Much has been written by important sociocultural theorists about the role played by risk in late modern societies, and some, like Beck and Giddens, have ventured to contend that industrial society is turning into `risk society'. Little empirical research has been conducted, however, that has sought to examine the speculations of grand theories about `risk society'. This article discusses findings from an Australian interview-based study that sought to elicit the participants' understandings of the notion of risk. Three major issues from the interviews are examined: the ways in which the participants defined `risk', the risks they nominated as most threatening to themselves and those they saw as threatening Australians in general. The findings reveal that the `risk society' thesis was supported in some ways. Other findings, however, challenged this thesis, including the participants' critique of government's role in protecting its citizens from risk, the ways in which many of them represented risk-taking as positive, their relative inattention to environmental risk and the role played by such factors as gender, age and sexual identity in structuring risk perceptions.

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Much has been written about the 'social problem' of fear of crime in the criminological and sociological literature in recent years. We would argue that thus far in this literature, however, there has been too much emphasis on the question 'How rational is people's fear of crime?', a question that largely reduces the complexity of the phenomenon and positions a 'biased' lay response against an 'expert' objective judgment. In this article, we review different epistemological perspectives that can be offered to understand in greater depth the fear of crime phenomenon. We place particular emphasis on those hermeneutic perspectives that go beyond the models of the rationalist, individualistic subject to exploring issues of symbolic representation, discourse and the micro -and macro-contexts in which fear of crime is experienced and given meaning. We also draw upon two case studies from our own empirical research into fear of crime, conducted with the intention of exploring the situated narratives, cultural representations and different levels of symbolic meaning that contribute to the dynamic constitution of fear.

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