Because life course sociology is an imaginative framework, Biography and the Sociological Imagination is less about "what we know" about the life course and more about "how to think" about changing societies and aging by drawing on life course ideas. Drawing from the latest research and using stories of real people, Shanahan and Macmillan spur readers to imagine alternative ways of organizing society and the implications of these alternatives for the biography.

Ross Macmillan is an associate professor at the University of Minnesota and the editor of The Structure of the Life Course: Individualized? Standardized? Differentiated.