Global Social Change: Historical and Comparative Perspectives

This informative and exciting volume brings together accomplished sociologists and scholars to offer an introduction to ways of studying and understanding global social change.

The essays in Global Social Change explore globalization from a world-systems perspective, untangling its many contested meanings. This perspective offers insights into globalization's gradual and uneven growth throughout the course of human social evolution.

In this informative and exciting volume, Christopher Chase-Dunn and Salvatore J. Babones bring together accomplished senior sociologists and outstanding younger scholars with a mix of interests, expertise, and methodologies to offer an introduction to ways of studying and understanding global social change.

In both newly written essays and previously published articles from the Journal of World Systems Research, the contributors employ historical and comparative social science to examine the development of institutions of global governance, the rise and fall of hegemonic core states, transnational social movements, and global environmental challenges. They compare post–World War II globalization with the great wave of economic integration that occurred in the late nineteenth century, analyze the rise of the political ideology of the "globalization project"―Reaganism-Thatcherism―and discuss issues of gender and global inequalities.

Christopher Chase-Dunn is a Distinguished Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Riverside, where he is the director of the Institute for Research on World-Systems. He is the coauthor of Global Struggles and Social Change: From Prehistory to World Revolution in the Twenty-First Century.

Salvatore J. Babones is an assistant professor of sociology at the University of Pittsburgh.