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Abstract Most writing in the social sciences on risk-taking tends to represent it as the product of
ignorance or irrationality. The modern subject tends to be portrayed in this writing as risk-aversive
and fearful of risk, constantly seeking ways of avoiding it. While there has been an extensive
literature on peoples perceptions of risk, little empirical research has attempted to investigate the
meanings given to voluntary risk-taking: that is, risk-taking that is undertaken without coercion in
the full acknowledgement that risks are being confronted. In this article we present ndings from our
qualitative research on a group of Australians risk knowledges and experiences, using in-depth
interviews to explore the meanings given to risk and the discourses used to express ideas about risk.
We focus here on what our interviewees had to say about their experiences of, and views about,
voluntary risk-taking. We identify and discuss three dominant discourses in our interviewees
accounts: those of self-improvement, emotional engagement and control. Our conclusion relates these
discourses to wider discourses and notions about subjectivity and embodiment.
Key words: risk, voluntary risk-taking, sociological theory, perceptions of risk, discourse
Introduction
Most of the accounts of risk circulating in contemporary Western expert and popular cultures
portray it as negative, something to be avoided. So too, much of the academic literature on
risk represents individuals in late modernity as living in fear, constantly dogged by feelings of
anxiety, vulnerability and uncertainty in relation to the risks of which they are constantly
made aware. For example, in uential sociologists Ulrich Beck (1992, 1994, 1995) and
Anthony Giddens (1990, 1994, 1998) have written about the so-called emergent risk society
of late modernity, in which people are seen to be highly aware of, and worried about, risks
and critical of the institutions that produce them. It has been contended that in both everyday
and professionalised discourses, risk is now often a synonym for danger or hazard (Douglas,
1992).
The emphasis in contemporary Western societies on the avoidance of risk is strongly
associated with the ideal of the civilised body, an increasing desire to take control over ones
life, to rationalise and regulate the self and the body, to avoid the vicissitudes of fate. To take
a
School of Social Sciences and Liberal Studies, Charles Sturt University, Australia; b School of Journalism, Media and
Cultural Studies, University of Cardiff, Wales.
Address correspondence to: Deborah Lupton, 14 Arnold Street, Killara 2071, Australia. E-mail: dlupton@csu.edu.au
Our study
A total of 74 people were interviewed for our study during 199798: 32 living in the Sydney
and Blue Mountains area, 28 in Wollongong and 14 in Bathurst.1 These locations, all in the
state of New South Wales, were chosen to provide diversity. Sydney is the largest city in
Australia and the Blue Mountains is an adjoining rural area known for its natural beauty,
from which many people commute to Sydney and at which many Sydneysiders spend tourist
weekends. Wollongong is a large post-industrial city near Sydney currently adapting to the
gradual erosion of its steel industry, and Bathurst is a small country town some 210 km west
of Sydney.
The interviewees were recruited and interviewed by research assistants living in the locales,
who used pre-existing social networks and snowball sampling for recruitment. The group of
interviewees was dominated by well-educated, young and middle-aged adults of British
ancestry. Of the participants, 42 were female and 32 male. More than half (44) had at least
some university education and a further seven participants held a trade or technical
quali cation. Of the remainder, 2 had only completed the nal year of high school, 16 did
not complete high school and 2 were still school students. Fifty-six participants were of
British ancestry. Of the remainder, 15 were of continental European ethnicity, 2 were of
Lebanese ethnicity and 1 was Aboriginal. In terms of age, the group was concentrated around
early and middle adulthood: 8 were aged 20 or less, 20 were aged between 21 and 30, 19
aged between 31 and 40, 13 aged between 41 and 50, 7 aged between 51 and 60 and 6 aged
61 or over (one unknown).
We make no claims for generalisability of our ndings to the Australian population as a
whole. Nonetheless, we believe that the in-depth data that have emerged from the interviews
conducted with this group provide some important insights into the epistemologies and
discourses that give meaning to risk among non-experts.
