Jens Oliver Zinn
Biographic Data
| ID | 2927694 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Jens Oliver Zinn |
| GIVEN NAMES | Jens Oliver |
| FAMILY NAME | Zinn |
| SIGNATURE | ZINN J O |
| AFFILIATIONS | The University of Melbourne |
| ORCID | 0000-0002-4992-9123 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 47 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 95 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 47 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 0 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2003 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 6 |
Making Uncertainty Habitable
Medical education has long been described as a "training for uncertainty," yet how uncertainty is practically organised in professional formation remains underexplored. Drawing on a sociocultural approach to risk and on anthropological theories of ritual, this article conceptualises anatomical dissection as a ritualised infrastructure through which uncertainty is collectively managed. Based on seven months of participant observation and 32 interv…
A New Phenomenology of Risk and Uncertainty
Unsure and underinsured
Climate change and development within floodplains are expanding flood risk zones and increasing the number of households that are underinsured. Although flood insurance is core to disaster preparedness, how flood-prone households navigate flood insurance decisions remains poorly understood. This study explores how households make decisions about flood insurance coverage within contexts shaped by engagement, renewal cycles, rezoning, and insurer p…
The mixed blessing of shifting responsibilities
For a long time, Germany was largely spared from extreme weather events such as flooding. Severe flooding occurred only sporadically and at extended intervals. However, due to climate change, adjustments to more severe and frequent flooding are necessary. This was demonstrated by the Ahr Valley floods in 2021 and the southern German floods in 2024. In response, the introduction of compulsory elemental insurance has been repeatedly discussed to st…
Shifting risks back to the state? Flood insurance and responsibility in the face of climate change in Australia
In Australia, with its neoliberal policy tradition, responsibility for dealing with severe and extreme weather events such as floods and bushfires has mainly been left to individual households and insurance markets. With the growing number of extreme weather events, existing institutional arrangements and behavioral patterns are challenged. Individuals have difficulties to reliably assess and manage knowledge about such climate change related haz…
Thoughts about intersectionality and risk. Interviews with key scholars
Since the early twenty first century, feminist and intersectional approaches to risk research have gained momentum, initially emerging from studies on HIV risks within health studies. Over the past decade, these approaches have expanded to other fields. As editors of this special issue, Katarina Giritli Nygren and Anna Olofsson introduce a reflection piece anchoring the issue. The reflection piece includes insights from seven influential scholars…
Rationalization, enchantment, and subjectivation – lessons for risk communication from a New Phenomenology of everyday reasoning
The success of risk communication in democratic societies depends on a good understanding of people’s knowledge and ways of reasoning, which requires a broader perspective of ‘societal risk communication’. This includes all kinds of rationales how people and social institutions communicate, make sense of, and engage with risk and uncertainty to better understand the epistemological challenges for risk communication by experts and social decision-…
Risk-taking and social inequality
Even though risk-taking is a common and widespread social experience sociological theorizing on the concept is scarce. This contribution aims to systematize and advance understanding of risk-taking and its different forms and how these connect to social inequalities and the social machinery. It considers risk-taking in the context of the debate about Bourdieu's theory of practice and Archer's theory of morphogenesis before suggesting a conceptual…
Rationales of risk and uncertainty and their epistemological foundation by new phenomenology
Risk studies have shown that many people rather than following rational means of managing risk refer to non-rational (hope, faith) and in-between rationales (trust, intuition), which are not irrational but reasonable and based on subjective experiences, which are difficult to overcome by the communication of mere expert knowledge. We suggest that the problem of analyzing subjective risk management can be itemized as a result of the tension betwee…
Covid-19, pandemic risk and inequality
In this editorial, we introduce a special thematic collection of articles published in this current issue, and earlier in 2021, which develop a range of social science approaches to studying and theorising pandemic risk, largely focused on the COVID-19 pandemic. We structure this editorial essay in two parts. First, we consider the challenges of theorising pandemics with an attentiveness to inequality. We consider what different theoretical appro…
Communicating the unknown
This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We develop a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach in CQPWeb , based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the go…
Understanding discourse and language of risk
