Christopher Andrews is an assistant professor of sociology at Drew University in Madison, New Jersey. He has published book chapters and articles on software startups and the “new economy”, online job listings and informal hiring practices, and self‐service in the retail food industry. His most recent book The Overworked Consumer: Self‐Checkouts, Supermarkets, and the Do‐It‐Yourself Economy (2019) examines the growing trend of self‐service and its effects on American jobs and consumers.

Robert J. Antonio specializes in social theory, but also teaches and works in the areas of globalization, political economy, and environment. He is currently working on multiple projects related to contemporary capitalism’s crisis tendencies, especially concerning the intersection of increased economic inequality, ecological risk, and possible democratic and authoritarian responses.

Medora W. Barnes is an Associate Professor in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at John Carroll University. Her research focuses on a variety of gendered life transitions. Recent research has examined teachers’ work‐family decisions during the transition to parenthood, and how learning fetal sex changes the interactions of pregnant women. Publications include articles in the Journal of Family Issues, Qualitative Sociology Review, and Journal of Consumer Culture.

Nachman Ben‐Yehuda, department of sociology and anthropology, Hebrew University’ centers his research on various manifestations of deviance from Durkheimian and constructivist perspectives. By asking the age‐old Hobbesian question “how is the social order possible?” he focuses on the Hegelian concept of antithesis. This general plot is occasioned by directing attention to how, why, where and when challenges to the status quo emerge and function as catalysts for processes of social change or stability. His last book is on fraud in research (with Amalya Oliver‐Lumerman).

Alessandro Bonanno is Texas State University System Regents’ Professor and Distinguished Professor of Sociology at Sam Houston State University. His work focuses on the neoliberal globalization of the economy and society. In particular, he investigates the impact that neoliberal globalization has on democracy, labor relations and the emancipatory options of subordinate groups. Dr. Bonanno is the author of numerous publications that appeared in English and other major languages. His latest books are: “The legitimation Crisis of Neoliberalism” (2017) and “Resistance to the Neoliberal Agri‐food Regime: A Critical Analysis” (2018).

Mary Chayko is a sociologist, social media researcher, and professor at Rutgers University's School of Communication and Information (SC&I). Her research is on the impact of digital technology and social media on relationships, community, society, and self. She is the author of four books, including Superconnected: The Internet, Digital Media, and Techno‐Social Life (Sage Publications), now in its second edition. Connect with Dr. Chayko at http://marychayko.com and on Twitter @MaryChayko.

Miguel A. Centeno is the Musgrave Professor of Sociology at Princeton University.

William C. Cockerham is Distinguished Professor and Chair Emeritus of Sociology at the University of Alabama at Birmingham. He was Editor‐in‐Chief of the Wiley‐Blackwell Encyclopedia of Health, Illness, Behavior, and Society (2014) and served on the editorial boards of the American Sociological Review, Mental Health and Society, and Social Currents among others. Recent books include Medical Sociology, 14^th edition (2017) and Sociology of Mental Disorder, 10^th edition (2017).

Nick Crossley is a Professor of Sociology and Co‐Founder/Co‐Director of the Mitchell Centre for Social Network Analysis at the University of Manchester (UK). His recent work has focused upon the role of social networks in collective action and culture, particularly music. His most recent book is Networks of Sound, Style and Subversion: The Punk and Post‐Punk Worlds of Manchester, London, Liverpool and Sheffield, 1975–1980 (Manchester University Press 2015). He is currently working on a book which maps out a relational approach to music sociology, to be published by Manchester University Press.

Mitchell Duneier is Maurice P. During Professor of Sociology at Princeton. He is the author of Sidewalk, Slim’s Table, and Ghetto: The Invention of a Place, the History of an Idea.

Riley E. Dunlap is Dresser Professor and Regents Professor of Sociology Emeritus at Oklahoma State University and one of the founders of environmental sociology. He has chaired the environmental sociology groups within the American Sociological Association, the Rural Sociological Society and the Society for the Study of Social Problems, and served as President of the International Sociological Association’s Research Committee on Environment and Society. He also chaired the American Sociological Association’s Task Force on Sociology and Global Climate Change, and is senior editor the resulting volume, Climate Change and Society: Sociological Perspectives (Oxford, 2015).

