David L. Andrews is an Associate Professor of Sport Commerce and Culture in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Maryland at College Park, USA, and an affiliate faculty member of the Departments of American Studies and Sociology. He is assistant editor of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, and an editorial board member of the Sociology of Sport Journal, Leisure Studies, and Quest. He has published on a variety of topics related to the critical analysis of sport as an aspect of contemporary commercial culture. His recent publications include Sport–Commerce–Culture: Essays on Sport in Late Capitalist America (2006), Sport, Culture, and Advertising: Identities, Commodities, and the Politics of Representation (with S.J. Jackson, 2005), Sport and Corporate Nationalisms (with M.L. Silk and C.L. Cole, 2005), and Manchester United: A Thematic Study (2004). He has also guest edited special issues of the Journal of Sport and Social Issues, the Sociology of Sport Journal, Cultural Studies–Critical Methodologies and South Atlantic Quarterly.

Robert J. Antonio teaches sociology at the University of Kansas, USA. He is the editor of Marx and Modernity: Key Readings and Commentary (Blackwell, 2003). He has written widely on classical, contemporary and critical theory. He also has done work on various facets of globalization, frequently collaborating on that topic with Alessandro Bonanno.

Salvatore Babones is Assistant Professor of Sociology at the University of Pittsburgh, USA, with secondary appointments in Pitt’s Graduate Schools of Public Health and Public and International Affairs. He is co-editor with Christopher Chase-Dunn of the forthcoming volume Global Social Change: Historical and Comparative Perspectives. His research focuses on the causes and consequences of social stratification in broad cross-national perspective. He is currently studying the relationship between economic globalization and domestic income inequality at the country level.

Ulrich Beck is Professor for Sociology at the University of Munich, Germany; British Journal of Sociology Visiting Centennial Professor of the London School of Economics and Political Science, UK; and director of a research centre ‘Reflexive Modernization’ (Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft). His numerous books include Risk Society (1992) and Power in the Global Age (2005).

Peter Beyer is Professor of Religious Studies in the Department of Classics and Religious Studies at the University of Ottawa, Canada. His publications include Religion and Globalization (1994), Religion in the Process of Globalization (2001), Religions in Global Society (2006) and numerous articles in diverse journals and collected volumes. His current research focuses on religion among second generation Hindu, Muslim and Buddhist youth in Canada.

Tim Blackman is Professor of Sociology and Social Policy at Durham University, UK and Head of the University’s School of Applied Social Sciences. He is an adviser to the UK Office of the Deputy Prime Minister on neighbourhood renewal. Among his publications are books on urban planning, urban policy, comparative social policy and health inequalities. He is currently working on a major project looking at the role of performance management in public health across England, Wales and Scotland. His previous posts include Dean of the School of Social Sciences and Law at Teesside University and Director of the Oxford Dementia Centre.

John Boli is Professor of Sociology at Emory University, USA. A native Californian and Stanford graduate, he studies world culture, global organizations, education, citizenship, and state power and authority. Recent books include World Culture: Origins and Consequences (with Frank Lechner; Blackwell, 2005) and Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (with George Thomas; 1999).

Melissa L. Caldwell is Assistant Professor of Anthropology at the University of California, Santa Cruz, USA. She is the author of Not by Bread Alone: Social Support in the New Russia (2004), and co-editor with James L. Watson of The Cultural Politics of Food and Eating (Blackwell, 2005). Her research on food, globalization and post-socialism in Russia has been published in journals such as The Journal of Consumer Culture and Ethnos. She is currently writing a book on summer gardens and personal agriculture in Russia.

Chris Carter is Reader in Management at the University of St Andrews, UK. He also holds a Visiting Appointment with the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He travels globally quite a lot, especially in the Scottish winter.

Stewart Clegg is Professor of Management at the University of Technology, Sydney, Australia. He also holds appointments at the University of Aston Business School, Maastricht University and the Vrije Universiteit, Amsterdam, the Netherlands. He travels globally a great deal.

Gerard Delanty is Professor of Sociology at the University of Liverpool, UK. His most recent publications include Community (2003) and (with Chris Rumford) Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (2005). He has edited the Handbook of Contemporary European Social Theory (2005), and (with Krishan Kumar) Handbook of Nations and Nationalism (2006).

