IDEAS home Printed from https://ideas.repec.org/h/spr/rischp/978-3-030-88374-4_1.html
   My bibliography  Save this book chapter

Understanding Risk Debates Through Mary Douglas: Environment, Inequality, and COVID-19

In: Risk Management

Author

Listed:
  • Philip Mark Linsley

    (University of York Management School, University of York)

  • Alexander Philip Linsley

    (Alne)

Abstract

This chapter suggests that neo-Durkheimian institutional theory as developed by Mary Douglas is a potentially useful way for understanding why different perspectives arise on difficult risk issues and why when the world is confronted with a number of potentially catastrophic risks, action does not swiftly follow. The theory proposes that within any group or organisation or society there will be four primary worldviews on risk and risk management present, and these arise because patterns of social relations shape how problems are interpreted and how solutions are configured. Within the chapter, the theory is adopted to analyse three major risk issues: the environment and climate change, inequality and poverty, and COVID-19. The nature of the impacts of COVID-19 appears to make it stand apart from the other two risks. It has much greater transparency; for example, it is evident it is causing significant numbers of people real hardship. Further, the virus took hold on our lives very rapidly. In this crisis, our vulnerabilities have been laid bare and it is this which may be the galvanising point around which a solution could be built that achieves buy-in from the holders of the four different risk perspectives.

Suggested Citation

  • Philip Mark Linsley & Alexander Philip Linsley, 2022. "Understanding Risk Debates Through Mary Douglas: Environment, Inequality, and COVID-19," Risk, Governance and Society, in: Cristina Florio & Monika Wieczorek-Kosmala & Philip Mark Linsley & Philip Shrives (ed.), Risk Management, pages 1-16, Springer.
    • Handle: RePEc:spr:rischp:978-3-030-88374-4_1
    DOI: 10.1007/978-3-030-88374-4_1
    as

    Download full text from publisher

    To our knowledge, this item is not available for download. To find whether it is available, there are three options:
    1. Check below whether another version of this item is available online.
    2. Check on the provider's web page whether it is in fact available.
    3. Perform a search for a similarly titled item that would be available.

    Corrections

    All material on this site has been provided by the respective publishers and authors. You can help correct errors and omissions. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:spr:rischp:978-3-030-88374-4_1. See general information about how to correct material in RePEc.

    If you have authored this item and are not yet registered with RePEc, we encourage you to do it here. This allows to link your profile to this item. It also allows you to accept potential citations to this item that we are uncertain about.

    We have no bibliographic references for this item. You can help adding them by using this form .

    If you know of missing items citing this one, you can help us creating those links by adding the relevant references in the same way as above, for each refering item. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

    For technical questions regarding this item, or to correct its authors, title, abstract, bibliographic or download information, contact: Sonal Shukla or Springer Nature Abstracting and Indexing (email available below). General contact details of provider: http://www.springer.com .

    Please note that corrections may take a couple of weeks to filter through the various RePEc services.

    IDEAS is a RePEc service. RePEc uses bibliographic data supplied by the respective publishers.