Abstract
While governments are expected to formulate coherent and effective responses to risks and disasters, a significant but much less often examined duty falls upon the lay public as well. In the face of dangers or uncontrollable hazards, the burden is not only on the experts within the scientific and technocratic establishments but also on the lay people to seek ways to avoid, mitigate or deal with dangers or hazards. Therefore, interesting questions arise pertaining to the perspectives and the experiences of the lay public in the face of dangers, their efforts to avoid or manage risk, the bases and drivers of particular risk responses, and the consequences of these risk responses to individuals and communities. In fact, it is precisely when such issues arise that the social processes that revolve around the abstract notion of risk become observable to us, the external observers of a phenomenon. In these situations, one can ask deeper theoretical questions, such as the ones with which we are concerned here—whether, to what extent and how scientific knowledge prevails over other forms of knowledge. These are the questions which this volume intends to grapple with.
To that end, the contributors to this volume shed light on various aspects of this theme by exploring the responses of lay people to situations where they must deal with scientific models and approaches to risk. The first article in the volume, by Saito and Pahk, inquires into citizen–government interactions in the aftermath of the nuclear disaster in Fukushima. Examining critically the STS scholarship that studies the role of scientific expertise in democratic decision-making, the authors question whether and to what extent the assumptions of STS scholarship hold, given the STS model’s somewhat optimistic outlook on the usefulness of scientific knowledge for democratising decision-making. Saito and Pahk’s sophisticated analysis suggests that, in contrast to the assumptions of STS scholarship, in which technical democracy is the ultimate goal and an ideal form of decision-making, there are situations in which politicians and bureaucrats make use of scientific knowledge to pursue their interests and the ideals of technical democracy are brushed aside, as the title of their article suggests that ‘political expediency won over technical democracy’. Kimura responds to the question of the drivers of risk responses by examining risk communication programmes utilised by the electric power industry. Kimura’s case studies demonstrate the ways in which industries strategically use and position women in their risk communication programmes to advance their agendas. In her analysis, questions about the role of women in risk communication programmes are translated into questions of framing that concern safety and also the question of strategies used by industries to control and manage the perceptions of a lay female audience. Implicit in these two articles is an assumption that echoes the theoretical perspective of Beck (1992), in which risks are conceptualised as having physical and concrete reality. Thus, questions such as how actors who own or access specialised knowledge—actors such as politicians, bureaucrats and industries—influence policymaking and public opinions become compelling questions.
In contrast, the theoretical assumptions of the article by Kang and that written by Yamaguchi differ markedly from those of the previous two articles, in that these papers use a social constructivist perspective on knowledge to consider not only responses to the knowledge of risk but also the question of what constitutes knowledge of risk and whose definition of risk predominates. Examining activists’ and patients’ response to asbestos risk, Kang deals with the question of how lay people’s responses to risk are shaped by their relationships not only with the experts but also with activists who purport to ally themselves with the patients. The article suggests that those who are suffering from ailments that attest to the risk and the consequences of exposure to asbestos experience difficulty in communicating their own perspectives and bodily experiences, as the dominant narratives, presented by activists using popular epidemiology, obscure their voices. Kang’s analysis shows us that even within an arena in which so called alternative knowledge is generated, questions about asymmetrical relationships among the seemingly unitary actors conceptualized as lay people are still paramount. Studying the responses of experts and lay people to radiation contamination of food and farms, Yamaguchi explores the problems arising from the mismatch between the lay experience of risk and the interpretations of radiation risk by experts who come in with a set of public policy instruments for implementing a science-based approach to risk. The article articulates the existence of two contrasting knowledge systems and social conditions that privilege a scientific conception of risk and deny the relevance of lay knowledge. Yamaguchi’s article portrays social processes of how a specific form of knowledge gains authoritative power over other forms of knowledge. These two articles remind us of Wynne’s (1996) contributions, which place emphasis on the notion of power, seeing asymmetrical relationships between expert and lay perspectives, such that the question of risk and risk response is determined by the very nature of the knowledge system, in which the experts prevail and the lay public is forced to depend on the system developed and defined by the experts.
Avenell’s contribution focuses on a different facet of risk responses: the extent to which scientific experts acting in opposition to the authority structure can succeed in changing the official narrative . Revisiting the antinuclear advocacy and activism of scientific experts in the post-war period in Japan, Avenell points out that the political influence of scientific experts who were involved in the antinuclear movement was more substantial and much more nuanced than other studies have suggested. The author carefully revisits the history of antinuclear advocacy in Japan from the early 1970s from the perspective of social processes of how a specific form of knowledge gains, refuting the ‘narrative of civic failure’ which has been the dominant interpretation of the history of Japanese antinuclear activism, and reveals the influence that the scientific experts who devoted themselves to antinuclear activisms have had on the trajectory of nuclear power development. An important contribution of this article is its highlighting of the existence of a multiplicity of scientific interpretations of risk, and the indeterminate nature of risk knowledge, which is often impacted by the evolution of the relationship between risk knowledge and the social system.
The article by Lü and Chen focuses on the shifting nature of risk perception within the lay public. Examining the risk perceptions of the lay public with respect to genetically modified food, Lü and Chen also allude to the indeterminate nature of risk knowledge, which is reflected in the changing responses of the lay public. Their article makes clear that the reactions of the lay public to risk can be as dynamic as the evolution of risk knowledge. Their longitudinal study suggests that the lay public’s reaction is influenced by various contingencies that are embedded in social, economic and political contexts, such that the perceptions of the lay public and the issues with which they are concerned do not necessarily develop in parallel with the scientific understanding of the risks. This point very nicely brings us back to the question of this volume, that is, to what extent does scientific knowledge prevail over other forms of knowledge, thus bringing in complex relations between science and society? The observed heterogeneity of risk knowledge and reflexivity of science in this volume is an indication that there is significant variation in the interpretation of reality, and that capturing and understanding the multiplicity of perspectives is a worthy goal.