Cultural Theory has given rise to a diverse set of research programs that span multiple social science disciplines and that have in recent years been used to analyze policymaking conflicts generally.
This tendency, she argued, plays an indispensable role in promoting certain social structures, both by imbuing a society's members with aversions to subversive behavior and by focusing resentment and blame on those who defy such institutions.
Focusing largely on political conflict over air pollution and nuclear power in the United States, Risk and Culture attributed political conflict over environmental and technological risks to a struggle between adherents of competing ways of life associated with the group–grid scheme: an egalitarian, collectivist (“low grid”, “high group”) one, which gravitates toward fear of environmental disaster as a justification for restricting commercial behavior productive of inequality; and individualistic ("low group") and hierarchical ("high grid") ones, which resist claims of environmental risk in order to shield private orderings from interference, and to defend established commercial and governmental elites from subversive rebuke.
The first of these was Karl Dake, a graduate student of Wildavsky, who correlated perceptions of various societal risks—environmental disaster, external aggression, internal disorder, market breakdown—with subjects’ scores on attitudinal scales that he believed reflected the “cultural worldviews” associated with the ways of life in Douglas's group–grid scheme.
[15] The second prominent theory, which is grounded in social psychology and behavioral economics, asserts that individuals’ risk perceptions are pervasively shaped, and often distorted by heuristics and biases.
[16] Douglas maintained that this “psychometric” approach naively attempted to “depoliticize” risk conflicts by attributing to cognitive influences beliefs that reflect individuals’ commitments to competing cultural structures.
[19] Such deeply ironic statements are scattered through her work as indicating an unattainable mirage of 'positionlessness': understanding and knowledge must, for Douglas, always emerge from a particular, partial, position, as is evident from the opening chapters of her 1982 book with Wildavsky.
Complexities and ambiguities inherent in Douglas's group-grid scheme, and the resulting diversity of conceptualizations among cultural theorists, lead Åsa Boholm to believe the theory is fatally opaque.