This best-selling text offers an integrated social science view of the world, emphasizing that social change is a pervasive reality of our era. One of the main themes of Contemporary Society is that the transition from an industrial to a post-industrial order in the modern world is fraught with difficulties, as was the transition from an agricultural to an industrial order in an earlier human era. This text draws upon sociology, political science, economics, anthropology, geography, history, psychology, and their related disciplines to give students an integrated overview of the social sciences.