Sociology emerged in the wake of the major transformations wrought by the Industrial Revolution of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries, which disrupted the previous type of social order and changed the human world forever. But social change did not simply stop in the nineteenth century. Indeed, many sociologists have argued that, since the 1970s, the pace of social change has actually speeded up and with it, some key organizing structures of industrial culture, such as social class, the traditional family and manufacturing industry, have lost their hold over individual lives (...) It is also clear that, as industrialization and its impact have now spread to almost every region of the globe, sociologists need to adopt a global focus in their studies (p. ix).

• Asking and Answering Sociological Questions
• Theories and Perspectives
• Globalization and Social Change
• The Environment
• Cities and Urban Life
• Work and the Economy
• Stratification and Social Class
• Poverty, Social Exclusion and Welfare
• Race, Ethnicity and Migration
• The Media
• Organizations and Networks
• Crime and Deviance
• Nations, War and Terrorism

As a growing number of unskilled and agricultural workers migrate to urban centres, the formal economy struggles to absorb the influx into the workforce. In most cities in the developing world, it is the informal economy which enables those who cannot find formal work to survive. From casual work in manufacturing and construction to small-scale trading activities, the unregulated informal sector offers opportunities to poor and unskilled workers (...)

The OECD (...) estimates that a billion new jobs will be needed by 2025 to sustain the expected population growth in cities in the developing world. It is unlikely that all these jobs will be created within the formal economy, and some development analysts argue that attention should be paid to formalizing or regulating the large informal economy, where much of the 'excess' workfoce is likely to cluster in the future (p. 231)

(...) Zygmunt Bauman (2003; viii) argues that, today, relationships are 'the hottest talk of the town and ostensibly the sole game worth playing, despite their notorious risks'. His book Liquid Love is about the 'frailty of human bonds', the feeling of insecurity to which this frailty leads, and our responses to it. Bauman writes that the hero of his book is 'the man or woman without bonds' (of family, class, religion or marrige) or at least without any fixed, unbreakable ties.

The ties that Bauman's hero does have are loosely knotted, so they can be released again with little delay if circumstances change. And for Bauman, the circumstances will change, and often. He uses the 'liquid' metaphor to describe modern society, which he sees as characterized by constant change and a lack of lasting bonds (p. 426).

This is partly why (...) we are always talking on mobile phones, sending text mesages to one another and even typing them in truncated sentences to increase the speed at which we can send them. It is not the message itself that is important, but the constant circulation of messages, without which we can feel excluded. Bauman notes that people now speak more of connections and networks and less of relationships. To be in a relationship means to be mutually engaged, but networks suggest fleeting moments of being in touch (p. 426).

• Anthony Giddens er tidligere rektor for the London School of Economics and Political Science og er nu medlem af Overhuset i det britiske parlament. Som sociolog og socialteoretiker har han skrevet mange bøger, bl.a. The Third Way og The Consequences of Modernity.
  
  
• Philip W. Sutton er en uafhængig forsker, som tidligere var knyttet til the University of Leeds og Robert Gordon University i Aberdeen, Skotland.