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 focuses 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 what 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?