Search

Raleigh International is a British youth development charity that offers structured overseas expeditions ‘to inspire young people...to discover their full potential’. The expeditions involve three different projects: adventurous activity, community service and environmental conservation. This paper examines the experiences of a group of venturers who participated in a 10-week expedition to Ghana. Data were collected through a series of interviews and participant observation. The analysis of the participants’ motives for engaging in the projects is informed by the interactional principles of Erving Goffman. The study participants indicated that their involvement with the organisation was primarily a form of face-work: to enhance their credibility as they anticipated entering the adult world of employment. In particular, they were concerned with building aspects of character that resonate with Goffman’s elements of courage, gameness, integrity and composure. Raleigh International as the organisational body is seen to display elements of a ‘total institution’, providing the rules and values that govern the social encounter, during the time of which actors live in relative isolation from broader society. This study identifies two areas of concern for these young venturers. First, there was a failure to recognise that their desire for ‘risk’ to develop character was limited by the boundaries placed around their activities by Raleigh International, reflecting a broader culture of caution. And, second, their sense of ‘service’ to a developing nation contained elements of stigmatisation of the people with whom they worked. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

Sociological approaches to risk and uncertainty are well-developed. These approaches have played an important role in analysing the significance of risk and uncertainty in modern social life. However, it is approaches based on rational actor perspectives in New Public Management that have become pre-eminent in handling social risks in recent UK policies. This paper tackles the puzzle of why sociology is strong in critique but much weaker in policy influence by pointing to the institutional and contextual standing of approaches which offer a natural home to individual rational actor approaches within UK government. Approaches that understand and analyse risk in statistical terms have been particularly influential in many aspects of modern life. A second stream, that has tended to attract less attention, stresses linkages between these approaches and the growth of particular institutions. The challenges faced by modern states in a post-industrial and globalised world are widely discussed. An important response, particularly prominent in the UK and especially in social policy-making, has been New Public Management, associated with an individual rational actor paradigm. Sociological approaches to risk have contributed a number of critiques of this development, however these critiques have failed to gain much purchase on policy-making. One reason is the extent to which approaches which rest on an individual rational actor paradigm are entrenched within the institutional framework of policy-making. This paradigm rests on a different approach to agency than that which is most influential in sociology. [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]