Dr. George Ritzer is a Distinguished University Professor and a Distinguished Scholar-Teacher at the University of Maryland, where he has also received a Teaching Excellence Award. The American Sociological Association honoured him with the Distinguished Contributions to Teaching Award, an honorary doctorate from LaTrobe University in Australia, and the Robin Williams Lectureship from the Eastern Sociological Society.

Over the course of two decades, his most well-known work, The McDonaldization of Society, has been read by hundreds of thousands of college students and translated into more than a dozen languages. Ritzer is also the editor of McDonaldization: The Reader and the author of a number of critical sociology books, including Enchanting a Disenchanted World, Expressing America: A Critique of the Global Credit Card Society, The Globalization of Nothing, as well as a number of best-selling social theory textbooks and Globalization: A Basic Text. He is the founding editor of the Journal of Consumer Culture and the editor of the Encyclopedia of Social Theory (2 volumes), the Encyclopedia of Sociology (11 volumes; 2nd edition forthcoming), and the Encyclopedia of Globalization (5 volumes).