Nicholas C. DelSordi is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Sociology at Arizona State University, USA. He is currently working on a dissertation that analyzes the ethnic, cultural and structural integration of Mexican Americans in the United States and migrant groups in Europe from a global comparative/historical perspective. His general research covers issues of immigration, ethnicity and globalization, and how class polarization is implicated with broader global processes. He is also conducting research on the political participation and modes of incorporation among recent immigrants in the south-west.

Peter Dicken is Emeritus Professor of Geography in the School of Environment and Development at the University of Manchester, UK. He has held visiting academic appointments at universities and research institutes in Australia, Canada, China, Hong Kong, Mexico, Singapore, Sweden and the United States and lectured in many other countries throughout Europe and Asia. He is an Academician of the Social Sciences, a recipient of the Victoria Medal of the Royal Geographical Society (with the Institute of British Geographers) and of an Honorary Doctorate of the University of Uppsala, Sweden. He has served as a consultant to UNCTAD and to the Commission on Global Governance as well as to private organizations. He is recognized as a world authority on the geography of economic globalization through his extensive contributions to leading international journals and books and, especially, through his internationally acclaimed book, Global Shift: Reshaping the Global Economic Map in the 21st Century (4th edn, 2003).

Kathryn Farr is Professor Emerita in the Department of Sociology at Portland State University, USA and the author of Sex Trafficking: The Global Market in Women and Children (2005). Her research interests are in transnational experiences of women with violence and feminist understandings of gender-based violence.

Glenn Firebaugh is Liberal Arts Research Professor of Sociology and Demography at Pennsylvania State University, USA and former editor of the American Sociological Review (1997–9). During the 2004–5 academic year he was a Visiting Scholar in the Sociology Department at Harvard University. Recent books include The New Geography of Global Income Inequality (2003) and Seven Rules for More Effective Social Science Research (forthcoming).

Brian Goesling is a post-doctoral fellow in the Population Research Center at the University of Michigan, USA. He received his PhD from Pennsylvania State University in 2003 and was a Robert Wood Johnson Foundation Fellow at Michigan from 2003 to 2005. In addition to global inequality, his research interests include the study of health disparities in the United States.

Douglas J. Goodman is an Assistant Professor at the University of Puget Sound, USA. He has published on consumer culture including Consumer Culture: A Handbook (ABC-CLIO, 2003) and ‘Consumption as a Social Problem’, in The International Handbook of Social Problems (2004); sociological theory including three texts with George Ritzer, Sociological Theory (2003), Classical Sociological Theory (2004) and Modern Sociological Theory (2004); and law and society including ‘Defending Liberal Education From the Law’, (with Susan Silbey) in Law in the Liberal Arts (2004). His current work focuses on the nexus between law and popular culture and he has a forthcoming article, ‘Approaches to Popular Culture and Law’, in Law and Social Inquiry.

Andrew D. Grainger is a doctoral candidate in the Department of Kinesiology, University of Maryland, College Park. His research examines sport’s role in the construction and negotiation of identities – both ‘local’ and ‘global’ – within, and between, Polynesia and the broader Pacific. Of particular interest is how the notion of diaspora may be employed as a means of understanding the lives, travels and migration of Pacific peoples, and Polynesian athletes in particular, throughout the Pacific and beyond.

Subhrajit Guhathakurta is an Associate Professor with appointments in the School of Planning and the International Institute for Sustainability at Arizona State University, USA. His research interests include land and regional economics, small industries in developing countries, housing policies, land use and environmental planning. His publications appear in journals such as World Development, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Urban Affairs Review, Berkeley Planning Journal, Mortgage Banking and the Journal of Planning Education and Research. He has held visiting appointments at the Center for Urban Spatial Analysis at University College London, and at the Center for Sustainable Urban and Regional Futures at the University of Queensland in Brisbane.

Farnoosh Hashemian is a Research Associate in the Department of Global Health at the Yale University School of Public Health, USA. Her research focus is on the nexus of global health policy and universal access to quality healthcare. She has worked extensively on health and human rights issues in the Middle East. Farnoosh Hashemian has compiled a two-volume Farsi book entitled The Trial and Diary of Abbass Amir Entezam, Iran’s deputy Prime Minister in 1979 and the longest-held prisoner of conscience in the Middle East. Published in the spring of 2001, the book has sold over 21,000 copies and stirred much political debate in Iran. Most recently, she was the recipient of a Yale’s Deans Award for Outstanding MPH thesis.