Understanding risk communication in the public sphere is important for risk studies since the management of risk not only requires decision makers and experts to communicate risk well but also to understand how risk is debated in the public sphere more broadly. This special issue therefore discusses approaches which examine the linguistic representation of risk in text and how it changes over time. With the increasing body of digitised text avail…
Conclusions
This conclusion revisits the COVID-19 pandemic from the broader perspective of a changing global world. It raises questions regarding the opportunities for global learning under conditions of global divisions and competition and includes learning from the Other, governing within a changing public sphere, and challenging national cultural practices. Moreover, it exemplifies how the society-nature-technology nexus has become crucial for understandi…
Introduction
With SARS-CoV-2 a new coronavirus is spreading around the world that challenges governments and triggers unprecedented social responses. Worldwide people have had to manage the experience of an uncertain new threat under very different conditions. A growing body of research and theoretical approaches tries to make sense of the social responses to the pandemic. This monograph issue contributes to the research on the first wave of the pandemic from…
Health and illness as drivers of risk language in the news media – a case study of The Times
Since the 1980s, a growing body of scholarship suggests that societal concerns and management of risk have become a central feature of modernising societies. Most prominently Ulrich Beck has asserted that modern societies were increasingly confronted with the side-effects of social progress challenging the modern machinery, such as science and insurance, to manage risk. Since this early focus on technological advancement and environmental degener…
Understanding Risk-Taking
A monstrous threat’
This article explores the factors that helped COVID-19 to become a ‘monstrous threat’ to humanity, which legitimises significant restrictions to people’s freedom and is justified by the ethics to keep everyone safe. It analyses how rigid means increase old inequalities and produce secondary risks and significant side-effects and demonstrates how, with social and economic costs soaring, governments seek ways back – not to the old normal – but new …
Risk in The New York Times (1987–2014)
The meaning of risk-taking – key concepts and dimensions
Dealing with and taking risks are central issues of current societies which had been characterised by heightened debates and conflicts about risk (Beck, Giddens). Even though there is good knowledge available, policies and strategies to reduce people’s risk-taking are often less successful than expected. Experts are puzzled about common people not following good advice presuming people’s lack of understanding. While this might be true in many cas…
‘In-between’ and other reasonable ways to deal with risk and uncertainty
How people deal with risk and uncertainty has fuelled public and academic debate in recent decades. Researchers have shown that common distinctions between rational and 'irrational' strategies underestimate the complexity of how people approach an uncertain future. I suggested in 2008 that strategies in-between do not follow standards of instrumental rationality nor they are 'irrational' but follow their own logic which works well under particula…
Living in the Anthropocene
Social debates about nature are changing. Understandings of nature as largely independent of human activity and available for exploitation have given way to concerns about its protection, and have further shifted towards strategies focused on actively managing and producing nature. This article aims to make sense of this shift using a risk framework. Originating from the modern notion of risk that amalgamates risk minimisation and risk-taking, it…
Towards a better understanding of risk-taking
The current study of risk is dominated by the risk minimisation approach that frames risk and risk-taking as something undesirable that should be avoided as much as possible. However, this approach to risk often fails to consider the broader conditions and motivations of risk-taking and to examine why people expose themselves to danger. In this editorial, I explore two key concepts – voluntary risk-taking and risk behaviour – considering the ways…
The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities
In this article, we examine the conceptual importance of integrating risk and intersectionality theory for the study of how risk and various forms of inequality intersect and are mutually constitutive. We argue that an intersectional perspective can advance risk research by incorporating more effectively the role of such social categories as gender and race into the analysis of ‘risk’ as an empirical phenomenon. In doing so, the intersectional pe…
Calculating Political Risk
Konzeptionelle Überlegungen und eine empirische Strategie zur Erforschung von Individualisierungsprozessen
Mit Becks (1986) These eines neuen Individualisierungsschubs wurde seit den 80er Jahren eine Diskussion über soziale Wandlungsprozesse im Nachkriegsdeutschland entfacht. Die zuweilen unscharfe und uneinheitlich verwendete Begrifflichkeit führte im Individualisierungsdiskurs immer wieder zu Missverständnissen. Dabei liegt eine zentrale Schwierigkeit in den explizit oder implizit mitgeführten Vorannahmen: etwa über das Verhältnis von Handlungsresul…
The meaning of risk-taking – key concepts and dimensions
