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This article offers a critical appraisal of C. Wright Mills's The Sociological Imagination with focus brought to how he sets his sociology into practice. It is designed as an invitation to further dialogue and debate over the methodology of this work. It reviews Mills's attempt to create a "sociologized pragmatism" and analyzes the contribution of The Sociological Imagination to this project. It argues that the critical praxis that informs the development of research and writing on "social suffering" demonstrates an approach to social inquiry that moves both with and beyond Mills, particularly with regard to the task of cultivating social understanding from conflicts met in lived experience.

This article provides a critical comparative review of Ulrich Beck's and Mary Douglas's social theories of risk. The author is particularly concerned to highlight the partiality of their favoured renditions of the social reality of risk perception in relation to the accumulated evidence of empirical research. Their contrasting (and opposing) conceptions of the social processes through which people may negotiate the meaning of `hazard' in terms of `risk' are presented as ideal-types which are both indispensable and insufficient for explaining the cultural complexity of this phenomenon. Moreover, insofar as the lived experience of complexity may be made the object of sociological concern, it is suggested that we might be in a better position to evaluate the cultural significance of risk as a product of this experience.

This article critically investigates the presumption that we are living in a qualitatively new `age of anxiety'. It suggests that most sociologists who address this topic have so far failed to recognize the analytical complexity of the condition of anxiety itself. By examining the possibility of establishing sociological indicators of the prevalence and character of anxiety in contemporary societies, the author argues that the `sociological imagination' has yet to provide a sufficient account of the interrelationship between representations of social problems in the public sphere and the variety of anxieties which individuals may encounter in their `personal troubles of milieu'.