Discover Sociology

NEW TO THIS EDITION:

• The new edition is available as a digital option through SAGE Vantage, an intuitive digital platform that offers auto-graded assignments and interactive multimedia tools—including video—all designed to enable students to better prepare for class. Learn more.
• New co-author Susan L. Wortmann brings her expertise as an instructor and scholar of sociological theory, gender, and religion.
• The text discusses and analyzes many sociologically significant events of 2020, like the economic and social costs of COVID-19, mass demonstrations in response to police brutality, and the crisis of democratic institutions in the U.S.
  
• A new chapter-ending feature, “What’s Next?”, considers many of the dramatic events of 2020 and invites students to consider how they might shape society for years to come.
• Twelve new career profiles (“What Can I Do With a Sociology Degree”) show the diversity of skills and job opportunities available to sociology students.
• An increased focus on intersectionality across all chapters expands our understanding of how “Inequality Matters.”
• The Race and Gender chapters have been reworked to expand the discussion of sexuality and the LGBTQ+ community.
• The social movements and social change chapter has been revamped to encourage students to think critically about the environmental movement and illustrates the concepts with real cases of social movements.

• Eye-catching and compelling chapter openers and What Do You Think? questions draw students into the sociological mindset with timely and engaging material designed to ignite lively classroom discussion.
• Inequality Matters boxes examine a core concern in sociology—power—and offer students a critical perspective on how power is distributed, reproduced, and exercised in society.
• Private Lives, Public Issues boxes illustrate the relationship between individual lives and the social forces that shape them.
• Behind the Numbers boxes help students become critical consumers of information by prompting them to examine the sources of and assumptions around data that stream into their lives.
• Global Society boxes help students to develop a fuller understanding of their lives, communities, and country in an interconnected, interdependent, and multicultural international environment—and to see how other countries around the world are experiencing societal changes and challenges.
• What Can I Do With a Sociology Degree? features recent graduates who links the skills they acquired as majors to specific occupational fields and job titles.