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This paper compares moral panic with the potential political catastrophes of a risk society. The aim of the comparison is threefold: 1. to establish the position of risk society threats alongside more conventional moral panics; 2. to examine the conceptual shifts that accompany the new types of threats; and 3. to outline the changing research agenda. The paper suggests that as new sites of social anxiety have emerged around environmental, nuclear, chemical and medical threats, the questions motivating moral panic research have lost much of their utility. Conceptually, it examines how the roulette dynamics of the risk society accidents expose hidden institutional violations that redound into 'hot potatoes' that are passed among and fumbled by various actors. Changing conceptions of folk devils, claims making activities, and of a safety are also discussed. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article applies the gender-based attribution theory to the Canadian track athlete Ben Johnson's loss his gold medal for using a banned performance-enhancing steroid. Attribution theories have largely ignored the effects of gender or sought cross-situational predictions for the foci of men's and women's attributions. A theoretical position that sheds light on gender and attributions is that of differential moral development of men and women. Sociologist C. Gilligan claimed that in Western societies mother-centered early socialization leads to a rule-and-rationality based morality in men that maximizes self-interest. In contrast, women learn to emphasize relationships, and their ensuing morality is empathic, responsive to others' needs, and sensitive to context-specific circumstances. Thus, attributions of' the two sexes may be due to the fact that men resolve moral dilemmas through an instrumental and women through a socio-emotionai logic that Gililgan called the ethic of care.