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Nikos Bozatzis*

Reflexive Modernitys Reflexive Actors: Beyond self-monitoring and self-interpretation

In this paper I shall try to open the space for a social psychological perspective of enquiry within contemporary social theoretical debates. Social psychology has historically fashioned itself as a discipline destined to account for, to put it bluntly, the interface between the social and the individual. The wider social, political and academic conditions of its historical emergence though resulted in theoretical and methodological choices which were often targeted with the charge of psychological reductionism or for espousing an uncritical individualistic ethos (see, inter alia, Gergen, 1973; Israel & Tajfel, 1972; Parker, 1989; Parker & Shotter, 1990). Such criticisms, which were initiated and flourished in the early 1970s, have had a major impact in the landscape of the discipline. From the mid 1970s onwards, a number of alternative approaches were articulated which aimed, to say the least, at readdressing the balance between the social and the individual in social psychological theory and research practices (cf. Armistead, 1974; Henriques et al., 1984; Tajfel, 1981). From the mid 1980s onwards, this self-critical social psychological re-fashioning took a radical new form. At least in the anglophone academic world, the wider turn to language that has swept across the social sciences informed the rise of a number of alternative social psychological perspectives which have come to be known under the generic term discourse analysis (e.g. Billig, 1987; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Burman & Parker, 1993). Discourse analytic approaches, by broadly adopting a social constructionist perspective, have attempted to overcome, in terms of theory development and research practices, the very binary opposition individual / social by focusing on language and on the
*

University of Athens Faculty of Political Science and Public Administration.

7 discursive constitution of both mental and social facts. Not surprisingly for the discipline of social psychology, such processes of discursive construction are often sought to be elucidated at the level of everyday understandings. In my presentation today, I shall argue that the discursive turn in social psychology, with its meta-theory of language and discursive practice and with its developed sets of analytic tools and concepts, can make a significant contribution to one of the most interesting and productive debates in contemporary social theory and sociology; namely, in the debate around the risk society thesis. The thesis of risk society (or of reflexive modernization) occupies a pivotal position within debates in contemporary social theory. Whereas its classical formulation is to be found in a volume publish by the German sociologist Ulrich Beck in 1986, the problematique of reflexive modernity has gained world-wide intellectual attention with Anthony Giddens theoretical work in the 1990s (Giddens, 1990; 1991), the translation of Becks book into English (Beck, 1992) and the initiation of a productive social theoretical dialogue (e.g. Adam et al. 2000; Beck et al., 1994; Lash et al., 1996; Lupton, 1999a). In my paper, I set to explore the theoretical possibilities for establishing a social psychological niche within this social theoretical debate. My broad argument shall be that the theory of reflexive modernization rests upon inadequate social psychological assumptions in its treatment of the reflexive work that lay social actors undertake. My argumentative endeavour is facilitated by the state of the art within the relevant social theoretical literature. Various commentators have already initiated the task of mounting a critique towards the key intellectual figures of the reflexive modernization thesis (Beck and Giddens), in a direction that suits well my current intents and purposes. Moreover, the point has already been made (cf. Lupton, 1999b) that the, more often than not, abstract mode of theorizing about the reflexive condition of modernity either does not square well, or it does not facilitate, empirical research in the field, particularly when the research focus is shifted from the macrosociological plane to that of the everyday experiences and understandings. In what follows, I shall set, first, to present a broad outline of Becks and Giddens narratives of the late modern condition. Next, I shall present existing critiques of these authors work within the relevant academic debate, capitalizing on the social theoretical force of these to enhance the potency of my broader argument, and, at the same time to draw the lines that demarcate them from the approach I advocate. Finally, I shall set to blueprint a social psychological treatment of lay reflexivity by recourse to the contemporary discourse analytic literature within that discipline.

Overview of Becks and Giddens account of reflexive modernity

Central to both Becks and Giddens narratives of the late modern condition is a concern with risk. In their respective accounts, though in a somewhat different manner, life in late modernity is presented as imputed with risks and uncertainties of a radical new kind. According to Beck (1992), contemporary western societies are risk societies insofar as they are forced to encounter the dark side of modernization processes, insofar as they are forced to deal with the unintended consequences of their developmental trajectories. The main problem, Beck argues, of the contemporary late-industrial societies is not any more the production and distribution of goods (wealth, for example), as it was the case with pre-modern or earlymodern societies, but the prevention and minimization of bads. In Risk Society, Beck paints an apocalyptic / dystopic image of the late industrial condition. In his account, a sharp distinction is drawn between the dangers and hazards existed in previous eras and the ones prevailing today. Typical of the latter are environmental pollution, ionizing radiation and the toxic chemicals to be found in mass produced and consumed foods. For Beck, there are certain distinguishing characteristic which differentiate between the type of risks that endanger contemporary societies from the risks which faced pre-industrial or early industrial societies (e.g. famine, plague and natural catastrophes). The sheer enormity of contemporary risks is the first distinguishing characteristic that Beck points to. In pre-modern and early modern times, the dangers, hazards and threads to human life were delimited in terms of space, time and social location. However big the destructive force of, say, floods, plague and famine might have been, they do not compare with the magnitude and the global nature of their late modern counterparts, which threaten with destruction all life on earth. Moreover, contemporary risks are increasingly difficult to quantify, calculate and prevent. As Beck argues, in the course of industrialization the hazards and dangers of earlier times were gradually transformed to calculable risks through the ever growing instrumental rational control of environmental and social conditions. In contemporary risk society, the assessment of risk is a highly ambivalent affair insofar as risks are rooted in highly complex social conditions and bodies of technical knowledge. Science, which once was thought to be the steam-engine of progress, with all the concomitant allusions to safety that the word progress entailed, has been gradually loosing its kudos. This has happened both because scientists and experts of all shape and sizes more often than not contradict each other in public over risk assessment questions, as well as because of the growing public awareness that the high consequence risks, which contemporary societies face, are themselves products of technoscientific developments, which constituted the very essence of the modernist utopia of progress.