Each participant was interviewed individually using a semi-structured interview schedule,
except for two group discussions comprised of four university students in Sydney and a
similar group in Wollongong. The questions asked of participants were directed at eliciting
their views and experiences of risk in relation to their personal biographies, so as to
contextualise risk in their everyday lives. They were asked to de ne risk, to describe the risks
they saw as threatening themselves personally, both in the past and the present, and
threatening Australians in general, how they had learnt about risks and who or what they saw
as the cause of risks. Our analytical emphasis was on key themes, narratives, de nitions,
discourses, personal/social histories, rhetorical and expressive devices and so on, emerging
from the transcribed interviews. In particular, we wished to identify the meanings that our
interviewees gave to the concept of risk, the ways in which they identi ed risks as affecting
themselves and how they sought to express these ideas using speci c discursive strategies.
1. This research was funded by Large Grant awarded to the authors by the Australian Research Council. Later research
included interviews with Britons: see Lupton and Tulloch (forthcoming) for a full analysis of the data from both Australian
and British interviewees.
The following discussion, in analysing the meanings given by the participants to voluntary
risk-taking, addresses the three dominant discourses that emerged in their accounts: those of
self-improvement, emotional engagement and control.
trepidation and concern and the unknown were just on one level quite fantastic and
on the other very scary.
Eric had found that his rst geographical comfort zonea sleepy English university town
in South Africawas itself a place of severe ideological constraint. His university education,
featuring Marxist thinking, transformed him from an unthinking supporter of apartheid into
its opponent, and he felt impelled to leave the country. In Britain he encountered new risks,
relinquished other comfort zones as he discovered his gay identity and came out. Now,
having moved to Australia, he was experiencing the outcome of sexual risk-taking of the
1980s, as he saw most of his friends dying of AIDS. Yet Eric continued, despite his loneliness
(two partners have died), to value both his ideological and sexual transformations.
Both Erics and Lorraines accounts of their own risk-taking point to the notion of
risk-taking as a form of work upon the self. For Eric, the risk-taking involved in migrating and
coming out had its rewards in living in a country where freedom of expression and thought
are allowed, something he valued highly, and where he felt able to express and act upon his
sexual desires. He felt that his authentic selfthe self that is anti-apartheid, interested in
social justice and gaycould be expressed via his risky decision to leave his country of origin
and migrate elsewhere.
In Lorraines interview, she described risk-taking as a form of feminist protest against the
conventions that restrict girls and women in their lives. In her case, growing up in the country
in the 1950s, such restrictions were imposed particularly by her parents: Being a girl, you
have to take risks by trying to overcome the taboos that [limit] women. In her own life, she
said, as a young girl she chose to deliberately court risks when riding her horse, and also by
taking up cigarette smoking and drinking alcohol. In doing so, she was going against [her]
parents wishes and thereby challenging restrictions they sought to impose upon her.
Ron is 60, unemployed, and living in Bathurst. In his younger days he enjoyed riding in
rodeos, a physical activity that posed great threats to life and limb. He discussed the bene ts
and pleasures he saw as gaining from this experience:
Im thinking probably the most focused risk-taking, where you really cant predict
what might be the outcome of the activity at all, is riding in a rodeo, which I did over
about a two-year period, and each experience is unique and absolutely unpredictable. What it is that you get from success is a degree of personal satisfaction and
self-esteem as a result of taking, accepting a risk and being successful. And if you
said to me, you know, Is it worth it?, Id have to say Yes!. Its part of the whole
process of becoming the person that you nally nish being, presenting oneself in
another way. And its a totally different context, and it might sound silly to say it,
but it has some comparisons with say, taking an examination where you front up
and if you succeed there is a degree of personal self-satisfaction as a result of
whatever is the end result.
Rons account is clear about the ways in which he conceptualises this particular risk-taking
activity as contributing to his sense of accomplishment and, indeed, to the continuing process
of developing self-identity. For him, rodeo-riding was a means of testing himself and
demonstrating to himself the limits of his skills. So too, Lyng (1990) found that for the
edgeworkers he spoke to, who engaged in parachute jumping, the notions of self-realisation,
self-actualisation and self-determination were commonly claimed as goals of their dangerous physical activity. According to Lyng (1990: p. 860): In the pure form of edgework,
individuals experience themselves as instinctively acting entities, which leaves them with a
puri ed and magni ed sense of self.
