Risk as politics, culture as power

The cultural theory of risk has been misinterpreted in recent years. Most significantly, the grid–group typology, which was originally developed as a heuristic device, embedded in a much deeper sociological theory, has been taken out this original context. Both the ontological foundations and the epistemological implications of cultural theory have been misunderstood in a significant number of cases. This paper provides a summary of the neo‐Durkheimian institutional theory from which the typology was derived and suggests a number of relatively unexplored avenues for risk research.