This best-selling textbook returns for an eighth edition with material on the most fundamental issues in sociology today. The authors continue their tradition of focusing on the big picture, with an emphasis on race, class, and gender in every chapter—building on the seventh edition’s discussion of reproductive justice after the revocation of Roe v. Wade, social movements such as Black Lives Matter and #MeToo, a discussion of the Covid-19 pandemic and Donald Trump and Joe Biden.
The text frames sociological debates around the major theoretical perspectives of sociology and focus on capturing students’ imaginations with cutting-edge research and real-world events. The hallmark of the book continues to be clear writing that helps students understand the intricacies of the discipline like no other textbook on the market.
New to the eighth edition
Thinking outside the box (or inside it…)
Selected chapters contain thematically linked boxed inserts aimed at bringing analytical and expositional focus to certain issues, as follows:
- Sociological Insights: These boxes focus on how sociology can help us better understand a variety of issues and how examples from everyday life can help us to understand sociological principles, illustrating how topics are carefully linked to that material.
- Global Sociology: One of the most pronounced social changes of the past century has been globalization—a transition from the dominance of nation-states and national economies to global interactions. These boxes examine how social change moves around the world.
- Sociological Surprises: One common criticism of sociologists is that we sometimes expend a great deal of effort to prove things that are obvious. On the contrary, the reality is that what we find often goes against what people commonly believe and even against sociological researchers expect to find. These boxes focus on such unexpected findings, analyzing why the social reality turns out to be something different from what is expected.
- Understanding Race, Class, and Gender: These boxes give added emphasis to the book’s focus on race, class, and gender inequality. In every issue that sociologists study, race, class, and gender play a key role—and these boxes provide students with clear and concrete examples of how this occurs.
- Student Life: These boxes, which discuss student life from a sociological viewpoint, show how sociology is relevant to students in their everyday lives, covering race relations to dating to paying for college, and draws out their sociological implications.
- Putting Sociology to Work: These boxes focus on application: How can sociology be used to solve a social problem or to make an important decision?
Preface
Acknowledgements
About the Authors
1. Sociology: The Discipline
2. How Sociology Is Done
3. Perspectives on Society and Interaction
4. Culture and Social Structure
5. Socialization
6. Stratification: Structured Social Inequality
7. Race and Ethnic Relations
8. Sex, Gender, and Society
9. Groups, Organizations, and the Workplace
10. Deviance, Crime, and Social Control
11. Economy and Society
12. Politics, Power, and Society
13. Marriages and Families
14. Education
15. Religion
16. Health, Population, and Aging
17. Urban Society: City Life and Collective Behavior
18. Social Movements and Change
Biography
John E. Farley is Professor Emeritus of Sociology at Southern Illinois University – Edwardsville, where he has taught courses ranging from introductory sociology to a course in advanced data analysis for graduate students. He is the author of two other textbooks, Majority-Minority Relations, Sixth Edition (2010) and American Social Problems: An Institutional Analysis, Second Edition (1992). His articles on his sociological research have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, American Journal of Economics and Sociology, Urban Affairs Quarterly, and a number of other journals.
Michael W. Flota is Professor and Chair of the School of Social Science at Daytona State College, where he teaches Introduction to Sociology every semester, and serves as the Managing Editor for the Journal of Florida Studies.
J. Scott Carter is currently a Professor of Sociology at the University of Central Florida (UCF) in Orland, FL. He has published in several journals, including the Annual Review of Sociology, Social Problems, Sociology of Race and Ethnicity, Social Science Research, Social Science Quarterly, and the Journal of Family Issues to name a few. He is also co-author of the book, The Death of Affirmative Action? Racialized Framing and the Fight Against Racial Preference in College Admissions (2021), and co-editor of the book, Protecting Whiteness: Whitelash and the Rejection of Racial Equality (2020).
