Overview

This innovative text focuses on an American icon, central to United States culture, that is rapidly becoming a global expression of prosperity - the credit card. George Ritzer explains what the credit card tells us, both good and bad, about the essence of the modern US and why and how the credit card is helping to transform much of the world. Drawing on the insights of both classic and contemporary social thinkers, including Georg Simmel, C Wright Mills, Karl Marx and Max Weber, as well as micro-macro, agency-structure and Americanization theories, Ritzer also reveals to students the powerful insights gained from using the sociological `imagination' applied to a topic that students know about and are interested in.

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9780803990449

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George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland, where he has also been a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher and won a Teaching Excellence Award. He was awarded the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association, an honorary doctorate from LaTrobe University in Australia, and the Robin Williams Lectureship from the Eastern Sociological Society. His best-known work, The McDonaldization of Society (8th ed.), has been read by hundreds of thousands of students over two decades and translated into over a dozen languages. Ritzer is also the editor of McDonaldization: The Reader; and author of other works of critical sociology related to the McDonaldization thesis, including Enchanting a Disenchanted World, The Globalization of Nothing, Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society, as well as a series best-selling social theory textbooks and Globalization: A Basic Text. He is the Editor of the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2 vols.), the Encyclopedia of Sociology (11 vols.; 2nd edition forthcoming), the Encyclopedia of Globalization (5 vols.), and is Founding Editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture. In 2016 he will publish the second edition of Essentials of Sociology with SAGE.

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