Chloe, a 39-year-old artist who lives in the inner city of Sydney, talked about a different
kind of risk-taking that achieves the same ends. Chloe said that she does not take risks
involving placing herself in physical peril: I de nitely do not seek out physical sport sort of
physical risks. Im very conscious that I dont do that. Im not adventurous in that way, like
Ive never been abseiling, Ive never been parachuting, you know, any of those sorts of things,
white water rafting. When she talked about her own voluntary risk-taking, Chloe focused
instead on the relationship between artistic creativity and risk in both her teaching and her
own art:
I encourage people in my workshops, my creativity workshops, to take risks. If those
people are doing a painting or whatever, and someoneIll just give you a little
example. Someone got to a point recently in a painting where she said, Oh, I keep
getting stuck at this point and Im afraid Ill mess it up. And I encouraged her to
do the thing that might mess up the painting, take that risk. And she did it and it
was a real breakthrough. And I think I tend to do that creatively, in creative areas.
Whether it be in painting or whatever the creative expression, I push myself to take
those risks. The risk of stuf ng the whole thing up.
Like Lorraine, Chloes notion of the bene ts of risk-taking includes the opportunity to go
beyond accepted convention. For her artistry, risk-taking is essential to transcend the
banalities of niceness and super ciality. Although her risk-taking is related to art rather than
physical danger, Chloe experiences the same sorts of pleasures from it. She extends herself
beyond usual boundaries, she is able to achieve self-actualisation and transformation:
The buzz of excitement when you do that daring thing or whatever, that can
transform, I think thats often where the energy is. Its hard to describe it, but I
think theres often a lot of energy and aliveness in taking a riskthat sort of risk. I
mean maybe thats the case with any risk-taking: Im just thinking about painting at
the moment. Yeah, it seems to release energy and helps and often, yeah, its like
pushing the boundaries, going further. You know, it can add depth to what youre
creating which might have just been a bit sort of nice. Too nice, or super cial or
whatever before doing that. So theres something transformative about it.
The discourse of self-improvement in relation to risk-taking bespeaks the cultural importance
placed on knowing and monitoring the state of ones self, on movement and progression of
this self, on exibility and adaptability (Martin, 1994). As Daniel, a 39-year-old Sydneysider,
put it: I dont think that you can live life fully without placing yourself in a risky situation.
I dont think that you can really fully nd your own full potential without taking risks. The
boundaries here concern the boundaries of the self: that which is deemed possible in terms
of self-realisation and expanding ones life experiences.
The discourse of emotional engagement
Risk-taking is also fundamentally associated with emotion. To be confronted with risks that
one does not choose to take is to experience fear, nervousness, discomfort, as 44-year-old
Sydneysider Raymond put it. But to deliberately take a risk may also be to seek a heightened
degree of emotional intensity that is pleasurable in its ability to take us out of the here-andnow, the mundane, everyday nature of life. As Martin contended: I think risk is good in as
much as that at least it stimulates the adrenalin. Risk is adventurous, challenging, exciting.
And according to Pete, a 35-year-old crane-driver from Wollongong: The bigger the risk the
more excitement. Even when you take out a mortgage its exciting, even though its a risk.
can bring an adrenalin rush that allows a cionados to escape the bounds of the rational mind
and controlled body, to allow the bodys sensations and emotions to overcome them for a
time. There is a sense of heightened living, of being closer to nature than culture, of breaking
the rules that we see society as imposing upon us. Here again selfhood is important. The
emotions produced by risk-taking are seen to give access to authenticity of selfhood by
confronting the barriers of convention or social expectation.
Daniel went on to explain what he got out of this risk-taking: Balancing on a bar thirty feet
off the ground and continuing to work for a little while, and then escaping from that situation
and making your way back down to some sort of solid oor, can give me a feeling that Im
very much in control of my body. And that is a very nice feeling really, I like that feeling.
Anna described the sense of control she achieved from taking physical risks in her youth,
despite suffering quite serious injury:
I can remember we were living in northern Europe and living in the 50s, early 50s,
we had no heating except fuel stoves. And it was always my task to chop the wood
at autumn time, and the wood then got stacked in the outhouse and would dry. And
I was very skilled, Ive always been very skilled with my hands, and I would, I mean
I was probably 12, and I would use an axe with great skill and I would just chop
these logs, and I would do it very quickly. And thats where I lost a bit of my thumb
and the axe went into my hand another time. I mean they were sort of risks, I knew
I was going far too fast, but I got a pleasure out of using that skill, and I felt in
control.