Dealing with and taking risks are central issues of current societies which had been characterised by heightened debates and conflicts about risk (Beck, Giddens). Even though there is good knowledge available, policies and strategies to reduce people’s risk-taking are often less successful than expected. Experts are puzzled about common people not following good advice presuming people’s lack of understanding. While this might be true in many cas…
A monstrous threat’
This article explores the factors that helped COVID-19 to become a ‘monstrous threat’ to humanity, which legitimises significant restrictions to people’s freedom and is justified by the ethics to keep everyone safe. It analyses how rigid means increase old inequalities and produce secondary risks and significant side-effects and demonstrates how, with social and economic costs soaring, governments seek ways back – not to the old normal – but new …
Health, Risk and Uncertainty in the Life Course
Survey Research and the Production of Evidence for Social Policy
Large representative surveys have become a valuable resource to inform public policy in an increasingly complex modern world. They provide authority to policy since they are considered objective, neutral and scientific. In contrast, this article conceives the production of knowledge as an interactive process. We argue that the conduct of large social surveys tends to reinforce existing world views, power relations and a narrow construction of soc…
Introduction
With SARS-CoV-2 a new coronavirus is spreading around the world that challenges governments and triggers unprecedented social responses. Worldwide people have had to manage the experience of an uncertain new threat under very different conditions. A growing body of research and theoretical approaches tries to make sense of the social responses to the pandemic. This monograph issue contributes to the research on the first wave of the pandemic from…
Cambodian youth managing expectations and uncertainties of the life course – a typology of biographical management
Globalising changes in recent decades have produced great impacts on young lives, and youth sociologists have been analysing how young people negotiate change and uncertainty in their lives. This article complements existing research by a case study on Cambodia, where young people have in recent years been charged to deal with drastic social changes but in social conditions different from the better known global North. By drawing on data from a s…
Conclusions
This conclusion revisits the COVID-19 pandemic from the broader perspective of a changing global world. It raises questions regarding the opportunities for global learning under conditions of global divisions and competition and includes learning from the Other, governing within a changing public sphere, and challenging national cultural practices. Moreover, it exemplifies how the society-nature-technology nexus has become crucial for understandi…
Living in the Anthropocene
Social debates about nature are changing. Understandings of nature as largely independent of human activity and available for exploitation have given way to concerns about its protection, and have further shifted towards strategies focused on actively managing and producing nature. This article aims to make sense of this shift using a risk framework. Originating from the modern notion of risk that amalgamates risk minimisation and risk-taking, it…
Risk-taking and social inequality
Even though risk-taking is a common and widespread social experience sociological theorizing on the concept is scarce. This contribution aims to systematize and advance understanding of risk-taking and its different forms and how these connect to social inequalities and the social machinery. It considers risk-taking in the context of the debate about Bourdieu's theory of practice and Archer's theory of morphogenesis before suggesting a conceptual…
Erwartbarkeit, Glück und Vertrauen - Zum Wandel biographischer Sicherheitskonstruktionen in der Moderne
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 183 - 202
Communicating the unknown
This paper presents an annotation approach to examine uncertainty in British and German newspaper articles on the coronavirus pandemic. We develop a tagset in an interdisciplinary team from corpus linguistics and sociology. After working out a gold standard on a pilot corpus, we apply the annotation to the entire corpus drawing on an “annotation-by-query” approach in CQPWeb , based on uncertainty constructions that have been extracted from the go…
Understanding discourse and language of risk
Understanding risk communication in the public sphere is important for risk studies since the management of risk not only requires decision makers and experts to communicate risk well but also to understand how risk is debated in the public sphere more broadly. This special issue therefore discusses approaches which examine the linguistic representation of risk in text and how it changes over time. With the increasing body of digitised text avail…
Introduction
In social policy debates and research over recent years, ‘risk’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘the life course’ have become influential topics. In this themed section we will revisit these concepts and analyse how they have influenced policy debates and research in Australia and elsewhere. The contributions were developed as part of a research collaboration that brings together expertise from social policy, gender studies, risk sociology, social work, …
Understanding risk and old age in western society
