Barry Turner for the Ages of Living Dangerously: Risk,`New Capitalisms',and Life in the Coming Century

Abstract

This essay explores some implications of Barry Turner's work on risk and insurance, both in its symbolic and substantive aspects, in relation to analyses of organizational life in the future. I develop the paper's central propositions by focusing on `emerging new capitalism' as articulated in Steinberg's (1993) potential `new ages': information age, postmodernism, global interdependence, new mercantilism, corporate control, flexible specialization, new social movements, and new fundamentalisms. I discuss `risk', and Turner's conception of it among others, as a new epistemological and political space for analyzing these new ages. Finally, I reconsider `risk' as the metaphor of choice for productive life in the coming century, since it allows for both on-going construction and deconstruction of possible worlds within the uncertainties that the new capitalisms might bring about.

Keywords

risk new capitalisms post-industrialism globalization eventalization symbolism

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