Joe R. Feagin, Distinguished Professor at Texas A&M University, researches systemic racism, sexism, and classism. His 73 books include The White Racial Frame (Routledge 2013); and Elite White Men Ruling (Routledge 2017). He is the recipient of the American Association for Affirmative Action’s Fletcher Lifetime Achievement Award and the American Sociological Association’s W. E. B. Du Bois Career of Distinguished Scholarship Award and Cox‐Johnson‐Frazier Award. He was the 1999–2000 president of the American Sociological Association.

Kevin Gillan is a Senior Lecturer in Sociology at the University of Manchester and Editor‐in‐Chief of Social Movement Studies. His work focuses primarily on the ways in which social movements generate and communicate alternative conceptions of political economy. He is currently writing a book with the working title How Capitalism Matters: Economy, Polity, Society (Palgrave).

Kevin Fox Gotham is a professor of sociology and associate dean at Tulane University. He is author of Crisis Cities: Disaster and Redevelopment in New York and New Orleans (with Miriam Greenberg) (2014, Oxford University Press), Race, Real Estate and Uneven Development (2014, SUNY Press), Authentic New Orleans (2007, NYU Press), Critical Perspectives on Urban Redevelopment (2001, Elsevier Press), and over 100 publications on real estate and housing policy, racial segregation, urban redevelopment, and tourism.

Laura Grindstaff is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis, and a faculty affiliate in Gender Studies, Performance Studies, and Cultural Studies. Her research and teaching focus on the cultural dimensions of sex/gender, race, and class inequality, with a particular emphasis on American media and popular culture. She is the author of The Money Shot: Trash, Class, and the Making of TV Talk Shows as well as numerous articles and essays on aspects of popular culture ranging from sports and cheerleading to reality TV and social media.

Arianna J. King is earning her Ph.D. in Urban Studies at Tulane University. She holds a master’s degree from the University of New Orleans in Urban Studies and is a current member of the African Studies Association, American Anthropological Association, and the Rural Sociology Society. Her research has appeared in the Advances in Gender Research series (2016, Elsevier Press). Her current research leverages interdisciplinary approaches to explore gender and urban space in Ghana.

David Lazer is Distinguished Professor of Political Science and Computer and Information Science, Northeastern University, and Co‐Director, NULab for Texts, Maps, and Networks. His research focuses on the nexus of network science, computational social science, and collaborative intelligence. He is the co‐inventor of the Volunteer Science research platform.

Ming‐Cheng M. Lo is Professor of Sociology at the University of California, Davis. Lo’s research focuses on culture, illness experiences, and civic engagement. She is the author of Doctors within Borders: Profession, Ethnicity, and Modernity in Colonial Taiwan (University of California Press 2002; Japanese edition, 2014). A recent series of articles addresses the roles of cultural capital and non‐dominant cultural resources in health, healthcare, and environmental justice activism.

Noriko Matsumoto is a lecturer at the University of Vermont (Department of Sociology and Critical Race and Ethnic Studies Program). Her work has appeared in Ethnic and Racial Studies, Encyclopedia of Global Human Migration (2013), and The Next Generation: Immigrant Youth in a Comparative Perspective (2011, coauthor). She is the author of Beyond the City and the Bridge: East Asian Immigration in a New Jersey Suburb (Rutgers University Press, 2018).

Michelle Meagher is Associate Professor of Women’s and Gender Studies at the University of Alberta in Edmonton Canada, where she teaches courses on the history of feminist thought, representations of gender, and popular culture. Her current research draws together the fields of feminist art history and periodical studies to examine the ways that feminist art, theory, and politics were produced, defined, and circulated by American periodical communities of the late 1970s and through the 1980s.

Joseph J. Merry is Assistant Professor of Sociology at Furman University. His research primarily investigates class‐based and racial/ethnic inequalities in education. In particular, previous work examines educational influences from three major areas: the family, schools, and the realm of academic activities that occur outside of formal schooling, such as private tutoring. He holds a BA degree from John Carroll University and MA and PhD degrees from The Ohio State University.

Maria Paino is an Assistant Professor in the department of Sociology, Anthropology, Social Work, and Criminal Justice at Oakland University. Her research focuses on inequalities and organizational processes particularly in education and clinical contexts.

Ken Plummer is Emeritus Professor of Sociology at the University of Essex and the founder editor of the journal Sexualities. His works include Sexual Stigma (1975), Telling Sexual Stories (1995), Intimate Citizenship (2003), Sociology: The Basics (2^nd ed, 2016) and Cosmopolitan Sexualities (2015). His most recent book is Narrative Power (2019).

