Uncertainty, Reduced. A Discussion of Patrik Aspers’ Book

Abstract

The essay discusses Patrik Aspers’s recently published book Uncertainty. Individual Problems and Public Solutions from a sociological perspective. The book makes important contributions to the interdisciplinary study of uncertainty, particularly by introducing (and maintaining) a clear distinction between risk and uncertainty and by emphasizing the fundamental role that informal and formal social institutions play in reducing or managing uncertainty in everyday life. My main criticism is that it focuses exclusively on the analysis of public knowledge in terms of reducing uncertainty. Many of the forms of public knowledge discussed in the book — including, for example, ratings and rankings — can just as well be understood as forms of producing and specifying uncertainty, partly due to their publicness. This argument is presented in the second part of the essay and illustrated based on experience in the theorization and empirical study of rankings. The analysis leads to the more general argument that modern institutions and discourses also generate expectations that shape the experience of (un)uncertainty. These expectations form social contexts that co-determine whether public knowledge is experienced as effectively reducing, producing or otherwise specifying uncertainty, and, in so doing, undermine any attempt to determine “objectively” whether we live in more or less uncertain times than earlier societies. Taking such complications into account would change the message of the book about uncertainty reduction and could help link it to other strands of uncertainty research.