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of “risk” in relation to old age. Ideas are explored linked with what has been termed as the “risk society” and the extent to which it has become part of the organizing ground of how we define and organise the “personal” and “social spaces” in which to grow old in western modernity. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical paper in three parts, including: an introduction to the relevanc…
Gender Inequalities and Risk During the ‘Rush Hour’ of Life
Increasingly, social policies combine to intensify old risks and create new social risks with unequal consequences for men and women. These risks include those created by changing normative expectations and the resulting tensions between social policy, paid employment and family life. Policy reliance on highly aggregated standardised outcome data and generalised models of autonomous rational action result in policies that lack an understanding of…
Strategies ‘in Between’ to Deal with Risk and Uncertainty in Current Welfare States
In current societies public debates are increasingly about the allocation of risks and uncertainties. Environmental and technological risks as well as social risks are subject of public controversies and are addressed by state regulation. The article argues that many debates about the strategies of how to deal with risks refer to a modern dichotomy of professional scientific knowledge on the one hand, and lay-knowledge, beliefs or ideologies on t…
Rinderwahnsinn. Können Gesellschaften aus Krisen lernen
Health, Risk and Uncertainty in the Life Course
The biographical approach
In research on health and illness, studies using a narrative approach are gaining ground in a context where a statistical quantitative approach as well as an ‘objective’ approach to illness have dominated for decades. This can be interpreted as a shift from an objective to a subjective and social concept of risk. Against this background, this editorial argues that the biographical approach provides important opportunities to enhance understanding…
Erwartbarkeit, Glück und Vertrauen - Zum Wandel biographischer Sicherheitskonstruktionen in der Moderne
SozW Soziale Welt , Seite 183 - 202
Current Directions in Risk Research
This article reviews the main approaches to risk in psychology and sociology and considers recent developments. It shows that research continues from a wide range of perspectives. Some developments in psychological thinking have recently acknowledged the importance of the cultural framing of risk perceptions and responses and the positive power of emotions to manage uncertainties, while some streams of work in sociology have moved toward more ind…
Reflexive Modernization
Ulrich Beck introduced the term reflexive modernity (also called second modernity) by explicitly demarcating himself from postmodern approaches which would imply that current developments go beyond modernity (Beck et al. 2003)
Understanding risk and old age in western society
Purpose The purpose of this paper is to explore the concept of “risk” in relation to old age. Ideas are explored linked with what has been termed as the “risk society” and the extent to which it has become part of the organizing ground of how we define and organise the “personal” and “social spaces” in which to grow old in western modernity. Design/methodology/approach A theoretical paper in three parts, including: an introduction to the relevanc…
Uncertainty
Uncertainty is characterized by cognitive and emotional elements. Uncertainty indicates unclear, ambiguous, or contradictory cognitive constructions, which cause feelings of uncertainty
Individualism
Individualism emphasizes the importance of the individual, for example the individual's freedom, interests, rights, needs, or beliefs against the predominance of other institutions in regulating the individual's behavior, such as the state or the church. A range of theories in different societal domains contributes to the dissemination of individualistic ideas in society. In particular, economic and political liberalism are vehicles of individual…
Autopoiesis
The neurobiologists Humberto R. Maturana and Francisco J. Varela introduced the term autopoiesis in the 1970s in order to describe how living systems (e.g., human, plant, cell, or microbe) produce and reproduce themselves. Combining the idea of autonomy and production, autopoiesis means in short the continual self‐production of living systems. The components of an autopoietic system reproduce themselves and the relations between them by these com…
Life Course
The term life course refers to the idea that the course of one's life is not just determined by a natural process of aging but is mainly shaped by social institutions and sociocultural values as well as by decisions and unexpected events. Thus the life course consists of life stages (e.g., childhood, youth, adulthood), status passages or transitions (e.g., from youth to adulthood, from student to professional), and life events (e.g., marriage, jo…
Health Risk and Vulnerability - Edited by Alan Petersen and Iain Wilkinson
Heading into the unknown
Within interdisciplinary risk research, strategies for managing risk and uncertainty based on cognitive rationality are seen as more effective than non-rational strategies, such as hope, belief, or avoidance. However this dichotomy between rational and irrational strategies neglects a whole range of everyday approaches to risk that are neither completely rational nor irrational as they may involve the use of prior knowledge and experience. These …
The sociology of risk and uncertainty
This article responds to Judith Green's (Citation2009, p. 493–508, this issue) contribution 'Is it time for the sociology of health to abandon "risk"?' It agrees with some of Green's criticisms of risk studies, but argues that rather than abandoning the concept of risk it should be refined and developed. Even though Green is right to have concerns about narrow approaches to social reality she follows a narrow perspective herself, which is atypica…