David Jacobson is the founding director of the School of Global Studies at Arizona State University, USA. His research and teaching is in politics from a global and legal perspective, with a particular focus on international and regional institutions, international law and human rights issues, and he works extensively in the area of immigration and citizenship. His books include Rights Across Borders: Immigration and the Decline of Citizenship (1996), Place and Belonging in America (2002) and editor of The Immigration Reader: America in Multidisciplinary Perspective (Blackwell, 1998).

Richard Kahn is a doctoral candidate at the UCLA Graduate School of Education, USA and is the co-editor of the recent book Theory, Facts, and Interpretation in Educational and Social Research (2004).

Douglas Kellner is George Kneller Chair in the Philosophy of Education at University of California Los Angeles, USA and is author of many books on social theory, politics, history and culture, including Critical Theory, Marxism, and Modernity (1989); Jean Baudrillard: From Marxism to Postmodernism and Beyond (1990); works in cultural studies such as Media Culture and Media Spectacle; a trilogy of books on postmodern theory with Steve Best; a trilogy of books on the Bush administration, including Grand Theft 2000 (2001); and his latest book Media Spectacle and the Crisis of Democracy (2005). His website is at http://www.gseis.ucla.edu/faculty/kellner/kellner.html.

Roberto Patricio Korzeniewicz is Associate Professor of Sociology at the University of Maryland, USA and Professor Titular at the Escuela de Política y Gobierno of the Universidad Nacional de San Martín, Argentina. He co-edited (with William Smith) Latin America in the World-Economy (1996), and Politics, Social Change, and Economic Restructuring in Latin America (1997). His articles have appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Comparative Studies in Society and History, Desarrollo Económico, Economic Development and Cultural Change, Hispanic American Historical Review, Latin American Research Review and Revista Mexicana de Sociología. His current research focuses on global income inequality and on social movements in Latin America.

Craig Lair is a doctoral candidate at the University of Maryland, USA. Craig attended Arizona State University where he received the John D. Hudson Memorial Award for the Outstanding Graduate in Sociology. Craig’s general interests include social theory, the sociology of work and the social processes of individualization. He is currently working on a project with George Ritzer on the sociology of outsourcing. His dissertation will concentrate on the outsourcing of intimate matters. Craig has co-authored a number of pieces for edited volumes dealing with such topics as the labour process of computer programming firms and the relevance of the McDonaldization thesis to service work. He has also published work on the relationship between communication technology and social relationships.

Eriberto P. Lozada Jr is Assistant Professor of Anthropology and Director of Asian Studies at Davidson College in North Carolina, USA and the author of God Aboveground: Catholic Church, Postsocialist State, and Transnational Processes in a Chinese Village (2002). He has also published articles on his research on globalization and its impact on food and popular culture, various issues in science and religion, and is currently exploring the relationship between sports and civil society in China and the United States.

Xiulian Ma is a doctoral student in sociology at the University of Utah, USA. She earned a Master’s degree in Mass Communications and Journalism at Remin University of China in 2000. She is also a journalist, having worked for China’s The Economic Daily from 2000 to 2002, winning the China News Award (‘Zhongguo Xinwenjiang’) in 2002, for her coverage of rural communities’ poverty and related policy issues in Yan’an.

Anthony McGrew is Professor of International Relations at the University of Southampton, UK and Head of the School of Social Sciences. He has held Visiting Professorships at Ritsumeikan University, Kyoto; Trinity College, Dublin; the Australian National University, Canberra; and the Centre for Global Governance, London School of Economics. Research interests embrace globalization, global governance (with particular reference to issues of accountability and democracy) and international relations theory. Recent publications include: (ed.) The Transformation of Democracy? Democracy Beyond Borders (1997); Global Transformations (with D. Held; 1999); The Global Transformations Reader (ed. with D. Held; 2003); (ed.) Empire: The United States in the Twentieth Century (2000); Globalization/Anti-Globalization (ed. with D. Held; 2002); Governing the Global Polity: From Government to Global Governance (2002); Understanding Globalization (ed. with D. Held; 2006); and Globalization, Human Security and Development (ed. with N. Poku; 2006).

Philip McMichael is an International Professor of Development Sociology at Cornell University, USA. His research focuses on food regime analysis, global development and transnational social movements. Recently he has authored Development and Social Change: A Global Perspective (2004), and co-edited New Directions in the Sociology of Global Development (2005).

Peter Manicas is currently Director of Interdisciplinary Studies at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. He has published many books and articles, including A History and Philosophy of the Social Sciences (Blackwell, 1987), War and Democracy (Blackwell, 1989) and most recently A Realist Philosophy of the Social Sciences: Explanation and Understanding (2006).