9 In Becks macro-sociological account, the term reflexivity takes more the semantic content of self-confrontation than reflection. It is used to describe the condition in which the process of modernization, in its continuous unfolding, has been led in a critical confrontation with its own practices through their consequences. The contemporary societies, which find themselves in risk, are reflexive / risk societies insofar as they become a problem for themselves, insofar as risks trigger institutional responses at national and international levels and insofar as political differences come to be superceded by global alliances that cut across political boundaries. As Beck argues, the stage of reflexive modernization has been reached as part of the modernization process itself. As such, it does not entail the repudiation of modernity, rather it entails the application of its principles to itself. In this sense, the reflexive quality of contemporary late modern societies is a deeply political quality. It paves the road for a creative self-destruction of an entire epoch: that of industrial society. It is not coincidental that for Beck the paradigmatic political struggles in (world) risk society (cf. Beck, 1999) are the struggles of grass-root political movements like the environmental one. In his narrative, Beck conveys a strong sense of disenchantment on behalf of the lay people directed towards once esteemed modern institutions like politics, industry, science, technology and so on. The sheer magnitude of contemporary risks and the widely disseminated awareness that these very institutions are accountable for the generation of these risks are singled out as the driving motors of this disenchantment. In Becks outline of reflexive modernization, the notion of individualization has been suggested to denote the other (private) side of globalization processes. Put in a nutshell, individualization refers to the growing loosening of the structuring impact of traditional and modern institutions, like social class, gender roles or the nation, in the life-world of late modern citizens. In late modernity, as Beck argues, individuals are gradually freed from the structural constraints of social institutions of previous eras and are forced to compose their personal biographies and identities in a much more flexible and open-ended manner. In Becks (1994: 14) words, individualization entails the disintegration of the certainties of industrial society as well as the compulsion to find and invent new certainties for oneself and others without them. Individualization, as a social trend, has been brought about by diverse social factors such as the spread of mass education, feminism, changes in the labour market and the improvements in living standards. In Becks account, the concept of individualization is imputed with agentic overtones to the extent that it endows (or burdens) individuals with the task of making choices. Individuals are described as finding themselves in a condition where decision-making in a

 10 wide range of arenas is a societal necessity. One cannot just escape it. However strong the freeing overtones of his account of individualization may be, Beck does not make the mistake to suggest that social inequalities have disappeared altogether. Neither he suggests that the structuring of opportunities or of life-paths, in an era where one is forced to accomplish their own reflexive biography, may not be channeled any longer through social attributes like social class, gender or ethnicity. His argument is that today it is becoming increasingly common the effects of such structures on the lives of individuals not to be acknowledged and to evade private and public scrutiny. Instead, societal inequalities leading to failures in the business of authoring a reflexive biography come to be widely understood as psychological matters in the form of personal inadequacies, generating guilt feelings and anxieties. Anthony Giddens work in the 1990s deals also with issues pertaining to risk and reflexivity in late modernity and, indeed, his approach converges with Becks at a certain, at least, extent. Giddens narrative is also a narrative on social change and transformation in late modernity. Central to his approach is his concern for a social theoretical establishment of the linkage between processes of globalization and of changes in everyday life and personal identities. For Giddens (1991), late modernity can be characterized as a risk culture. This is so, as he argues, not necessarily because individuals today are confronted with more dangers and hazards compared to what was happening in previous eras. Late modernity can be characterized as a risk culture due to the widespread and ever-growing contemporary awareness that current dangers and hazards are mostly produced through human interference rather than through fate or divine intervention. Of central importance to Giddens account of reflexive modernity is his discussion of the effects that a series of, what he calls, disembedding mechanisms have been having on the nature of everyday life and conduct in modernity, as well as his discussion of trust and its societal (dis)placement in the late modern According condition. to Giddens, the move from traditional society to modernity has involved an increasing trend towards the disassociation of time and space from place, within which, traditionally, localized activities gave shape to the social fabric. With globalization this trend has accentuated to an unprecedented degree, and relations with absent / distant others constitute the core of current economic and societal processes, replacing the contextual and fragmented nature of pre-modern social experience. Giddens (1991: 242) calls disembedding this [] lifting out of social relationships from local contexts and their recombination across indefinite time / space distances. For Giddens, one of the mechanisms by means of which such a process of disembedding is being accomplished is

 11 what he calls expert systems, or systems of expert knowledge. According to him, expert systems bracket time and space, since they produce and disseminate bodies of knowledge endowed with validity independent of the agents who deploy them and the clients who purchase them. Giddens sees virtually the entirety of the late modern life-world as penetrated by such systems of expert knowledge: food, medicine, architecture and the care of the self are seen as arenas within which the colonization of life-world by expert systems is unfolded. Giddens draws a sharp line of distinction between reflexivity as the reflexive monitoring of action, which he sees as an intrinsic element of human activity throughout history and reflexivity in late modernity. In late modernity, he argues, reflexivity involves an unprecedented -in previous eras- susceptibility of most aspects of social activity to chronic revision in the light of new information or knowledge. Such information and knowledge, Giddens notes, is not incidental to modern institutions but constitutive of them. Reflexivity is conceptually linked to the methodological principle of doubt, which constitutes the cornerstone of scientific ethos, and, as such is described as both a product of the Enlightenment thought, as well as a factor that confounds its expectations. While the Enlightenment utopia of certainty and progress was founded on the idea of the ever unfolding victories of reason over the dogmas of tradition through a radical questioning of the arbitrariness of established habits and customs, the ethos of radical doubt imported by science has come to bite its own tail, as it were. Since any scientific fact is amenable to revision or rejection in the light of new information and knowledge, the promised certainties of the Enlightenment are always in want. For Giddens, the consequences of this ostensible viciouscircle are far reaching. As long as the image of science as an uncertain and ever changing terrain gains public recognition and as long as scientific debates are channeled and gaining in familiarity and currency in the public sphere, radical doubt becomes formative of the existential parameters of the late modern condition. At this point, Giddens elaboration on the notion Giddens of trust (1990; becomes 1991) relevant. draws heavily, on one hand, on psychological approaches (Erikson, 1965) and, on the other, on the micro-sociology of Goffman (1963) and on the ethnomethodological approach, as developed by Garfinkel (1963), in order to substantiate the vital importance of ontological security and trust, both for the successful psycho-dynamic development of the individual as well as for the successful accomplishment of everyday routines and practices. Whereas trust emerges in Giddens synthetic account as a psychological and sociological sine qua non condition of sociality both in traditional society as well as in modernity, he discerns a radical transformation or, rather, displacement of trust in late modernity. Traditional society and early modernity, within which localized activities

