Definition
Risk society is Ulrich Beck's name for the late-modern social formation in which the central political question shifts from how to distribute wealth to how to distribute and manage manufactured risks — technological, environmental, financial, and security risks that human action itself has produced.
Where industrial modernity organised conflict around the production of goods, risk society organises it around the production of bads. The risks are typically invisible to ordinary perception, unevenly distributed in ways that cut across classical class lines, and global in scale.
Why it matters
How it works
In a risk society, institutions are evaluated by how well they anticipate, measure, and contain low-probability high-consequence events. Insurance, regulation, surveillance, and pre-emptive intervention expand. Public anxiety becomes a political resource: governments compete on the credibility of their risk management more than on their ideological vision.
For criminology, the framework reframes crime control as a risk-management practice. Actuarial sentencing, predictive policing, situational prevention, and the proliferation of surveillance are read as expressions of risk-society logic — efficient on their own terms, but raising fresh questions about civil liberties, equity, and the displacement of harms onto already-marginalised groups.