Risk concerns future happenings - as related to present practices - and the colonising of the future therefore opens up new settings of risk, some of which are institutionally organised.

The new mixed economy looks...for a synergy between public and private sectors.

The flow of action continually produces consequences which are unintended by actors, and these unintended consequences also may form unacknowledged conditions of actions in a feedback fashion. Human history is created by intentional activities but is not an intended project; it persistently eludes efforts to bring it under conscious direction.

High-consequence risks have a distinctive quality. The more calamitous the hazards they involve, the less we have any real experience of what we risk: for if things 'go wrong', it is already too late.

Lifestyles are routined practices, the routines incorporated into habits of dress, eating, modes of acting and favoured milieux for encountering others; but the routines followed are reflexively open to change in the light of the mobile nature of self-identity.

Achieving control over change, in respect to lifestyle, demands an engagement with the outer social world rather than a retreat from it.

The thesis that risk assessment itself is inherently risky is nowhere better borne out than in the area of high-consequence risks.