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Social scientific attention has recently focused upon the private regulation of Britain's burgeoning night-time economy by door supervisors or ‘bouncers’ as they are more commonly known. Contributing ethnography to this literature, this paper explores bodily risk among doorstaff in Southwest Britain. The commonly perceived association between doorwork and high levels of violence renders this a demonised occupation yet doorstaff may also be in physical danger when policing urban nightspots. Centrally, this participant observational study—grounded in the phenomenological ‘foreground’ or lived experience of risk — explores bodily danger within the door supervisors' routine night-time contexts. Interrelated social, cultural and economic factors associated with the attenuation, minimisation or avoidance of physical harm are also noted. Describing voluntary and other-imposed occupational health risks, including physical violence and illicit drug-taking, furthers an appreciative understanding of why doorstaff may simultaneously be in danger and dangerous. More formally, this paper, in underscoring the importance of the ‘lived body’, also supports recent theoretical calls for an embodied sociology. Sociological reflection on health, risk and society, it will be argued, must be grounded in the inescapable corporeality and emotional vicissitudes of actual flesh and blood bodies less it ride roughshod over complex social reality. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

A number of ‘food scares’ over the past decade in Europe have generated considerable debate about public understandings of food risk, and the extent to which such understandings impact on decision making. This paper reports on a focus group study of how UK consumers discuss choosing safe food. Strategies for making food choices were, in general, characterised by confidence rather than anxiety. Although concerned in an abstract way with the safety of food and how it was monitored, ‘risk’ and ‘safety’ were rarely the primary discursive framework used for justifying food choices. Other discourses, such as health, naturalness, economy and convenience, competed with, overlapped with or were legitimated by that of ‘risk’. However, everyday decision making was presented as a routine endeavour, aided by a number of ‘short cuts’ or rules of thumb for establishing food choices as routine and unremarkable. These short cuts divided safe from risky categories of food, but also divided preferred from despised foodstuffs in relation to other food discourses. Rules of thumb provided useful rhetorical devices for routinising accounts of food choice. In practice, however, rules of thumb are reported as being utilised in complex and contingent ways. They thus provide a sophisticated bulwark against the uncertainties of food risks when events (such as the media concern over BSE) threaten everyday trust in routine decisions. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]