ascendancy of neoliberalism has produced a fundamental shift toward the
unrepentant promotion of knowledge to contribute to economic productivity (Peters,
2011). As an ideological project, neoliberalism redefines what it means to teach and learn,
and participate in schooling. Olssen and Peters (2011: 42) write, ‘‘The traditional
professional culture of open intellectual enquiry and debate has been replaced with an
institutional stress on performativity, as evidenced by the emergence of an emphasis on
measured outputs.’’ Neoliberal mentalities have linked even progressive education so that
risk taking is not only a pedagogical tool, but also a highly charged test of character
(Bialostok, 2012; Bialostok and Kamberelis, 2010, 2012). Carter (2009: 230) makes a
similar claim:

There is no doubt that many of us would believe our promotion of learner-centered pedagogies
as a best practice within the humanist and progressive tradition of education rather than as
culturally insensitive fodder for the global knowledge economy. But we need to recognize that
there is more to it, and that neoliberal global discourses on education and knowledge economy
have co-opted humanistic vision of active learning within democratic and collaborative
environments to its own purposes of human capital development.

In this special issue, the authors employ the concept of risk as a means of examining
prevailing modes of self-identification, institutional affiliation, and the dynamics of power
relationships in contemporary society. Indeed, for some the value of risk analysis lies not
so much in the ways it serves as a means to investigate social responses to particular
forms of possible danger, but more in the ways in which it might sensitize us to the
ideological uses of language in current policy debates surrounding individual
responsibilities toward the state and how modern states are seeking to redefine
notions of citizenship. Alex Posecznick describes how admissions personnel and faculty
mobilize persuasive scripts that invite prospective students to re-imagine themselves as
subjects with a fluid set of aspirations within the context of risky futures. Sue Saltmarsh
and Holly Randell-Moon consider how work–life balance policies anticipate and attempt
to manage perceived risks to the institution as a consequence of workers’ utilization of
such policies for their own benefit. James Collins explores how No Child Left Behind and
its implementation simultaneously obscure economic differences and polarize
ethnolinguistic identities at school, state, and federal levels. Jill Koyama documents
three threads of risk discourses that emerge in English as a Second Language and
career-readiness classes offered by a resettlement agency. Richard Johnson illustrates
how the quality of the lives of children and teachers is diminished through regimes of
risk management in early childhood ‘‘no touch’’ policies. Peter Moran argues that
federal regulations now placed on schools have caused teachers and administrators to
become increasingly risk averse. Eugenie A. Samier’s article, using security studies
critiques, explores the societal and cultural risk for developing countries that
globalized higher education poses.
Bialostok 573

This issue of Policy Futures in Education was completed more than a year prior to the
sudden and unexpected death of Ulrich Beck. I was a doctoral student when a colleague
enthusiastically talked about Beck’s risk society. Enmeshed in my own dissertation, I
remained marginally interested. Five years of subsequent reading shifted my entire
research agenda. While my own risk paradigm aligns more closely with neo-Foucauldian
perspectives, I owe much of my career to Beck’s thinking. In order to properly summarize
Beck’s theory in the introduction to Education and the Risk Society (Bialostok, Whitman,
and Bradley, 2012), I poured over his ouvre, reveling at his brilliance, creativity, and social
passion. How many scholars actually change the way we think about the world, and
introduce language that we simply cannot write without?
With this in mind we gratefully dedicate this special issue to Ulrick Bech.

Funding
This research received no specific grant from any funding agency in the public, commercial, or not-for-
profit sectors.

Notes
1. I typed the word risk into Google’s Ngram Viewer to provide a quick and dirty trajectory of its use
over time. Hamilton et al. (2007) use three corpora to analyze the meanings of risk across social
contexts.
2. Ironically, the latter population also experiences high levels of risky behaviors, such as substance
and drug abuse, although educators do not typically regard them as ‘‘at risk’’ (Luthar, 2003).
3. Bauman (2000) also describes the flexible, self-reflective and self-monitoring aspect of human action
necessary to respond to and manage the risk-prone ‘‘liquid’’ society.
4. Paul du Gay (1991: 45) makes the point that ‘‘the Thatcherite project not only involved an economic
revival but also a moral crusade.’’
5. Olssen and Peters (2005: 315) write that neoliberalism refers to ‘‘a positive conception of state’s role
in creating the appropriate market by providing the conditions, laws and institutions necessary for
its operation. In classical liberalism the individual is characterized as having an autonomous human
nature and can practice freedom. In neo-liberalism the state seeks to create an individual that is an
enterprising and competitive entrepreneur.’’

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