What do skydiving, rock climbing, and downhill skiing have in common with stock trading, vandalism, unprotected sex and sadomasochism? All are high risk pursuits. This book will introduce the reader to the world of voluntary risk-taking, investigating the seductive nature of pursuing peril and teasing our boundaries between legal and criminal behavior, conscious and unconscious acts, sanity and insanity, and acceptable risk and stupidity.

I. Introduction

1. Edgework and the Risk Taking Experience, Stephen Lyng

II. Theoretical Advances in the Study of Edgework

2. Sociology at the Edge: Social Theory and Voluntary Risk Taking, Stephen Lyng
3. Edgework: A Subjective and Structural Model of Negotiating Boundaries, Dragan Milovanovic

III. The Edgework Experience: Anarchy and Aesthetics

4. The Only Possible Adventure: Edgework and Anarchy, Jeff Ferrell
5. Edgework and the Aesthetic Paradigm: Resonances and High Hopes, David Courtney

IV. Group Variations in Edgework Practices: Gender, Age, and Class

6. Gender and Emotion Management in the Stages of Edgework, Jennifer Lois
7. Adolescents on the Edge: The Sensual Side of Delinquency, William J. Miller

V. Mainstreaming Edgework

8. Adventure Without Risk is like Disneyland, Lori Holyfield, Lillian Jonas, and Anna Zajicek
9. Financial Edgework: Trading in Market Currents, Charles W. Smith

VI. Historicizing Edgework

10. Edgework and Insurance in Risk Societies: Some Notes on Victorian Lawyers and Mountaineers, Jonathan Simon
11. On the Edge: Drugs and the Consumption of Risk in Late Modernity, Gerda Reith

VII. Edgework in the Academy

12. Intellectual Risk Taking, Organizations, and Academic Freedom and Tenure, Gideon Sjoberg
13. Doing Terrorism Research in the Dark Ages: Confessions of a Bottom Dog, Mark S. Hamm