Voluntary risk-taking, for these people, is inherently implicated in their notions of the
boundaries of their bodies, how far they feel they can push themselves, how well they can
conquer their emotions of fear and feelings of vulnerability. They are engaging in edgework
that allows them to experience an intensi ed body awareness but that also contributes to their
sense of being able to control their bodies. Even within the meanings of edgework, control
of the body remains a central preoccupation. Edgework is also characterised by an emphasis
on skilled performance of the dangerous activity, involving the ability to maintain control over
a situation that verges on complete chaos, that requires, above all, mental toughness, the
ability not to give in to fear. Cultivated risk-taking in this context is seen to provide an
opportunity for individuals to display courage, to master fear, to prove something to
themselves which allows them to live life with a sense of personal agency.
Conclusion
Our study revealed three major discourses employed by our participants to describe the
pleasures and bene ts of voluntary risk-taking. The discourse of self-improvement was
employed to describe the importance of working on the continuing project of the self through
taking risks, while the discourse of emotional engagement drew on a neo-Romantic ideal of
the body/self allowed to extend itself beyond the strictures of culture and society (Lupton,
1998).The third discourse, that of control, in some way counters that of emotional engagement in privileging control over ones emotions and bodily responses as a valued aspect of
engaging in risky activities. All three discourses represent a life without risk as too tightly
bounded and restricted, as not offering enough challenges.
These discourses are also underpinned by contemporary ideas about the importance of
identity and selfhood. The notion of risk-taking as contributing to self-development, selfactualisation, self-authenticity and self-control is part of a wider discourse that privileges the
self as a continuing project that requires constant work and attention. Risk-taking, in this
context, becomes a particular practice of the self (Foucault, 1988), a means by which
subjectivity is expressed and developed according to prevailing moral and ethical values.
Further, the use of spatial metaphors in talk about risk-taking demonstrates the importance
of the concept of cultural boundaries in thinking about the body, self and social relations.
Mary Douglass (1966) work on purity and danger highlights the integral role played by
conceptual boundaries in constructing ideas of Self against those of the Other. She argues
that it is particularly at the margins of the body and society that concerns and anxieties about
purity and danger are directed. Because margins mark and straddle boundaries, they are
liminal and therefore dangerous, requiring high levels of policing and control. This is why we
tend to think of risk-taking as involving the transgression of boundaries; and why there may
be an additional sense of self-improvement when policed boundaries are crossed. That which
lies beyond the boundaries of the Selfthat is, the domain of Othernessis risky. Risk is
dangerous, but also exciting, in its lack of certainty and challenging of the borders between
the known and the unknown.
The discourses employed by people when describing their risk-taking speak of intensity of
emotion and embodied sensation, of movement, ows and waves that break down or cross
cultural boundaries. These tropes suggest that the pleasures invoked by risk-taking for some
are also implicated with transgression of the civilised body image. Against the ideal of the
highly controlled civilised body/self is the discourse which valorises escape from the bonds
of control and regulation, which hankers after the pleasures of the grotesque body, the body
that is more permeable and open to the world. This discourse rejects the ideal of the
disembodied rational actor for an ideal of the self that emphasises heightened sensual
embodimentthe visceral and emotional ights produced by encounters with danger. The
transgression it involves is pleasurable because of its association with the dangerous, the
forbidden, the polluting, the contaminated, the disorderly, the carnivalesque. The very fear,
anxiety and disquiet aroused by these cultural categories are implicated in the excitement
generated by confronting these feelings and crossing over to the other side, at least for a
time.
Yet, as we have argued, risk-taking is not only about loss of control over the body/self. For
some people, notions of control remain central to risk-taking and are an important part of its
pleasures. Indeed, if successfully undertaken without disaster striking, voluntary risk-taking
can lead to a greater sense of control, resulting in a feeling of accomplishment and agency.
Risk-taking, therefore, is far more complex than is suggested in the traditional social scienti c
literature. It may be based just as much on knowledgeof the self, of ones own bodily
capacities and desiresas on ignorance.
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