 12 occupied a center place in the social organization of life, provided for an ample environment for placement(s) of trust: kinship, local community, religious cosmologies and traditions facilitated an easy type of social bonding. On the contrary, in late modernity, while systems of expert knowledge saturate everyday experiences and the life-world, trust is by necessity invested in expert systems and requires a leap of faith on behalf of individuals. Insofar as systems of expert knowledge provide for a contested terrain, fraught with internal challenges and the prospect of future revisions, the placement of trust on certain bodies of knowledge or agents of expertise (and not on others) becomes a thoughtful calculative exercise. According to Giddens, this calculative attitude with regard to the open possibilities of action does not refer solely to late modern experiences of risks and uncertainties over present conditions, which set themselves as quandaries and puzzles within conflicting contemporary discourses of expertise. More and beyond the present condition, reflexivity in late modernity involves the reflexive organization of the future in the present. Giddens account of selfidentity in late modernity as a reflexive project is a good case in point. With the demise of the traditional order, which more or less provided for fixed passages into the life-course, Giddens argues that biography and self-identity gradually and increasingly emerged within modernity as reflexive projects, with the responsibility for their scripting placed on the individual. The key-words in such processes are these of choice and lifestyle. As Giddens (1991: 85) maintains:
In a world of alternative lifestyle options, strategic life-planning becomes of special importance. Like lifestyle patterns, life plans of one kind or another are something of an inevitable concomitant of post-traditional social forms. Life plans are the substantial content of the reflexively organized trajectory of the self. Life-planning is a means of preparing a course of future actions mobilized in terms of the selfs biography. (Italics in original).

Towards a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective: Emerging issues

It has been argued (Lupton, 1999b) that Becks and Giddens accounts of reflexive modernity waver uncertainly between a realist and a weak constructionist position. At times, both Beck and Giddens, seem to advance a realist account of risk: risk(s) are treated as objective dangers that exist and can be calculated independently of social and cultural processes, with the admission that this calculation may be distorted by social and cultural

 13 frames of interpretation. At other times though, Beck and Giddens seem to suggest that despite the fact that risks are objective dangers, existing out-there, their existence is inevitably mediated by techno-scientific discourses. Despite the fact that most social psychologists of a discourse analytic persuasion, largely due to their disciplinary location, would not go on to produce an alternative to Becks and Giddens macro-sociological account of the late modern condition, they would have a certain objection to these authors epistemological predilections. Given the fact that the dominant discourse analytic tradition within social psychology (e.g. Potter, 1996; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell & Potter, 1992) acknowledges the formative influences of post-structuralism and of relativist perspectives within the discipline of sociology of scientific knowledge in the development of a discourse analytic approach to social psychological phenomena, I suggest that what Lupton (1999: 35) describes as a strong constructionist epistemological position with regard to risk fits more easily to the discourse analytic / social psychological outlook. Namely, the broad assumption that nothing is a risk in itself and that what comes to be understood as a risk is a product of historically, socially and politically contingent ways of seeing, or of discourses with the canonical Foucauldian sense of term. The probable broad agreement with such an epistemological stance towards risk notwithstanding, most social psychologists of a discourse analytic persuasion would not start their research engagement with risk from such a threshold1. From the perspective of the most productive and influential strand of discourse analytic work within social psychology, a direct analytic engagement at the level of discourses forecloses instead of exemplifying the social construction of whatever historically and politically contingent objects and does not facilitate empirical research in the field of everyday understanding. A direct analytic attestment to discourses operating within the social and cultural fabric (or, better, within texts) has been criticized as amenable to what Widdicombe and Wooffitt (1995) call the danger of ascriptivism: that is, the danger of imputing discourses to social texts without making explicit the analytic grounds that warrant such an imputation. Instead, as we shall see in some detail later on, what is usually favoured is a more ethnomethodological course of analytic action, which places great emphasis on the ways in which social actors themselves orient to and accomplish situated understandings of discursive practices. What is useful to point to at this stage is that a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective on the everyday understanding of risk cuts some distance away from a realist epistemological position, with all

Of course, for discourse analysts who adopt an explicit and exclusively post-structuralist perspective (e.g. Parker, 1992) such a threshold is a perfectly legitimate one.

 14 the cognitive assumptions that the latter may have. Discourse analysts would not approach risks as objectively existing entities which come to be known, assessed and subsequently acted upon by lay social actors. Neither would they treat life choices as outcomes of a rational / instrumental balancing act upon competing expert-knowledge options on offer. Nevertheless, quite some contemporary social theorists writing from within or from the outskirts of the risk society debate do not espouse either such an objectivist understanding of risk and life options and its concomitant cognitive rendering of reflexivity. Let us turn to a brief consideration of such alternative social theoretical treatments.

Social theoretical critiques and alternatives a. Aesthetic / hermeneutic reflexivity and the project of reflexive sociology
Writing from within the core parameters of the risk society debate, Lash (1994) proposed a radical re-conceptualisation of the risk society thesis. According to Lash, such a radical reconceptualisation is only possible if the theory of reflexive modernity is set against and coarticulated with, what he calls, this theorys unarticulated others or its doubles. These doubles, for Lash, are: (a) the structural conditions of reflexivity, which have not been recognized in Becks and Giddens accounts, overstressing as they are the agency (and power) of social actors in late modernity vis--vis the structure, (b) the aesthetic dimension of reflexivity, which Beck and Giddens have largely ignored by conceptualizing it as an essentially cognitive process and (c) the notion of community, arrived at through the conceptual transformation of the concept of aesthetic reflexivity in a hermeneutic direction, against the strong individualization theme that underscores the work of Beck and Giddens. Whereas Lashs critique is well-worth of a more thorough and detailed consideration, for my current needs and purposes, I shall restrict myself in a brief reference to his proposal for an aesthetic and, eventually, hermeneutic treatment of reflexivity. At the core of Scott Lashs critique lies a deep social theoretical dissatisfaction with the strong utilitarian individualism, as he calls it, that underpins Becks and Giddens elaboration of reflexivity. Lash is not content in conceding the full latitude of the concept of reflexivity to cognition. He is not prepared to consent to a social theoretical constitution of the social agent (solely) as a rational, calculating actor. He acknowledges that such a treatment of reflexivity has a strong philosophical resonance in the conventional Enlightenment tradition of intellectual modernism. Nevertheless, as he goes at length to show, the cognitive understanding of reflexivity is by no means the only understanding of reflexivity

