A Risk Society

“Risk society” is a concept that was first framed by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in Risk Society in 1986. In Beck’s view, the modern society had deviated from (Karl Marx’s) class society or (Max Weber’s) industrial society and had developed into a social form that is highly modern, known as the “risk society.” Social theories based on unequal distribution of wealth (the functional theory, Marxism, and various kinds of postindustrial or postmodern theories that derived from it) have lost their interpretability when it comes to the crisis and inequality in the distribution of risks. Therefore, there needs to be a turn in social theories, that is to say, “risk sociology” needs to be advanced with problem awareness being “how to avoid, minimize, and direct risks or hazards systematically created as a part of modernization.”