Tom Horlick-Jones and risk work

Abstract

In this review, I examine Tom Horlick-Jones’s contribution to risk work—the ways in which individuals in their everyday activities select and make sense of risk issues and take and subsequently account for actions in relationship to such issues. I consider Tom Horlick-Jones’s background as a natural science and the ways in which his concerns about the social consequences of science drew him to work on practical issues that effect everyday life such as risk and disasters. I identify several key themes in Horlick-Jones’s work: including his awareness of the importance and limitations of grand social theory such as Beck’s Risk Society and Foucault’s governmentality and the insights offered by Garfinkel and other ethnomethodologists into the practical reasoning that individuals use in everyday life; his interest in ethnographic methods as a means of identifying the practical reasoning that underlies risk work; and his commitment to making changes by working with policy makers and community groups. In his study of risk work, Tom Horlick-Jones shows the importance of combining direct observation with other sources of data so that the accounts which individuals gave of their activities are not detached from the activities. Risk work involves both practical reasoning and practical action and individuals not only have to take actions to manage risk but also have to subsequently account for what they have done.