 15 to be excavated from the landscape of intellectual modernism. Unfolding his argument against the exclusive understanding of reflexivity (or of critique) in cognitive terms, Lash pinpoints, to start with, to the notion of aesthetic reflexivity. According to him, whereas cognitive reflection involves a greater or lesser extent of abstract mediation and the process of information, aesthetic reflection is of a more proximal mode and involves mimetic mediation through cultural symbols (like, images, sounds and narratives). Lash embarks in a detailed philosophical and social theoretical narrative which traces the intellectual lineage of the notion of aesthetic critic and the mimetic in a modernist intellectual tradition that runs in parallel to the conventional Enlightenment tradition of critical theory. In Lashs account, this parallel modernist lineage is populated, amongst others, by Nietzsche, Benjamin, and the contemporary deconstructionist philosophers Derrida, Rorty and Bauman. The details of this intellectual journey could not be reviewed here. Nevertheless, what is particularly worth mentioning here is the upshot of this narrative tracing of philosophical roots. Whereas the philosophical establishment of the notion of aesthetic reflexivity challenges the image of a rational calculating actor as the only possible subject of modernism, this challenge is not the argumentative end of Lashs account. Lash is emphatically critical of the radical individualism that, as he argues, lurks in aesthetic modernism and deconstruction. As he notes, this individualism does not resemble the individualism of the utilitarian calculating subject, which underlines the writings of Beck and Giddens. All the same, it is an expressive or aesthetic type of individualism, which does not allow for a conceptualization of community or of the we within the reflection process. For him, what is needed in order to open up a space for the conceptualization of a notion of we or community is not the prevalent intellectual mode of the hermeneutics of suspicion that characterizes the deconstructionist ethos but its polar opposite: a hermeneutics of retrieval. An intellectual posture that would not unendingly sweep away foundations but [would] attempt to lay open the ontological foundations of communal beingin-the-world (Lash, 1994: 146). For Lash, this intellectual space can be found in Pierre Bourdieus project of reflexive sociology. According to Lash, the tantalising problem of individualist underpinnings that informs both Becks and Giddens cognitive treatment of reflexivity as well as aesthetic countertreatments can be social theoretically tackled only if one starts with a notion of self that is already situated in a matrix of background practices. As Lash argues, both cognitive as well as aesthetic reflexivity pre-suppose a subject that is somehow drawn out of the world and for whom the world is by necessity mediated, conceptually or mimetically. Lash is in search of an

 16 approach that would be able to capture the throwness and the embeddedness of the individual into a web of always already existing practices and meanings. Bourdieus notion of habitus (e.g. Bourdieu, 1984) and his blueprint of a reflexive sociology project (Bourdieu & Wacquant, 1992) hold, for Lash, the promise for such an approach. The project of reflexive sociology entails the systematic uncovering of the unthought categories which themselves are preconditions of more self-conscious practices. Lash appreciates that the notion of habitus cuts a radical distance away from the structure agency dualism. Reflexivity, in contrast to Beck and Giddens, is not on social structure, neither on institutional or other rules. The individual is not implicitly theorised in terms of a rationalchoice theory of action, as a cost-minimising and benefit-maximising, preference-scheduled actor. The notion of habitus entails an understanding of reflexivity which is on unthought categories. These unthought categories are not easily accessible, as are social structures, neither to lay social actors within the run of their everyday activities nor to sociologists. But they are not inaccessible in principle. As Lash maintains, in Bourdieus blueprint of reflexive sociology, the relationship between conscious self and the unthought categories is not a subject object monitoring relationship as it would be in Beck and Giddens cognitive understanding of reflexivity, but it does not take a psychoanalytic object-subject causal form either. These unthought categories provide for the ontological foundations of practical consciousness and, in Lashs understanding of Bourdieu, the relationship between them and conscious self is a hermeneutic one: they are to be hermeneutically interpreted. Elaborating through Bourdieus lenses on the notion of unthought categories, Lash exemplifies them as classificatory taste categories or schemata. They are the categories which inhabit mundane and immediate habits and practices. For analytic reasons, they can be described even more accurately as predispositions or orientations: as the learned, yet unthought, techniques of the body [] which [] would be foundational for conscious conduct (Lash, 1994: 155). Lash pinpoints to the influence that Bourdieus outline of a reflexive sociology has exerted on the development of a critical reflexive anthropology in the writings of Clifford and Rabinow. The project of reflexive anthropology entails a radical departure from the objectivism and realism of classical anthropology and necessitates what Lash (1994: 156) calls a partial fusion of horizons with the world of ones respondents. The reflexive social scientific enterprise needs to understand itself as a hermeneutic enterprise, by rendering its own categories as a particular, culture specific kind of orientations, predispositions and habits. It needs, as Lash argues, to work towards the emergence of a translation between its own categories and schemata and the ones deployed by the lay social actors who are enlisted

 17 as respondents within research projects. The reflexive social scientific enterprise needs to understand itself as just another ethnomethodology Lash (1994: 156) concludes. Lash through his quasi genealogical excavation of aesthetic reflexivity within the intellectual history of modernism provides for philosophical / social theoretical leverage in overturning the imperium of cognition over reflexivity. From a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective, of major importance is his critique of cognitive reflexivity for the individualist assumptions it rests upon. His turn to Bourdieus notion of habitus in order to capture the image of a self always already embedded in a web of habitual social practices and shared meanings should be welcomed. Indeed, quite recently discursive psychologists have also started employing Bourdieus notion of habitus in order to account for mundane / habitual practices of ideological reproduction (e.g. Billig, 1995). Nevertheless, whereas Lashs suggestion for social scientific enterprise to become a reflexive enterprise (another ethnomethodology) is a programmatic call, it may well be argued that discursive psychologists have gone further than that. Drawing upon the ethnomethodologically derived micro-sociological school of enquiry of Conversation Analysis, they have developed a principled analytic methodology which brings to the fore the participants own orientations in the accomplishment of the habitual / routine nature of conversational interaction (e.g. Antaki, 1994; Edwards, 1997; Edwards & Potter, 1992; Potter & Wetherell, 1987). Of course, one could not argue that discursive psychology comes to fulfil the mission of Bourdieus project for a reflexive sociology; neither it would aspire to do so. Nevertheless, it offers a viable analytic alternative to the cognitive / individualistic assumptions that underlie traditional approaches to everyday understandings. Everyday understanding, in the form of the occasioned production of socially accountable descriptions and conversational turns, is treated within the discursive perspective as an inherently social phenomenon. Indeed, its intrinsically social dimension does not come merely to be a priori supposed but in situ exemplified.