Jason Radford is a doctoral candidate in Sociology at the University of Chicago and visiting researcher at Northeastern University. His research focuses on organizational effectiveness and computational social science. He runs the Volunteer Science research platform where he creates online experiments to study groups, networks, and organizations.

Kimberly B. Rogers is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at Dartmouth College. She received her Ph.D. from Duke University in 2013. Kimberly's research explores how macro‐social inequalities are reproduced or overturned through behavior and emotion dynamics in social interactions and small groups. Her publications examine behavioral and emotional responses to stereotyped groups and unfair reward distributions, evaluate the degree of consensus in identity sentiments within and between cultures, explore how stable interaction patterns emerge from uncertain perceptions of identities, and consider emotions as both symptoms and sources of inequality.

Christopher P. Scheitle is an Assistant Professor of Sociology at West Virginia University. His most recent book is Religion vs. Science: What Religious People Really Think (Oxford, with Elaine Howard Ecklund). In addition to his research examining religion and science, Dr. Scheitle has recently conducted research on topics such as religious discrimination and crimes against places of worship.

Russell K. Schutt, PhD is Professor of Sociology at the University of Massachusetts Boston and Research Associate in Psychiatry at the Harvard Medical School and Research Associate at the Veterans Health Administration (Edith Nourse Rogers Veterans Administration Hospital). His research focuses on the relation between the social environment and individual functioning and orientations, in the context of homelessness, mental illness, service systems, and organizational and legal processes, with recent related publications including Homelessness, Housing and Mental Illness (2011, Harvard University Press) and Investigating the Social World: The Process and Practice of Research, 9^thedition (2019, SAGE), and Social Neuroscience: Brain, Mind, and Society (2015, Harvard University Press, co‐edited with Larry J. Seidman and Matcheri S. Keshavan). He has received the Chancellor’s Distinguished Service Award at the University of Massachusetts Boston.

Alan Sica is Professor of Sociology and Founding Director of the Social Thought Program at Pennsylvania State University. He was editor‐in‐chief of two ASA journals, Sociological Theory and Contemporary Sociology, and also editor/publisher of a third journal, History of Sociology. He has taught at Amherst College, University of Kansas, University of Chicago, University of California, Penn State, and University of Pennsylvania. He has written or edited over a dozen books about social theory, and scores of articles and reviews.

Brittany C. Slatton is an Associate Professor of Sociology at Texas Southern University. She recently served as the 2017 Langston Hughes Visiting Professor at the University of Kansas. Dr. Slatton’s work focuses on critical race studies and the intersection of race, gender, class, and sexuality. You can find her publications in journals such as Socius: Sociological Research for a Dynamic World, Sociology Compass: Culture, The Journal of Sociology and Social Work, and Genders.

Christian Smith is the Wm R. Kenan, Jr. Professor of Sociology at the University of Notre Dame and Project Director of the Global Religion Research Initiative. Among his many books is Religion: What it Is, How it Works, and Why it Matters (2017, Princeton University Press).

Lynn Smith‐Lovin is Robert L. Wilson Professor of Arts and Sciences at Duke University. She has received the Cooley‐Mead Award from the ASA Section on Social Psychology, the James S. Coleman Award from the ASA section on Mathematical Sociology, and Lifetime Achievement Awards from the ASA sections on Emotions and on Altruism, Morality and Social Solidarity. Her research examines the relationships among identity, action and emotion. She has served as President of the Southern Sociological Society, Vice‐President of the American Sociological Association, and Chair of the ASA Sections on the Sociology of Emotion and on Social Psychology. This work was partially supported by the Army Research Office Grant W911NF‐15‐1‐0180 to the second author, Lynn Smith‐Lovin (subcontractor to Dawn T. Robinson, University of Georgia)

Jeffrey Stepnisky is Associate Professor and Chair of Sociology at MacEwan University in Edmonton, Alberta, Canada where he teaches courses in classical and contemporary sociological theory. With George Ritzer, he edited The Wiley‐Blackwell Companion to Major Social Theorists (2^nd edition), and has co‐authored the textbooks Classical Sociological Theory, and Modern Sociological Theory. He has published essays on self, subjectivity, and most recently, the concept of atmosphere, in places such as The Journal for the Theory of Social Behavior and Space & Culture.

