For more than 200 years, everyday life in Britain has been beset by a variety of dangers, from the mundane to the life-threatening. Governing Risks in Modern Britain focuses on the steps taken to manage these dangers and to prevent accidents since approximately 1800. It brings together cutting-edge research to help us understand the multiple and contested ways in which dangers have been governed. It demonstrates that the category of ‘risk’, broadly defined, provides a new means of historicising some key developments in British society. Chapters explore road safety and policing, environmental and technological dangers, and occupational health and safety. The book thus brings together practices and ideas previously treated in isolation, situating them in a common context of risk-related debates, dilemmas and difficulties. Doing so, it argues, advances our understanding of how modern British society has been governed and helps to set our risk-obsessed present in some much needed historical perspective.

This book analyses the perceived legitimacy of health and safety in post-1960 British public life. Since 2010 health and safety has appeared to be in crisis, being attacked by press, politicians and public alike, but are these claims of crisis accurate? How have understandings of health and safety changed over the past 60 years? By exploring the history, culture, and operation of health and safety in contemporary Britain, this book provides a new assessment of an understudied, but surprisingly far-reaching, part of the British political and social landscape. Combining archival research with focus group, social survey and oral history testimony, the book examines the historical background to health and safety, how health and safety has been enacted in public and in the workplace, the impact of changing economic, occupational and social structures on the operation of health and safety, and the conflicts and interests that have shaped the area.

During the late nineteenth century, many countries across Europe adopted national legislation that required employers to compensate workers injured or killed in accidents at work. These laws suggested that the risk of accidents was inherent to work and not due to individual negligence. By focusing on Britain, Germany, and Italy during this time, Julia Moses demonstrates how these laws reflected a major transformation in thinking about the nature of individual responsibility and social risk. The First Modern Risk illuminates the implications of this conceptual revolution for the role of the state in managing problems of everyday life, transforming understandings about both the obligations and rights of individuals. Drawing on a wide array of disciplines including law, history, and politics, Moses offers a fascinating transnational view of a pivotal moment in the evolution of the welfare state.

The substantially revised third edition of The Handbook of Security provides the most comprehensive analysis of scholarly security debates and issues to date. It reflects the developments in security technology, the convergence of the cyber and security worlds, and the fact that security management has become even more business focused. It covers newer topics like terrorism, violence, and cybercrime through various offence types such as commercial robbery and bribery. This handbook comprises mostly brand new chapters and a few thoroughly revised chapters, with discussions of the impact of the pandemic. It includes contributions from some of the world's leading scholars from an even broader geographic scale to critique the way security is provided and managed. It speaks to professionals working in security and students studying security-related courses. Chapter 5 is available open access under a Creative Commons Attribution 4.0 International License via link.springer.com.

This book provides a critical engagement with the idea of the ‘security society’ which has been the focus of so much attention in criminology and the social sciences more broadly. ‘Security’ has been argued to constitute a new mode of social ordering, displacing the ‘disciplinary society’ that Foucault saw as characteristic of the liberal era. He saw a ‘control society’ (or ‘risk society’) characteristic of Neo-Liberalism, in which the deviant behaviour of particular individuals, as less important than general attempts to offset risk and reduce harm. Dodsworth argues that much of this literature is extraordinarily present-ist in orientation, denying the long history of attempts to mitigate risk, prevent harm and manage security which have always been a part of the government of order. This book develops a ‘critical history’ of security: a thematic analysis of debates about security and aspects of the security society which puts contemporary arguments and practices in dialogue with the texts and practices of the past. In doing so the book develops a cultural analysis of the meanings of security and the way these meanings have been articulated in particular practical contexts in order to understand how the promise of security has so effectively captured the imagination and channeled the effective engagement of people throughout the modern period.

This book makes the case for a unique coastal-urban experience of war on the home front during the First World War, focusing on case studies from the north-east of England. The use of case studies from this region problematises an often assumed national or generalised experience of civilian life during the war, by shifting the frame of analysis away from the metropolis. This book begins with chapters related to wartime resilience, including analysis of pre-war fear of invasion and bombardment, and government policy on public safety. It then moves on to a discussion of power relations and the local implementation of policy related to bombardment, including policing. Finally, the book explores the ‘coastal-urban’ environment, focusing on depictions of war damage in popular culture, and the wartime and post-war commemoration of civilian bombardment. This work provides a multi-faceted perspective on civilian resilience, while responding to a recent call for new histories of the ‘coastal zone’.

The Subjectivities and Politics of Occupational Risk links restructuring in three industries to shifts in risk subjectivities and politics, both within workplaces and within the safety management and regulative spheres, often leading to conflict and changes in law, political discourses and management approaches. The state and corporate governance emphasis on worker participation and worker rights, internal responsibility, and self-regulative technologies are understood as corporate and state efforts to reconstruct control and responsibility for Occupational Health and Safety (OHS) risks within the context of a globalized neoliberal economy. Part 1 presents a conceptual framework for understanding the subjective bases of worker responses to health and safety hazards using Bourdieu’s concept of habitus and the sociology of risk concepts of trust and uncertainty. Part 2 demonstrates the restructuring arguments using three different industry case studies of multiple mines, farms and auto parts plants. The final chapter draws out the implications of the evidence and theory for social change and presents several recommendations for a more worker-centred politics of health and safety. The book will appeal to social scientists interested in health and safety, work, employment relations and labour law, as well as worker advocates and activists.