b. Reflexivity as lay hermeneutics: Risks, institutions, social dependency and identities

Whereas Scott Lashs (1994) advocacy of a non-cognitive, non-rationalist conception of reflexivity allows for a an understanding of lay reflexivity as a hermeneutic endeavour and not as instrumental calculation, his account has been purely theoretical, with no particular insights gained from concrete research settings. Brian Wynne (1996), while maintaining some critical distance from Lash, further elaborates on what hermeneutic reflexivity may mean in

 18 actual socio-cultural settings, with concrete social actors cases invoked for exemplification. As it was the case with Lash (1994), at the argumentative sights of Wynne is Becks and Giddens understanding of (lay) reflexivity as a calculative, cognitive operation which imposes in social theoretical terms an image of lay social actors as rational-choice decision makers, infused with instrumental rationality. Wynne argues that this implicit understanding of reflexivity in Becks and Giddens writings emerges clearly if one considers their respective treatments of the notion of trust. As I noted earlier on, Beck in his dystopic depiction of the late modern condition attributes to the wider public a growing sense of disenchantment, which comes as a result of both the sheer enormity of contemporary risks as well as of the failed promises of techno-science for an earthly utopia of progress. As Wynne notes, such a notion of public mistrust is instrumental calculative and it takes aboard an unfounded rationalistic and contractual assumption about the foundations of social action and of social response. Wynne makes a similar argumentative case with regard to Giddens account of public (dis)placements of trust in expert systems. As we saw earlier on, according to Giddens, while in early modernity trust was unproblematically placed on social institutions and agents, in late modernity, the saturation of the life-world by expert systems entails, on the one hand, a by default- placement of trust in the realm of expert systems, and on the other, a rational-choice model of deliberation between competing alternatives within that very realm of expertise. Wynnes critique of Giddens is a particularly forceful and a particularly interesting one. He suggests that Giddens distinction between early and late modernity in terms of unqualified versus qualified trust placements is misconceived. He argues that Giddens depiction of early moderns as placing unqualified trust on institutions constructs them as cultural dupes and makes the mistake to confuse unreflexive trust with a state of reflexive dependency and private ambivalence. Indeed, Wynne draws on a number of research studies conducted in the 1950s, focusing on the public understanding of nuclear energy well before the rise of a public debate on that matter, which show that public mistrust to the relevant authorities and institutions was already evident in that phase and occasion of early or simple modernity. Wynnes broader argument is that the relation of the public towards expertise and its institutions has always been reflexive, although in a hermeneutic rather than a rational, calculative Wynnes manner. argument rests on the recognition, arrived at through his own empirical work as well as by reviewing previous sociological findings (e.g. Erickson, 1976; Wynne, 1992), that an integral element of expert interventions in the lifeworld of lay social actors has always been the generation of a condition of social dependency and the ensuing feelings of lack of agency and alienation on the part of the public. The sociological analyses on which Wynne

 19 draws upon reveal the reflexive treatment of expert institutions by the lay public even on occasions marked by a lack of overt manifestations of public mistrust. On those occasions, as Wynne argues, the lack of public dissent or distrust, should better be treated as virtual or as if trust than simply trust. People seem to be aware of their dependency on expert institutions and this awareness is associated with anxiety and the exhibition of an active interest in evidence on which they (should) base their as if trust in those expert institutions. Such occasions, according to Wynne, are instantiations of hermeneutic reflexivity to the extent that people engage in a problematisation of their relationships with expertise as part of their negotiation of their own identities. If the relationship between expert institutional interventions in the life-world and the lay public stances towards them is so much ambivalence-ridden as a hermeneutic understanding of reflexivity comes to suggest, then an interesting question that may surface is why this ambivalence is being so systematically overlooked by sociologists. Brian Wynnes answer to this question is a particularly interesting one. His argument is that the recognition of social dependency and lack of agency on behalf of lay social actors vis--vis powerful and ever present expert institutions in their life-world comes to be both normalised and consolidated via specific types of widely circulating cultural narratives, which provide for convenient rationalisations of such distressing and disorienting social experiences. These cultural narrative often mobilise themes of fatalism and of spectral forms of condensed agentic power pitied against lay social actors. Such rationalisations, while obviously consolidate a sense of powerlessness against the colonising forces of expert systems within life-world, at the same time provide for a refuge and a narrative protective cocoon against the more pervasive danger of the explicit recognition of a dominated, powerless and marginal social identity. Taking aboard an explicit constructionist perspective, Brian Wynne challenges the dominant assumption within the reflexive society thesis regarding risk perception. Whereas in Becks and Giddens writings risk perception is rendered to relate to perceptions and evaluations of objectively existent physical risks (as objects of experience), for Wynne lay perceptions and responses to risk
are rationally based in judgements of the behaviour and trustworthiness of expert institutions, namely those that are supposed to control the risky processes involved. That is, the most germane risks are (social) relational (Wynne, 1996: 57; italics in original).

According to Wynne, the rationalist discourses of modern institutions, in penetrating the lifeworlds of lay social actors, impose prescriptive models of what ought to count as human

 20 and social conditions proper in concrete situations and these models are found wanting in actual terms by the social actors on whom they are imposed. Therefore, the most immediate dangers that social actors encounter in their social lives are neither the objective dangers that expert systems aim at countering nor the objective (again) dangers which come as byproducts of expert systems functioning; rather, they are the identity-risks
arising from the fundamentally impoverished and morally-emotionally threatening models of the human which are silently embodied in the objectivist science of those modernist expert institutions, ironically intervening increasingly in the name of public protection from risks (Wynne, 1996: 60).