Alan Tomlinson is Professor of Leisure Studies at the University of Brighton UK, specialising in sport/leisure studies and cultural studies/cultural sociology. He has authored/edited 40+ books/volumes and 150+ book chapters/articles. His research has informed many broadcasting and press outlets. Work on the Olympics and FIFA has, with John Sugden, pioneered a critical investigative sociology. Tomlinson’s latest book “scheduled for publication in 2020” studies English football cultures through the lens of the life of former FIFA president Sir Stanley Rous.

Charles F. Wellford, is Professor Emeritus at the University of Maryland, College Park. He is past President of the American Society of Criminology. He is a fellow of ASC and a Lifetime National Associate of the National Academy of Sciences. Currently, he is co‐principal investigator, with Cynthia Lum, of a large‐scale study of criminal investigations and Chair of the Research Advisory Board for the Police Executive Research Forum. His most recent paper, co‐authored with students from Maryland and the University of Chicago, addresses the topic of gun markets.

Wendy Wiedenhoft Murphy is a Professor of Sociology at John Carroll University. Her book, Consumer Culture and Society, was published in 2017. She is the co‐author with George Ritzer of Essentials of Sociology, 3^rdEdition (2018) and Introduction to Sociology 4^thEdition (2019). In addition to chapters in edited book volumes her work has appeared in Social Movement Studies, Journal of Consumer Culture, and Peace and Change. Currently, she is researching the limited, but significant and active role of low‐income consumers in American society.

Robert D. Woodberry is director of the Project on Religion and Economic Change and a senior research professor at Baylor University. Most of his research analyzes the long‐term social impact of missions and religious change on societies around the world. He also studies optimal ways to measure and sample religious groups on surveys. His research appears in the American Sociological Review, Annual Review of Sociology, American Political Science Review and elsewhere.

Vicki Yang is a PhD student in sociology and demography at Princeton University.

Richard York is a Professor of Environmental Studies and Sociology at the University of Oregon. He is Chair of the Section on Animals and Society of the American Sociological Association (ASA), and was the Chair of the Environmental Sociology Section of the ASA in 2013–14, a Member of the School of Social Science at the Institute for Advanced Study in 2013–14, and the Co‐Editor of the journal Organization & Environment from 2006 to 2012. He has received the Fredrick H. Buttel Distinguished Contribution Award (2017) for lifetime achievement, the Teaching and Mentorship Award (2011), and the Outstanding Publication Award twice (2004 and 2007) from the Environmental Sociology Section of the ASA; the Gerald L. Young Book Award in Human Ecology from the Society for Human Ecology; the Rural Sociology Best Paper Award (2011) from the Rural Sociological Society; the Distinguished Scholarship Award from the Section on Animals & Society of the ASA (2015); and the Honorable Mention for the Lewis A. Coser Award for Theoretical Agenda Setting from the Theory Section of the ASA.

Sociology is a highly diverse and ever‐changing field. As a result, different observers of the field – and its subfields – will necessarily see and emphasize somewhat different realities. In part, this is a function of the diverse orientations of the observers. It is also related to the point in time at which the observations take place. The field is continually changing at least in part because the social world is in constant flux. As a result, analyses of the state of sociology and its sub‐fields at one point in time will be different, perhaps very different, from those at another point in time. These thoughts are very relevant to a discussion of both the chapters that are carried over in revised form from the first edition of this Companion to Sociology (published in 2012) and the new chapters included in this second edition.

Many contributors to the first edition of this Companion graciously revised their chapters (several with new co‐authors) for this edition of the Companion to Sociology to better reflect recent developments in their specialty fields. They include Alan Sica, Russell Schutt, Kimberly Rogers, Lynn Smith‐Lovin, Nachman Ben‐Yehuda, Charles Wellford, Ken Plummer, Brittany Chevon Slatton, Joe Feagin, William Cockerham, Christian Smith, Robert Woodberry (Christian Scheitle was added as a co‐author to the Smith‐Woodberry essay), Kevin Fox Gotham (Arianna King was added as a co‐author to the Gotham essay), Richard York, and Riley Dunlap. New or very different entries were authored by Jeffrey Stepnisky, Nicholas Crossley, Laura Grindstaff and Ming‐Cheng M. Lo, Medora Barnes, Joseph Merry and Maria Paino, Kevin Gillan, Miguel Ceteno and Vicki Yang, Noriko Matsumoto, Chris Andrews, Mary Chayko, Michelle Meagher, Jason Radford and David Lazer, Wendy Widenhoft Murphy, Alan Tomlinson, and Robert Antonio and Alesandro Bonanno.

