Housing policy, housing management and tenant power in the ‘risk society’: some critical observations on the welfare politics of ‘radical doubt’

Abstract

This article is a direct response to Culpitt (1999: 10), who has recently argued that ‘concepts of risk, particularly of Beck's thesis of risk society and the various meanings associated with it, have not been explored fully in relation to social policy’. We make applied usage of the work of Beck and other key risk society theorists to make sense of the changing nature of housing policy and management issues in late modernity. We also use these empirical observations of housing policy and management developments in the post-welfare society to critically reflect on (and thus develop) the risk society thesis, which we argue is a theory of postindustrial society and therefore partial and incomplete. In doing so, we take issue with Beck's and with Giddens's over-generalized notion that late modern societies are characterized by a ‘post-scarcity’ (e.g., ecological) risk politics that has moved ‘beyond left and right’. Using empirical evidence from the post-welfare society, we argue that the risk society further embeds and exacerbates—rather than transcends—the forms of (primarily economic) inequality found in industrial societies.