Responsibilisation: Blaming or Empowering Risk-Taking

By now the book has approached risk-taking as something individuals and social groups do while all kinds of social forces shape their activities and sense-making. Risk-taking implies not only a decision, a decision-making situation, and a possible gain and harm. It also requires an agent whether a person or organisation or any other social unit which possesses agency. With agency comes responsibility of the risk-taker for the positive and negative outcomes. This chapter explores how responsibility is attributed to people by insurance, social policy, technology and individual responses to responsibilisation. Furthermore, it shows that responsibilisation can be used to blame individuals or social groups but also to empower individuals which has become a central theme in social work.