The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.

The body is thus not simply an 'entity', but is experienced as a practical mode of coping with external situations and events.

Thinking in terms of risk certainly has its unsettling aspects (...), but it is also a means of seeking to stabilise outcomes, a mode of colonising the future. The more or less constant, profound and rapid momentum of change characteristic of modern institutions, coupled with structured reflexivity, mean that on the level of everyday practice as well as philosophical [Seitenwechsel] interpretation, nothing can be taken for granted. What is acceptable/appropriate/recommended behaviour today may be seen differently tomorrow in the light of altered circumstances or incoming knowledge-claims.

Martin Luther King did not stir his audience in 1963 by declaiming 'I have a nightmare'

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

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.

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.