CULTURE, COSMOPOLITANISM, AND RISK MANAGEMENT

Most cultural approaches to risk management deal with the connections between the forms of social relations within groups and the risk conce rns of those groups. According to these theories, a certain limited se t of different relational forms (usually three, four, or five) lead to specific, different and conflicting, risk concerns. In contrast to th ese theories, cosmopolitanism is an approach to culture that focuses, not on forms of sociality, but on changes among forms-expansions and c ontractions in the inclusivity of forms and movement by persons from o ne form of sociality to another. Relative to other cultural theories, cosmopolitanism thus is much more concerned with the solution of risk management problems than with their origins. Cosmopolitanism can be th ought of as a cultural continuum, with cosmopolitanism at one end and pluralism at the other. Cosmopolitan persons are more open to cultural change-and thus the solution of risk management problems. In this art icle, we outline our new theory of cosmopolitanism, describe a method for measuring it and present an experimental study that tests some imp lications of the theory. Results from the study support the theory by showing that, compared to pluralistic respondents, cosmopolitan respon dents are more inclusive in their risk management judgments-that is, t hey express equal concern for a local and a national issue, whereas th e pluralistic respondents express greater concern in the local case. W e discuss the risk management implications of a cosmopolitan approach to culture.