The revised chapters in Part I of this edition the Companion provide a thorough reexamination of the foundations – sociological theories (classical and contemporary) and research methodologies (quantitative and qualitative) – of the discipline.

Similar to the first edition, the chapters that compose Part II deal with the most basic substantive topics in sociology. They are: identity and social interaction, social networks, culture, deviance, criminology, gender and sexuality, race and ethnicity, families, education, religion, medicine and health, urban sociology, environmental sociology, social movements, armed conflict and war, immigration, sociology of consumption, social media, feminist theory, and intersectionality. These are the topics typically covered in introduction to sociology texts and courses, but here they are dealt with in a more sophisticated and advanced manner. The chapters are written for professional sociologists and graduate students rather than undergraduates. While several chapters in Part II cover the same topics (e.g. family, culture, education, social movements, war) as those in the previous edition, many of the authors are different and the discussions, in most cases, differ enormously. This is due to differences in the orientations of the authors involved and a result of the passage of almost a decade from the publication of the first edition of this Companion and the production in the interim of a great deal of new work on those topics.

Several topics mentioned above have been included in Part II of this volume because they became more firmly established in the discipline after the publication of the last edition of this volume. In addition, several topics from the previous volume are now included as new chapters in Part II. They include consumption, social media, and war, because those topics are no longer at the margins of sociology. In the past several years, sociologists, especially in the United States, have devoted more attention to consumption (the Sociology of Consumers and Consumption became an official section of the American Sociological Association in 2013). We have also witnessed the proliferation of social media platforms and other user‐generated websites since this topic was deemed “hot” in the last edition of this volume. Many sociologists are studying social media not only as a means of communication but for understanding these social networking sites and the internet more generally as “living” research laboratories where they can collect data via observation and participation. Like consumption and social media, the sociology of war has also become a more popular topic in recent years due, in part, to the fact that the United States has been at war in Afghanistan since 2001, as well as ongoing wars in Yemen and elsewhere. The refugee crisis in the European Union, stemming in large part from the Syrian civil war and other armed conflicts, has further motivated sociologists to examine the causes and consequences of war.

Other new topics included in Part II, such as social networks, feminist theory, and immigration, have also become increasingly important since the last edition. While the study of social networks was already a cutting‐edge topic a decade ago, today social networks are even more heavily researched, discussed in introductory textbooks, and readily recognized as important aspects of social interactions and relationships. Feminist theory has also increasingly become ensconced in sociology and will continue to inform the discipline given, among other things, the increasing awareness of the effects of sexism, patriarchy, and the power of the #metoo movement. The current backlash against immigration in the United States and several European countries is partially responsible for the rise of populism that they are now experiencing.

Part III showcases topics that are beginning to capture the attention of an increasing number of sociologists: debt, sports, big data, and capitalism in the era of Donald Trump's presidency and Brexit. Taking the lead from anthropologists, the sociology of debt (and its ancillary, credit) aims to establish the social significance of personal and public debt in relation power and inequality. The global popularity of sports and the growing number of academic sports studies departments have helped sociologists who study sports to underscore the importance of this social phenomenon to the field and in everyday life. Fandom, race, gender, and the commodification of leisure are just a few issues emphasized by the sociology of sports. Big data also takes into account variables like race and gender, building these social categories and others into aglorithms that attempt to better understand and predict social behavior. These algorithms are also used by practitioners to determine our preferences and ultimately affect our decisions. Technology and social media make it nearly impossible to escape the reach of big data today. This threatens our privacy, autonomy, and to some critics, democracy. In addition to technology the growth of populism in the West has many concerned about the durability of democracy. The election of right‐wing populists in Brazil, Italy, Poland, and Hungary (to name just a few), the increasing presence of alt‐right activists (e.g. in the United States and Germany), and the growth of protectionist economic policies have left some sociologists wondering if we can resist the political and economic authoritarianism associated with capitalism today.

Sociology, like the social world, is continually changing. This edition seeks to keep pace with these changes while retaining a focus on the essential core of the discipline.