Essentials of Sociology Second Edition Anthony Giddens, Mitchell Duneier, Richard P. Appelbaum, Deborah Carr From the Preface The book is constructed around a number of themes, each of which helps to give the work a distinctive character. The newest theme is Public Sociology, reflected in a series of boxes inspired by the 2004 annual meeting of the American Sociological Association. […] The book features twenty boxes that profile sociologists engaged in Public Sociology in diverse arenas. […] A second theme of the book is that of the world in change […] Sociology was born of the transformations that wrenched the industrializing social order of the West away from the ways of life characteristic of earlier societies. […] The pace of social change has continued to accelerate, and it is possible that we stand on the threshold of transitions as significant as those that occurred in the late eighteenth and nineteenth centuries. Sociology has prime responsibility for charting the transformations of the past and for grasping the major lines of development taking place today. Another fundamental theme of this book is the globalizing of social life.[…] The book also focuses on the importance of Comparative study. Sociology cannot be taught solely by understanding the institutions of any one particular society. […] A fifth theme is the necessity of taking a historical approach to sociology. […] Throughout the text, particular attention is given to issues of gender […] A seventh theme is the micro and macro link […] We emphasize that one can better understand a social situation by analyzing it at both the micro and macro levels… The final major theme is the relation between the social and the personal […]