Lifestyle Risk: The Challenging Marriage of Two Thorny Concepts

Lifestyle and risk — concepts that are today so commonplace and popular that we tend to take their meaning (and social history) for granted. This is a mistake since none of them are either value-free or uncontested. Bringing them together — theoretically as much as with regard to policy — is therefore bound to raise several questions regarding the definition of boundaries. If lifestyle is about the way one lives and we recognize that this is not alone a matter of (individual) agency but also a question of structure (class, culture or, indeed, regulatory environment); and, similarly, if risk is not just about determining objects or incidents of risk but rather about establishing the societal and environmental contexts within which specific (negative) outcomes are more likely to happen, hence itself an area rid with social and political meaning — then we are confronted with the challenge of how to approach the subject of lifestyle risk without falling prey to the rather strong temptation entailed in the marrying of these two concepts to impose normative expectations and, subsequently, standards on various lifeworlds. This article takes issue with some of the ideas advanced in the article by Planzer and Alemanno published in EJRR 4/2010 ‘Lifestyle Risks: Conceptualization of an Emerging Category of Research’, by considering the framing of the concept of lifestyle risk. The emergence of the concept of lifestyle risk is symptomatic of the more general trend from both the right and the left of the political spectrum to re-emphasize individual responsibility for social welfare (and the place of individuals in societies) — what Planzer and Alemanno refer to as ‘financial solidarity’. Yet how to effect such financial solidarity, and specifically how to balance individual and state responsibility, is neither obvious nor uncontested. Accordingly, the notion of ‘lifestyle risk’ is likely to become one of the battlegrounds for determining the scope of state intervention whereby one of the principal questions will be what gets classified as ‘lifestyle risk’ and what not, and how this changes over time. The paper presents a thought experiment to this effect by considering the implications of the inclusion of technologies within the scope of ‘lifestyle risk’.