Risk, health and the media
This special issue on ‘Risk and the Media’ explores relationships between risk theory in the social sciences and media studies' analyses of risk. Arguing that attempts to bring these two ‘risk and media’ fields together have been only sporadic, the editors deliberately adopt a reflexive view. They draw attention to their different approaches, as sociological and media/cultural studies researchers, to the articles chosen here. They emphasise these…
Strategies ‘in Between’ to Deal with Risk and Uncertainty in Current Welfare States
In current societies public debates are increasingly about the allocation of risks and uncertainties. Environmental and technological risks as well as social risks are subject of public controversies and are addressed by state regulation. The article argues that many debates about the strategies of how to deal with risks refer to a modern dichotomy of professional scientific knowledge on the one hand, and lay-knowledge, beliefs or ideologies on t…
Gender Inequalities and Risk During the ‘Rush Hour’ of Life
Increasingly, social policies combine to intensify old risks and create new social risks with unequal consequences for men and women. These risks include those created by changing normative expectations and the resulting tensions between social policy, paid employment and family life. Policy reliance on highly aggregated standardised outcome data and generalised models of autonomous rational action result in policies that lack an understanding of…
Introduction
In social policy debates and research over recent years, ‘risk’, ‘social inclusion’ and ‘the life course’ have become influential topics. In this themed section we will revisit these concepts and analyse how they have influenced policy debates and research in Australia and elsewhere. The contributions were developed as part of a research collaboration that brings together expertise from social policy, gender studies, risk sociology, social work, …
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Survey Research and the Production of Evidence for Social Policy
Large representative surveys have become a valuable resource to inform public policy in an increasingly complex modern world. They provide authority to policy since they are considered objective, neutral and scientific. In contrast, this article conceives the production of knowledge as an interactive process. We argue that the conduct of large social surveys tends to reinforce existing world views, power relations and a narrow construction of soc…
Risk, Social Inclusion and the Life Course – Review of Developments in Policy and Research
‘Risk’, ‘social inclusion’ and the ‘life course’ have become key notions in social policy after the Golden Age of welfare capitalism. This article reviews some of the key debates and developments in Australian social policy and research that underpin the contributions to this themed section. From ‘new social risks’ to ‘the great risk shift’ and the broader debates about the ‘risk society’ and ‘governmentality’, it reviews debates about social inc…
The mutual constitution of risk and inequalities
In this article, we examine the conceptual importance of integrating risk and intersectionality theory for the study of how risk and various forms of inequality intersect and are mutually constitutive. We argue that an intersectional perspective can advance risk research by incorporating more effectively the role of such social categories as gender and race into the analysis of ‘risk’ as an empirical phenomenon. In doing so, the intersectional pe…
Cambodian youth managing expectations and uncertainties of the life course – a typology of biographical management
Globalising changes in recent decades have produced great impacts on young lives, and youth sociologists have been analysing how young people negotiate change and uncertainty in their lives. This article complements existing research by a case study on Cambodia, where young people have in recent years been charged to deal with drastic social changes but in social conditions different from the better known global North. By drawing on data from a s…
Towards a better understanding of risk-taking
The current study of risk is dominated by the risk minimisation approach that frames risk and risk-taking as something undesirable that should be avoided as much as possible. However, this approach to risk often fails to consider the broader conditions and motivations of risk-taking and to examine why people expose themselves to danger. In this editorial, I explore two key concepts – voluntary risk-taking and risk behaviour – considering the ways…
‘In-between’ and other reasonable ways to deal with risk and uncertainty
How people deal with risk and uncertainty has fuelled public and academic debate in recent decades. Researchers have shown that common distinctions between rational and 'irrational' strategies underestimate the complexity of how people approach an uncertain future. I suggested in 2008 that strategies in-between do not follow standards of instrumental rationality nor they are 'irrational' but follow their own logic which works well under particula…
Sociology (34 works) · Political science (26 works) · Social science (22 works) · Psychology (20 works) · Risk Perception and Management (17 works) · Law (14 works) · Computer Science (13 works) · Epistemology (13 works) · Social Psychology (12 works) · Economics (11 works)