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What social problem does the American Red Cross involve?

Is it possibly health and health care or poverty? Or both? Or neither? Please super confused.

Public Comments

1. '1.this is an extract from their web site:

Red Cross provides training in lifesaving skills such as CPR and first aid, collects and distributes half the nation's blood supply, and helps victims of more than 67,000 disasters annually'

2. Here is an introduction to a new sociological perspective: 'Risk Theory'

'Anthony Giddens, the Brtish sociologist likes to begin public lectures by posing the following question to his audience: “What do the followinghave in common? Mad cow disease; the troubles as Lloyds Insurance; the Nick Leesonaffair [at Bearings Bank]; genetically modified crops; global warming; the notion that redwine is good for you; anxieties about declining sperm counts?”1 The answer, of course, isthat they are all about risk and how risk in multifarious settings now dominates social,political and economic discourse ... ... ..., the common thread in Giddens’ list relates to how technologyand science is impacting our lives; creating risks and unintended consequences for the
environment, our health and wellbeing'
extract from ref 1 below.

3. So Giddens is one of the current sociologists (since the 1990s) using Risk Theory to interpret our society. ie The 21st century society , in their terms, is a 'Risk Society'

The main theme of this paradigm is that with globalisaion and advanced technolgy, risks to society - environmental, economic, health and disease have grown out of control - this has led to the growth in importance of those institutions whose business is to deal with risk:insurance companies, credit and loans insitutions, banks and health and emergency services

Thus the American Red Cross has become one of the key institutions generating and contributing to the newly dominant discourses of our time, i.e. 'Risk Discourses', in society today. The Risk Theorist would argue that this discourse is rapidly displacing the earlier modernist discourse identified by Foucault as the medicalised discourses generated in the rise of urban industrialism ofthe 19th century.

This means that we learn new subjectivities or 'selves' no longer defining ourselves along the
a) evil/good divide of early modenism....controlled through religious discourses, or the
b) pathological /normal divide of 19th-20th century modernity when we defined ourselves through medicalised discourses.
but through
c)the low risk/high risk divide created by the new key domnant institutions: banking, credit systems and emergency institutions.

In summary then for Risk Theorists the social problems that the American Red Cross deals with is 'Risk'. Moreover this social problem of 'riskiness' has surpassed the problems of 'evil' or 'pathology' 'to become the major discourse channeling social and economic resources, and influencing our concept of ourselves.