George Ritzer is Distinguished University Professor at the University of Maryland. He was awarded the 2000 Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award by the American Sociological Association and he has authored more than 25 books including several student textbooks. He has been a major contributor to the literature on globalization, especially in The McDonaldization of Society (4 editions, last in 2004), Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society (1995) and most recently (2004), The Globalization of Nothing (2nd edition to be published in 2007 as The Globalization of Nothing 2). He is editor of The Blackwell Encyclopedia of Sociology (2007).