The Paradoxes of Modernity: Scientific Advances, Environmental Problems, and Risks to the Social Fabric?

Recent reviews have contrasted U.S. sociologists' "empirical" work on technological risks with the "theoretical" risk work of Giddens and Beck, but the reality is more complex. Most U.S. sociologists are less likely than Giddens or Beck to see risks as "transcending" socioeconomic and other divisions, but the United States-based work tends to interpret the trustworthiness of scientific-technical expertise in ways that lie between the arguments of Beck and Giddens. An examination of early nuclear technologies indicates that the United States-based perspectives provide a better "fit," for theoretical as well as empirical reasons. The development of nuclear technologies was mixed, rather than high or low, in its competence and trustworthiness, and it created social and environmental risks that did not so much "transcend" social divisions as to reinforce them. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]