Gus Martin is Assistant Vice President for Faculty Affairs at California State University, Dominguez Hills, USA. He is former Chair of the Department of Public Administration and Public Policy, where he also coordinated and taught in the Criminal Justice Administration programme. His research and teaching interests are terrorism and extremism, criminal justice administration and juvenile justice process. Dr Martin was educated at the University of Pittsburgh’s Graduate School of Public and International Affairs, Duquesne University Law School and Harvard College.

Timothy Patrick Moran is Assistant Professor of Sociology and Faculty Director of the International Studies Undergraduate Program at Stony Brook University, SUNY, USA. His research and writing is currently focused on subjects related to global inequality in its various dimensions and forms. He also writes on issues related to the historical application of quantitative methods in the social sciences, specifically focusing on global measurement and comparative statistical techniques. His research has been supported by the Universidad Nacional de General San Martín, Argentina, and the Luxembourg Income Study Project.

Velina Petrova is a PhD candidate and Woodruff Fellow in the Department of Sociology at Emory University, USA. Her research interests include development, globalization and comparative democratization. She is currently constructing a system-level analysis of foreign aid for development covering all DAC donor countries since the Marshall Plan.

Clayton Pierce is a doctoral student in Education at the University of California Los Angeles, USA, with a specialization in philosophy and history of education. He is co-author of multiple encyclopaedia articles with Douglas Kellner including one for Blackwell’s Encyclopedia of Sociology on media and consumer culture.

George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He was awarded the 2000 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association and he has authored many refereed articles and more than 25 books, including monographs, reference works, and textbooks. He has been a major contributor to the literature on globalization as an author and editor, especially The Wiley-Blackwell Encyclopedia of Globalization (5 vols., 2012); Globalization: A Basic Text (2nd edn., 2015 with Paul Dean), The McDonaldization of Society (8 editions, last in 2015), Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (1995) and The Globalization of Nothing (2nd edn., 2007). He is editor of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (11 vols., 2007; 2nd edn. forthcoming).

Roland Robertson is Professor of Sociology and Global Society at the University of Aberdeen, Scotland and Distinguished Service Professor Emeritus of Sociology, University of Pittsburgh. He is the author, co-author, editor or co-editor of many published items, including Globalization: Basic Concepts in Sociology (6 vols, 2003) and The Encyclopedia of Globalization (4 vols, 2006). His current interests are primarily in glocalization, cosmopolitanism and global millennialism.

William I. Robinson is Professor of Sociology, Global and International Studies and Latin American and Iberian Studies at the University of California-Santa Barbara, USA. His most recent books are A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class and State in a Transnational World (2004) and Transnational Conflicts: Central America, Social Change, and Globalization (2003). Pine Forge Press will publish his new manuscript, Theories of Globalization, in 2007.

Chris Rumford is Senior Lecturer in Political Sociology at Royal Holloway, University of London, UK. His most recent publications include (with Gerard Delanty) Rethinking Europe: Social Theory and the Implications of Europeanization (Routledge, 2005), and The European Union: A Political Sociology (Blackwell, 2002). He is currently editing the Handbook of European Studies, and completing a new book entitled Cosmopolitan Spaces: Europe, Globalization, Theory.

Gerald Schneider is, since 1997, Professor of Political Science at the University of Konstanz, Germany, where he holds the International Relations Chair. He is also Executive Editor of European Union Politics and has authored or co-authored around 100 scholarly articles. His main areas of research are decision-making in the European Union as well as the economic causes and consequences of armed conflict. Recent publications have appeared in European Journal of International Relations, European Journal of Political Research, Journal of Conflict Resolution, Political Studies and Rationality and Society.

Manfred B. Steger is Professor of Global Studies and Head of School of International and Community Studies at RMIT University, Australia. He is also a Senior Research Fellow at the Globalization Research Center at the University of Hawai’i at Manoa. His academic fields of expertise include global studies, political and social theory, international politics and theories of non-violence. His most recent publications include Globalism: Market Ideology Meets Terrorism (2nd edn., 2005); Judging Nonviolence: The Dispute Between Realists and Idealists (2003); Globalization (2003); Gandhi’s Dilemma: Nonviolent Principles and Nationalist Power (2000); and The Quest for Evolutionary Socialism: Eduard Bernstein and Social Democracy (1996). He is currently working on a book manuscript titled Ideology in the Global Age: Transforming the National Imaginary.