Brian Wynnes account is particularly important for the development of a discursive psychology niche within the theory of reflexive modernity. To start with, it goes beyond a mere social theoretical exemplification and seeks to ground the argument about hermeneutic reflexivity in empirical evidence. Moreover, it emphasises the role of cultural narratives and of the identity work accomplished within processes of lay reflection. Nevertheless, while his hermeneutic emphasis on cultural narratives and identity work rightly- substantiate a critique towards the cognitive understanding of reflexivity by Beck and Giddens, at the same time his hermeneutic turn may be amenable to further scrutiny from a discursive psychology point of view. Discursive psychologists would point out that the hermeneutic reflexive work which social actors seem to engage in, in Wynnes account, namely their social identity concerns and the deployment of cultural narratives, are presented as acontextualized naturalistic findings. An ethnographic perspective is indeed adopted by the researcher, but this is the perspective of a view from the mountain (cf. Condor, 1997). The researcher seems to be engaged in an observational exercise, subsequently informing her readers about the happenings in the world out-there. In so doing, scant attention is being paid to the specificity of the research context within which cultural narratives are mobilised by research participants (informants). Neither the context of the research is treated as (just) another type of expert system intervention into the life-world of the research participants. It may well be argued that the context of the research may occasion particular types of identity concerns (and work) for the participants. It may be the case that it is not merely the danger posed by intervening institutions out-there which occasions hermeneutic reflection on behalf of the participants. It may be the case that when (private) hermeneutic concerns come to be voiced within another expert system intervention (i.e. the research encounter), then more hermeneutic

 21 concerns for the establishment of an accountable social identity profile may become relevant. These identity concerns, while habitually practised by the research participants themselves should better become a topic of analytic interest for the observing or listening social scientist. From the perspective of discursive psychology, Wynnes treatment of lay reflexivity vis-vis institutions as a rational judgement is also seriously problematic. Discursive social psychologists, apart from treating instances of lay reflexive processes as occasioned discursive processes, would also seek to ground what Wynne treats as rational judgements of institutional functioning to culturally specific traditions of argumentation (cf. Shotter, 1993) vis--vis the role of (specific) institutions within a particular sociocultural setting. Such an analytic course of action would aim at highlighting the genealogical provenance of particular, historically and culturally rooted, resources of representational and narrative themes.

c. Reflexivity through cultural myths: Salvation and apocalypse in risk discourses

Alexander and Smith (1996) articulate a full-blown critique of the risk society thesis. Their overall argument is that the risk society thesis, as outlined by Beck (1992), fails to account for the role of culture both in the ontological constitution of risks as well as in the epistemological level of contemporary (lay) risk perception. Alexanders and Smiths account begins with an alignment with relativist strands of work within the discipline of sociology of scientific knowledge, which have established that there cannot be a truly rational discourse on science and technology, given the fact that the techno-scientific enterprise is infused with culture: rules of the thumb, rhetoric, and operative fictions have been shown to constitute integral features of science in action (cf. Garfinkel et al., 1981; Latour & Woolgar, 1979; Knorr-Cetina, 1994). In a similar vein, Alexander and Smith set up their account as an effort to highlight the mediating impact of culture in structuring social scientific and lay discourses on science and technology. To start with, they note that in sociological theory, from Marx and Weber onwards, technology has been overwhelmingly understood to produce rational discourses which respond in a more or less unmediated way to the objective materiality of technology and its effects. Nevertheless, Alexander and Smith disagree with such an assumption about the demystifying properties and potentiality of technology. They suggest that a failure to recognise the role of culture in mediating the impact of technology on society and on lay discourses about technology and its effects has detrimental effects for social theory. Becks risk society thesis provides for them a good case in point. Alexander and Smith take issue with Becks depiction of risks as objective facts

 22 generated by techno-scientific developments, with the latter unmediated by wider cultural factors, as well as with his treatment of risk perception as a simple (reflex-like) consequence of the sheer enormity of contemporary risks. As they argue, Beck fails systematically to answer questions such like how and when risks are detected and how these risks are placed on the public agenda. Alexander and Smith discern, what they call, a time-lag between the generation of objective risks and the public perception of those risks in Becks account. This time-lag, they argue convincingly, is unsuccessfully accounted for by Beck. In order to address this time-lag question, Alexander and Smith argue, Beck would have to consider more thoroughly the role of culture at two levels. First, he would have to appreciate the role of culture in the very ontological constitution of the risk society itself. He would have to acknowledge the importance of a strongly and widely held albeit tacit- social commitment to solving the problems of the world through rationalising techno-scientific endeavours. Second, at an epistemological level, he would have to appreciate that the contemporary public rendering of the techno-scientifically based society as a risk society involves a certain shift in cultural ways of understanding. Alexander and Smith seek to articulate the cultural dimension they see as missing from Becks objectivist account by recourse to the late-Durkheimian work on religious sociology. The key finding here relates to the pervasive manner in which even within modern society the symbolic / mythological categories of sacred and profane continue to inform lay understandings.
Whereas the sacred provides a social representation of the good in relation to which actors seek to build communities, the profane defines an image of evil and establishes a zone of pollution from which humans strive to be saved. (Alexander & Smith, 1996: 257)

This type of secular / religious imagery, as Alexander and Smith note, provides for an alleviation to earthly suffering by, on the one hand, promising a millennial utopia and, on the other, by defining the social evil from which the forthcoming utopia allows an escape. Alexander and Smith draw upon an extensive range of research findings which show that social discourses of technology, from the early 19thC onwards have always been endowed with a dilemmatic quality. On the one hand, technology has come to be represented within a utopian / salvationary narrative genre. On the other hand, technology has also been constantly represented with dystopic / apocalyptic overtones. Alexander and Smith argue that from 19thC until the late 20th C, the dystopic / apocalyptic

 23 theme has been subordinated to the utopian / salvationary one. They maintain that the remarkable social consensus which provided the motivational dynamic for the establishment of modern industrial society depended more than anything else on the widely shared cultural belief that technology would bring salvation from the earthly sufferings of modernisation processes itself. Moreover, as they point out, the salvationary theme on technology came as part and parcel with a representation of nature as profane, as a force that needed to be tamed by humans through technology. The research evidence on which Alexander and Smith draw upon suggest that the domination of this representation of technology and nature only started to be shaken at the late 20th C. As it is argued, the several decades within the 20th C, which came to be marked by the extensive techno-wars have had a decisive impact in public consciousness. The tables were turned and the representation of technology as profane gained currency, while nature fully assumed its sacred representational profile and, in the discourse of ecology, came to be associated with innocence, peace and self-regulation. The argumentative endpoint of Alexander and Smith has been to treat Becks thesis of risk society not merely as an inadequate social theoretical representation of risk dynamic but as a culturally situated argument, which, more than relaying empirical evidence, is translating the contours of the cultural mythology of technology into a social scientific genre. From a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective, Alexander and Smiths account is important for two reasons. First, it provides a (potential) genealogical backdrop to the reflexive invocation of representational themes within lay understandings. Acts of lay reflexivity are deemed an inherently cultural endeavour to the extent that these are accomplished through culturally specific and familiar narrative themes. Moreover, their account allows for and introduces the notion that frameworks of cultural understanding comprise contradictory / dilemmatic themes. As we shall see next, this is a pivotal analytic assumption and research finding within the discursive psychology literature. The problem that can be discerned with regard to their approach from a discursive psychology point of view is that their overwhelming emphasis on cultural codes distracts analytic attention from the level of the concrete utterances within which cultural codes come to be instantiated (cf. Billig, 1997). It should be noticed that this something more than a simple difference of perspective. Attention to the semantic content of narratives at the expense of their pragmatic deployment does not allow for a theorisation and analytic attestment to the situated discursive practices through which social actors embed themselves within an always already there life-world of shared meanings and practices.

