956.1
How to Conceptualize Social Inequality after Risk Concept?

Thursday, July 17, 2014: 3:30 PM
Room: Booth 52
Oral Presentation
Kenji KAWABATA , Sociology, The University of Tokyo, Bunkyo-ku, Japan
How to conceptualize social inequality after risk concept?

-Focusing on 1980's dispute in Germany. 

Risk concept has become a major interest in sociology with the publication of Ulrich Beck's Risk Society (Beck 1986). One of the most important thesis of Risk Society is the "paradigm" shift of social inequality. Beck claimed the "change from the logic of wealth distribution in a society of scarcity to the logic of risk distribution in late modernity". Thus he pointed out the appearance of risk society "in contrast to class society".

However, Beck's thesis has been criticized in several researches by showing the continuity of class relevance. Such as Hans-Peter Müller(Müller 1992) or Rainer Geißler(Geißler 1996) , J.H. Goldthorpe, (Goldthorpe 2002) etc. .Then how can we understand social inequality covering the relevance of risk and class. The issue is to integrate the relevance of risk and class to understand contemporary social inequality. And we need a concept which integrates class elements and risk elements.

This presentation attempts to figure out the issue to integrate class and risk concept focusing on 1980's individualization dispute in Germany.