George M. Thomas holds a PhD in Sociology from Stanford University and is Professor of Global Studies at Arizona State University, USA. His research and teaching focus on world cultural processes and their constitutive effects on authority and identity. He has a long-term research programme on how religious groups engage global rationalism. He is co-editor with John Boli of Constructing World Culture: International Nongovernmental Organizations since 1875 (1999).

Michael Timberlake is Professor of Sociology and Department Chair at the University of Utah, USA. His research has contributed to developing scholarship on cities and urbanization that takes into account social, economic, cultural and political processes operating across national borders, at the world level. He is currently involved in studying global networks of cities through research partly supported by the National Science Foundation.

John Tomlinson is Professor of Cultural Sociology and Director of the Institute for Cultural Analysis, Nottingham (ICAn) at Nottingham Trent University, UK. His many publications on the themes of globalization, cosmopolitanism, cultural modernity and mediated cultural experience include Cultural Imperialism (Continuum, 1991) and Globalization and Culture (Polity Press, 1999). He is currently writing a book on the relationship between speed and cultural modernity.

Howard Tumber is Professor of Sociology at City University London, UK and founder and co-editor of the journal Journalism. He is author of several books, including Reporting Crime: The Media Politics of Criminal Justice (with Philip Schlesinger; 1994), News: A Reader (1999) and Media at War (with Jerry Palmer; 2004). Tumber and Webster published Journalism under Fire: Information War and Journalistic Practices in 2006.

Bryan S. Turner was Professor of Sociology at the University of Cambridge, UK (1998–2005) and is currently Professor of Sociology in the Asia Research Institute, National University of Singapore. He is the research leader of the cluster on globalization and religion, and is currently writing a three-volume study of the sociology of religion and editing the Dictionary of Sociology for Cambridge University Press. A book on human rights and vulnerability is to be published in 2006 by Penn State University Press. Professor Turner is a research associate of GEMAS (Centre National de la Recherche Scientifique, Paris), a professorial Research Associate of SOAS, University of London, and an honorary professor of Deakin University, Australia. Professor Turner’s recent publications include Classical Sociology (1999) and The New Medical Sociology (2004). With Chris Rojek, he published Society and Culture: Principles of Scarcity and Solidarity (2001) and with Engin Isin he edited the Handbook of Citizenship Studies (2002).

Carolyn Warner is Associate Professor in the School of Global Studies and Affiliated Faculty in the Department of Political Science at Arizona State University, USA, and a research fellow with the Center on Democracy, Development and the Rule of Law at Stanford University. Her book, Corruption in the European Union, is forthcoming with Cornell University Press, and her works on patronage and fraud have appeared in Party Politics, The Independent Review and Clientelism, Interests, and Democratic Representation (edited by Simona Piattoni; 2001). Her major work on rent seeking by a religious organization is Confessions of an Interest Group: The Catholic Church and Political Parties in Post-War Europe (2000).

Frank Webster is Professor of Sociology at City University London, UK. He has written many books, including The Virtual University? Knowledge, Markets and Managements (with Kevin Robins; 2002), Theories of the Information Society (Routledge, 2002), The Intensification of Surveillance (with Kirstie Ball; 2003) and The Information Society Reader (2004).

Kathleen E. White is an educational researcher and consultant in global education. She has been a pioneer in global and international education in the United States and has authored, co-authored and edited numerous items in this and the general field of globalization. She has co-edited Globalization: Critical Concepts in Sociology (6 vols., 2003).

Derek Yach is currently a Professor of Public Health and head of the Division of Global Health at the Yale University School of Public Health, USA. He joined Yale after a long career with the World Health Organization where he was responsible for developing a new ‘Health for All’ Policy, which was adopted by all governments at the May 1998 World Health Assembly. He established the Tobacco Free Initiative and ensured that the Framework Convention for Tobacco Control (WHO’s first treaty) was accepted by all governments, and also placed chronic diseases and injuries higher on the global health agenda. Derek Yach has studied and written extensively about the breadth and depth of health issues as well as the challenges of globalization for health and the new era of global health governance.

Steve Yearley is Professor of the Sociology of Scientific Knowledge and Senior Professorial Fellow of the ESRC Genomics Policy and Research Forum at the University of Edinburgh in Scotland. He specializes in environmental sociology and the sociology of science and, in particular, in areas where these fields overlap. His recent books include Cultures of Environmentalism (2005), Making Sense of Science (2005) and (with Steve Bruce) The SAGE Dictionary of Sociology (2006).