Jonathan H. Turner is Distinguished Professor of Sociology. He is known primarily as a general theorist, although he has a number of more substantive specialties, including: the sociology of emotions, ethnic relations, social institutions, social stratification, and bio-sociology. He has been Faculty Research Lecturer at UCR, and in the profession, he has been president of the Pacific Sociological Association and California Sociological Association. He is also a Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science.

Steven Brint is Director of the National Science Foundation-supported Colleges and Universities 2000 study and an authority on comparative education, American higher education, the sociology of professions, and middle-class politics. He is the author of four books: The Diverted Dream (Oxford University Press, 1989), In an Age of Experts (Princeton University Press, 1994), and Schools and Societies (Pine Forge/Sage, 1998) and The Future of the City of Intellect: The Changing American University (Stanford University Press, 2002). His work on education, the professions and middle-class politics has appeared in the American Journal of Sociology, Work and Occupations, Sociological Theory, Sociology of Education, and in volumes edited by such scholars as William Julius Wilson, Morris Fiorina, Theda Skocpol, and Terry Nichols Clark.

Peter J. Burke has interests in micro-processes involving self and identity, agency, and interaction. One of the originators of Identity Theory, his research draws on Complexity Theory, Artificial Intelligence, and Computer Simulation to understand (1) how individuals, acting as agents with particular identities, come together in interaction to create larger aggregates, groups, organizations and societies, and (2) how these social structures constrain and limit the kinds of actions that individuals can take.

Robert Hanneman is the author of books on welfare state development, centralization in the structure of social service delivery systems, medical care system performance, dynamic models of sociological theories, and social network analysis methods. He has done work in military and economic sociology, and is currently examining the evolution of organizational populations and the evolution of cooperation in the United States salt industry from 1800 to 2000. His research areas include computational modeling (simulation) for theory construction, economic sociology, social networks, political and military sociology.

Raymond Russell focuses on how workers can participate in the ownership and control of their workplaces. His book Sharing Ownership in the Workplace (1985) examined forms of employee ownership in the United States, while Utopia in Zion (1995) surveyed the history of worker cooperatives in Israel. Since 1996, Russell has been investigating the relationship between work and ownership in the contemporary Russian economy.