Richard Appelbaum is Professor of Sociology and Global and International Studies at the University of California at Santa Barbara. He currently serves as Co-Director of the Center for Global Studies and is on the Executive Committee for the UCSB Center for Nanotechnology in Society. He previously served as Director of the Institute for Social, Behavioral, and Economic Research, chair of the Sociology Department, and was founder of the UCSB Global & International Studies Program.
He received his B.A. from Columbia University, M.P.A. from Princeton University's Woodrow Wilson School of Public and International Affairs, and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago.
He has been a Simon Visiting Professor at the Department of Sociology, University of Manchester, England, and an Honorary Visiting Professor in the Sociology Department at the University of Hong Kong.
He has received numerous awards and commendations for excellence in teaching, including the UCSB Academic Senate Distinguished Teaching Award in the Social Sciences. He has served as an elected Council Member of the Political Economy of the World-System Section of the American Sociological Association, as well as its President. He is on the Board of Consulting Editors of the Encyclopedia of Housing. He served as a faculty representative to the University of California Advisory Committee on Trademark Licensing, and currently serves on the Advisory Council to the Workers' Rights Consortium.
He has published extensively in the areas of social theory, urban sociology, public policy, the globalization of business, and the sociology of work and labor. In addition to numerous scholarly papers, he has published policy-related and opinion pieces in the Los Angeles Times and The American Prospect. His recent books include States and Economic Development in the Asian Pacific Rim (with Jeffrey Henderson; Sage, 1992); Behind the Label: Inequality in the Los Angeles Garment Industry (with Edna Bonacich; University of California Press, 2000); Rules and Networks: The Legal Culture of Global Business Transactions (co-edited with William L.F. Felstiner and Volkmar Gessner; Oxford, England: Hart, 2001), a collection that examines the legal frameworks that are emerging to regulate transnational businesses; and Sociology, 5th edition (with Anthony Giddens and Mitchell Duneier; W.W. Norton, 2003), an introductory textbook which emphasizes the importance of economic, political, institutional, and cultural globalization on American life. His most recent book is Towards a Critical Globalization Studies (co-edited with William I. Robinson, Routledge, 2005). He is also the author of the report of the Los Angeles Jewish Commission on Sweatshops, for which he served as a founding member. He is a founding editor (and currently emeritus editor) of Competition and Change: The Journal of Global Business and Political Economy. He is currently engaged in a multi-disciplinary study of supply chain networks in the Asian-Pacific Rim.
For more information see
Professor Appelbaum's Sociology department webpage.
