The author is a proud sponsor of the 2020 SAGE Keith Roberts Teaching Innovations Award—enabling graduate students and early career faculty to attend the annual ASA pre-conference teaching and learning workshop. Understanding the Social World: Research Methods for the 21st Century is a concise and accessible introduction to the process and practice of social science research. Fast-paced and visually engaging, the text crosses disciplinary and national boundaries, pays special attention to concern for human subjects, and focuses on the application of results. As it rises to the requirements of a world shaped by big data and social media, Instagram and avatars, blogs and tweets, the text also confronts the research challenges posed by cell phones, privacy concerns, linguistic diversity, and multicultural populations. The Second Edition discusses newly-popular research methods, highlights the fascinating work being conducted by contemporary social researchers, and includes enhanced tools for learning in the text and online. Included with this title: The password-protected Instructor Resource Site (formally known as SAGE Edge) offers access to all text-specific resources, including a test bank and editable, chapter-specific PowerPoint® slides.

This handbook provides an overview on major developments that occurred in the field of economic sociology after its rebirth since the 1980s in the US. It offers new insights on the uniqueness of European economic sociology compared to US economic sociology which emerged at the end of the 20th century. The handbook presents economic sociology as a developing field which started with certain foundations as new economic sociology, widening the perspective by introducing social factors thereby focusing more on general belief systems, social forms of coordination and the relationships between society and the economy. It offers an outstanding portrait of the research field helping to identify major foundations and trajectories as well as new research perspectives for a globalized economic sociology. This makes the handbook appeal to specialized researchers of the field, researchers from other disciplines interested in economic phenomena, as well as graduate and postgraduate students.

Crowds in the 21st Century presents the latest theory and research on crowd events and crowd behaviour from across a range of social sciences, including psychology, sociology, law, and communication studies. Whether describing the language of the crowd in protest events, measuring the ability of the crowd to empower its participants, or analysing the role of professional organizations involved in crowd safety and public order, the contributions in this volume are united in their commitment to a social scientific level of analysis. The crowd is often depicted as a source of irrationality and danger – in the form of riots and mass emergencies. By placing crowd events back in their social context – their ongoing historical and proximal relationships with other groups and social structures – this volume restores meaning to the analysis of crowd behaviour. Together, the studies described in this collection demonstrate the potential of crowd research to enhance the positive experience of crowd participants and to improve design, planning, and management around crowd events. This book was originally published as a special issue of Contemporary Social Science.

In a world where the effects of inequality occupy an increasingly prominent place on the public agenda, this book provides up-to-date and thorough analysis from the perspective of a group of researchers at the forefront of social stratification analysis. Exploring Social Inequality in the 21st Century is a clear and critical overview of current debates about social inequality. It includes new information, tools, and approaches to conceptualising and measuring social stratification and social class, as well as informative case studies. Throughout, the researchers describe the direct and indirect costs of social inequality. Divided into two parts – Conceptualising and Measuring Inequality; and Costs and Consequences of Inequality in the areas of Education, Employment, and Global Wealth – it includes new findings about the growth of wealth inequality in the G20 countries, and a detailed examination of tax policies designed to reduce inequality without affecting economic growth. With substantial contributions to the analysis of inequalities in education, and explanations of the processes and consequences of social and gender-based exclusion, this book is essential reading for anyone interested in understanding contemporary social inequality. This book was originally published as a special issue of the journal Contemporary Social Science.

Risk, Power, and Inequality in the 21st Century provides a groundbreaking new analysis of the increasingly important relationship between risk and widening inequalities. The massive, and often unequal, impacts of contemporary risks are recognized widely in popular discussions – be it the fall-out from the 2008 financial crisis or Hurricane Katrina – yet there is a distinct neglect in social science of the overall systemic impacts of these risks for increasing inequalities. This book moves beyond this lacuna to identify novel intersections of risk and inequalities. It shows how key processes associated with risk society – the social production and distribution of risks as side-effects – are intensifying inequalities in fundamental ways. In articulating how risk is intensifying both the social sources of suffering of the least advantaged and the power of the most advantaged, this book realizes a significant rethinking of risk, power, and inequalities in contemporary society.