 24

Outline of a social psychological / discourse analytic treatment of lay reflexivity

So far, in the bulk of this paper, I have briefly discussed critical social theoretical approaches towards the understanding of (lay) reflexivity in the work of Beck and Giddens. As I made it clear at the beginning of this paper, the rationale of this discussion has been quite instrumental. I wanted to benefit from the social theoretical force of the discussed objections towards the overwhelmingly cognitive, utilitarian, individualistic and rationalchoice assumptions that underpin the conceptualisation of reflexivity in Becks and Giddenss work. While discussing these multi-faced critiques, I took the chance to point towards some major converges and discrepancies between each of them and a social / psychological discourse analytic approach to lay reflexivity. I should like now to spell out in a more integrated fashion the core elements of such an approach. Before doing so though, I would like to draw attention to the fact that the discursive turn in social psychology provides for too many entry points, as it were, to an analytic treatment of reflexivity. The approach I have already started outlining unavoidably takes sides and locates itself within ongoing methodological and theoretical debates within the discursive turn in social psychology. Indeed, it resonates with methodological proposals that seek to offer a balanced perspective in the analysis of discourse, as operating both at micro- as well as macro- social levels (cf. Billig, 1991; Potter, 1996; Potter & Wetherell, 1987; Wetherell, 1998). Let me elaborate briefly then on what I consider to be the major road-stations that would navigate us through the discursive turn in social psychology with regard to lay reflexivity.

a. The rhetorical / ideological meta-theory of language

The work of Michael Billig (e.g. 1987; 1991; Billig et al., 1988) has exerted a paramount influence in the establishment of the discursive perspective within social psychology. Indeed, most social psychologists espousing a discursive perspective generally agree with Billigs rhetorical / ideological meta-theory of language. The basic tenets of Billigs meta-theory of language can be summarised as follows. For Billig, thought and language should better be treated as dialogical phenomena. One cannot study phenomena of thought (neither of perception) without recourse to the performative aspect of language. Both thought as well as language in its use are argumentatively / rhetorically organised: that is, every argument (in a public or an internal dialogue) for a position explicitly or implicitly takes its meaning from the position it aims at countering. For Billig, rhetorical / argumentative processes are inherently ideological

 25 processes: the argumentative positions upheld or countered in thought or talk are parts of wider, culturally specific social controversies. As such they have a history and this history is indicative of social struggles for hegemony. Ideologies, either in their formal statements or in their everyday transmutations, comprise of dilemmatic themes and quandaries. Everyday thinking and arguing then, since it is framed within these dilemmatic themes, is the cornerstone of thoughtful ideological reproduction. Let me figure out then how the rhetorical / ideological approach of Billig might enrich the social theoretical debate considered so far. By taking aboard the rhetorical / ideological metatheory of language, we arrive at a social psychological understanding of reflection, which does not need to be cognitive. For Billig both processes of thinking (i.e. their argumentative organization), as well as their subject matter (i.e. argumentative content) are inherently social, modeled as they are upon wider social controversies. In that sense, it may be argued that culture enters the culturally vacuous terrain that Becks account of risk society provides us with. In addition, by treating thought and talk as rooted in wider culturally and historically defined social controversies and dilemmas, Giddens image of the life-world as saturated with life choice-options provided solely by bodies of expert-system knowledges is challenged. The Gramscian origins of the rhetorical / ideological approach (cf. Billig & Sabucedo, 1994) allow for a kaleidoscopic view of common-sense ideologies, which are thought to integrate traditional, modern as well as late-modern themes and postulates. The rhetorical / ideological casting of (lay) reflexivity then renders it as an integral aspect of the human / social condition. Such a rendering can be paralleled with Wynnes critique of Giddens for presenting a cultural dupe model of the person in conditions of simple modernity. Nevertheless, a rhetorical / ideological treatment of lay reflexivity would cut some distance away from a certain position advanced within Wynnes account. As we saw, for Wynne, lay social actors rationally assess the performances of institutions and expert systems on the basis of the social identity dangers that these pose to them through their penetration of their life-worlds. From a rhetorical / argumentative perspective the story would be somewhat different. Assessments for and / or against institutions and institutional performances would not be treated as rational conclusions reached within a mental black-box and subsequently spelled out for the benefit of the over-hearing researcher. Instead, the emphasis would be placed on the very rhetorical process by means of which the rationality of a certain argumentative assessment would come to be established discursively. Such a rhetorical achievement of rationality might come to be substantiated through the invocation and the puzzlement over the validity of the counter position of the assessment proposed. Such a

 26 rhetorical situation then would be indicative of the inherently dilemmatic outlook of the tradition of argumentation about institutions and institutional performances. Moreover, it would also be indicative of the cultural dilemmas prevailing with regard to the social identity proper to be espoused when thinking and arguing about institutions and institutional performances.

b. Conversation Analysis (CA) and the Discursive Action Model (DAM)

From its inception, the discourse analytic turn in social psychology has been formatively influenced by the research tradition of conversation analysis, which has sprung out of ethnomethodology (e.g. Goodwin & Heritage, 1990). Despite the fact that conversation analysis is often (rightly, I would think) criticised for its exclusive micro-social focus on talk in interaction, its analytic potential should not be underestimated. When its analytic scope is relocated within the frame of other meso- or macro- social analytic approaches to language, like Billigs rhetorical / ideological approach for example, then an expanded latitude of analytic reach is being opened-up. The fundamental characteristic of CA is that it dispenses with the representational view of language. Language is not treated simply as a representational medium of mental and / or social entities which lie beyond it. For CA, language (usually, talk in interaction) is a field within which are unfolded social practices. It may well be argued that CA provides for a sociological microscope which magnifies the mundane, often unnoticed but nevertheless orderly and consequential accomplishment of the inter-subjective space between conversant (therefore active) social actors. CA is well-known for its strict focus on talk in interaction and its puritan abstinence from theorising any layers of context to talk apart from the context that the conversing participants themselves explicitly signal to. In CA terminology, a central focus and tool for analysis is the participants own orientation to whatever social phenomena are at stake within the unfolding of talk in interaction. CA, then, manages to capture and to bring to social scientific attention the most elementary and therefore basic- habitual practices which concern the co-construction and ethno-orientation towards shared meanings. The social actor of CA is the embedded social actor that Bourdieus notion of habitus also seeks to capture; albeit is an image of a social actor embedded in the most minimal -but already social- of possible contexts: in the ephemeral but consequential -and not at all whimsical context- of mundane social interaction. The spirit (if not the letter) of CA has been successfully transplanted into the discursive turn in social psychology via what has come to be know as the discursive action model

