Title: Scripts, animal health and biosecurity: The moral accountability of farmers' talk about animal health risks
Abstract: Abstract This paper explores the contribution of script theory to understandings of animal health risks. Script theory has long played an important role in studies of health and risk, yet the application of script theories is often vague and confused. Theories from different ontological perspectives are conflated resulting in an overly cognitive and asocial understanding of health behaviour with the potential to misinform health promotion strategies. The paper addresses these problems by applying the concept of script formulations to an analysis of farmers' understandings of bovine tuberculosis in farmed cattle. Drawing on interviews with 61 farmers in England and Wales, the paper argues that farmers reveal animal disease to be a scripted event, but that these scripts also order identity and provide a form of moral accountability for farmers' behaviour. This has implications for attempts to communicate animal disease risks and suggests that a more productive approach is to reorganise governance structures and relationships between farmers and government. Keywords: animal healthbiosecurityscriptsriskfarming Acknowledgements This research was funded by the ESRC (RES-000-22-1738 and RES-000-22-2578) and an international travel grant from Cardiff University. The authors would like to thank two anonymous referees for their helpful comments on an earlier draft.
Publication Year: 2011
Publication Date: 2011-06-01
Language: en
Type: article
Indexed In: ['crossref']
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Cited By Count: 55
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