Perspectives on the ‘lens of risk’ interview series: Interviews with Joost van Loon and Ortwin Renn

Abstract

This article is the second of a set which will be published in 2012/2013 in the special issue series Health Care Through the ‘Lens of Risk’. The interviews explore the views of leading social scientists about the study of risk and its societal significance. This particular article shares responses from interviews with two highly influential European social scientists about their approaches to risk. These responses, from Joost van Loon and Ortwin Renn, reflect two somewhat contrasting perspectives towards risk and risk research, although significant areas of common ground and certain compatibilities between their two approaches are also apparent. The complexities and interwovenness of risk considerations, and the challenges these pose to researchers and policy-makers alike, emerge as salient themes.

Keywords:

• risk
• risk analysis
• risk perception
• uncertainty

Notes

1. After the interviews were undertaken in October 2011, excerpts were then brought together into an initial draft of this article in early 2012. The two interviewees were then given the opportunity to lightly edit the interview material. The interviewer has made further very minor grammatical corrections.

2. Van Loon derives this latter concept from the work of Whitehead (1978) who applies the term in developing his ‘one substance’ cosmology. In seeking to ground a more materialist ontology in concrete points of contact between subject and object, the concept of prehension was preferred by Van Loon as it ‘describes much better what I mean with “irritation” between two objects engaging each other’. The term is outlined by Whitehead (1978, p. 23) as follows: ‘every prehension consists of three factors: (a) the subject which is prehending, namely, the actual entity in which that prehension is a concrete element; (b) the ‘datum’ which is prehended; (c) the “subjective form” which is how that subject prehends that datum’.

3. This Aristotelian concept is applied in the sense that to instantiate is to bestow something with certain properties, and thus a certain specific reality.

4. Van Loon pointed out his scepticism towards labels such as late-modernity due to the extent of assumptions latent around such terminology and that ‘as a result they fail to return much value’.

5. Gabriel Tarde was a prominent French sociologist and social psychologist whose work (for example, Tarde 1901), at the turn of the twentieth century, was later to influence research into herd behaviour and the ‘infectious’ development of public opinion.

6. Political-sociology and social-psychology are two examples of such hyphenated disciplines.