 27 (DAM) (Edwards & Potter, 1992). A core feature of the DAM is provided by the heuristic that people in everyday interaction (and beyond) treat each others as well groups as entities with motivations, stakes and interests. As analytic evidence suggest, talk which furnishes attributions of blame and responsibility on another part is more often than not rhetorically designed to disavow inferences about a potential stake or interest of the speaker in making such attributions and inferences. It is shown, therefore, that social actors in their normative pursuit of an accountable social identity are constantly faced with a dilemma of stake or interest: how to attend to interests in talk, without being undermined as interested. Edwards and Potter have shown that such a dilemma of normative morality is usually solved by recourse to the discursive genre they call factual discourse. That is, accounts and descriptions are rhetorically constructed as factual and mere representations of the world outthere through a number of rhetorical devices. All that may in the first glance- may seem largely irrelevant to the main subject of this paper; nevertheless, it is not quite so. Let us, for example, be reminded of the hermeneutically reflexive social actor of Brian Wynnes account. As it was argued, lay social actors engage in a rational assessment of institutional performances, and this more often than not entails a critical stance towards the prescriptive introduction of expert knowledge within their lifeworld, which deprives them from valuable aspects of their social identities. We may well assume, of course, and Wynne himself is quite explicit about that (Wynne, 1996: 79) that what counts as a rational assessment is a an analytic gloss. What is usually the case is that interview materials within which blame is allocated on institutions by relevant social actors while, at the same time, these social actors own local, grass-root knowledge is praised as superior to expert interventions, is taken at face value by the (politically committed) researcher. The claim to the moral and political high-ground by valorising local knowledge notwithstanding (for a detailed criticism, see Condor, 1997), a discourse analysis using the heuristics of DAM might be able to reveal a more complicated picture. The rationality of lay assessments may come to be highlighted as a rhetorical accomplishment which is done interactionally by means of specific rhetorical devices. One may also suppose that such a discursive accomplishment may rely on rhetorical disavowals of a potentially hearable prejudiced towards science moral profile. For example, other instances in which technoscience is thought to be superior to local knowledge may be invoked and rhetorically used by lay social actors in their discussions with the sympathetically predisposed researcher. If something like that is the case, then such a finding may not be as trivial as maybe thought in the first place. It could be the case that such a finding may be indicative of the dilemmatic

 28 nature of everyday ideologies. Perhaps an argument can be established pointing towards the dilemmatic identity postulates that are oriented to by the research participants themselves, while talking to the social scientist about the conditions of their social existence. Discourse analysts would maintain that such discursively oriented to conflicting identities may be more indicative of lay habitual practices and meaning making procedures compared to a plain social scientific attestment to the rationality of lay actors assessments.

c. Post-structuralist / genealogical insights

As I hinted above, while discussing Alexander and Smiths critique of Beck and his risk society thesis, most discourse analysts would appreciate the genealogical tracing of the cultural history of particular representations mobilised within lay reflexive acts. An integral tenet of discourse analysis is that historical familiarity provides for both the intelligibility as well as for (part of) the persuasive force of a particular representation of, say, technology within a reflexive account (cf. Potter, 1996; Wetherell & Potter, 1992). So, a discourse analyst might be tempted to explore whether a critical assessment of a particular techno-scientific expert system by lay social actors relies upon an assumption about technology as profane and polluting the peaceful innocence of the lay actors life-world. Nevertheless, as I noted before, ascriptions of cultural codes or discourses into everyday discursive practices may be a methodologically problematic endeavour. Discourse analysts who share a concern to keep a balanced perspective between the content and organisation of talk, would rather avoid ascribing a discourse on the basis of the propositional content of talk. Instead, they would seek to exemplify the ways in which a discourse may come to inform not the content of talk but discursive practices within which propositional content is packaged. The injection of a social psychological / discourse analytic twist in the treatment of lay reflexivity definitely complicates the ostensibly neat methodological grounds of cognitive treatments of reflexivity. Nevertheless, both critical social theoretical work within the risk society debate as well as theoretical developments within critical social psychology urges us to critically overcome the calculative, instrumental profile of the self-monitoring social actor implied in the core works of the reflexive modernity literature. Moreover, the adoption of a social psychological / discourse analytic perspective radicalises the hermeneutic understanding of lay reflexivity advocated by some authors. Discursive psychology teaches us that reflexive acts of self-interpretation are always more than acontextualized productions of hermeneutic statements. Questions about the relation between the research setting and the data collected need to be asked, as well as questions about the historicity and the cultural

 29 specificity of the traditions of argumentation which inform reflexive, representational practices. The dilemmatic quality of these common sense ideologies needs to be analytically disentangled in order for a more complete picture of habitual ideological reproduction to be highlighted. Discursive social psychology may not be able to furnish the complete picture that the reflexive sociology project of Bourdieu aspires to. Nevertheless, it is a reflexive social scientific enterprise in itself and, most importantly, it offers a methodologically principled way in highlighting the reflexive, in the sense of rhetorical cum ideological, work accomplished within everyday understandings. Future social psychological / discourse analytic work in this field of social theoretical and empirical enquiry may come to substantiate the programmatic convergences and divergences discussed here.

Acknowledgements
The incentive for the development of the arguments presented in this paper has been provided by my involvement in the E.C.-funded research project Uncertainty and Insecurity in Europe. I should like to thank my colleagues in that project, Konstantinos Tsoukalas, Michalis Lianos, Lilla Vicsek and Michelle Dobre, for their varied and valuable contribution in the development of my ideas and Vassilis Arapoglou for his perceptive criticisms of an earlier draft of this paper.

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