Essentials of Sociology (Fourth Edition)

The textbook that teaches students how issues in our global society connect to their own lives.

Every chapter of Essentials of Sociology, Fourth Edition, is organized around stories pulled from the news. New features in the Fourth Edition pull together the big questions in each chapter and organize them around a concept map to help students synthesize concepts and see the personal and global applications of a sociological imagination.

Anthony Giddens, former director of the London School of Economics and a current member of the House of Lords, is a world-renowned social theorist who has written over forty books. He has written on just about every major topic in sociology but is best known for his work on modernization theory and globalization.

Mitchell Duneier is an award-winning urban ethnographer at Princeton University and the City University of New York Graduate Center. He is most famous for his book Sidewalk, which won the Los Angeles Times Book Prize. Duneier's research focuses on the urban poor and other groups in the margins of society.

Richard P. Appelbaum, the MacArthur chair of Global Studies at the University of California, Santa Barbara, has won several awards for his teaching and works mainly on globalization and labor issues. Appelbaum is the coauthor of Behind the Label.

Deborah Carr is a demographer and an active teacher at Rutgers University, where she regularly teaches the intro course. Her work focuses on sociology of the life course, aging, social psychology, and gender. Carr's latest book, Worried Sick: How Stress Hurts Us and How to Bounce Back, looks at how stress gets under our skin, makes us sick, and how and why people cope with stress differently.