Reinhard Bendix (February 25, 1916 – February 28, 1991) was a German American sociologist.

Born in Berlin, Germany, he briefly belonged to Neu beginnen and Hashomer Hatzair, groups that resisted the Nazis. In 1938 he emigrated to the United States. He received his B.S., M.A., and Ph.D. from the University of Chicago, and subsequently taught there from 1943 to 1946. He then taught for a year in the Sociology Department of the University of Colorado before moving to the Department of Sociology at the University of California, Berkeley in 1947 where he remained for the rest of his career.

In 1969 Bendix was elected President of the American Sociological Association. From 1968 to 1970 he served as Director of the University of California Education Abroad Program in Göttingen, Germany. In 1972 he joined the Department of Political Science at Berkeley.

He held guest professorships at numerous universities, including at Columbia University, St. Catherine's and Nuffield Colleges at the University of Oxford, the Free University of Berlin, the University of Constance, Hebrew University in Jerusalem, and the University of Heidelberg.

Evelyn Nakano Glenn is a Professor of Gender & Women's Studies and of Ethnic Studies at the University of California, Berkeley. In addition to her teaching and research responsibilities she serves as Founding Director of the University's Center for Race and Gender (CRG). The CRG is a leading U.S. academic center for the study of intersectionality among gender, race and class social groups and institutions. In June 2008 Prof. Glenn was elected President of the 15,000 member American Sociological Association. She served as President-elect during the 2008-2009 academic year, assumed her presidency at the annual ASA national convention in San Francisco in August 2009, served as President of the Association during the 2009-2010 year, and continued to serve on the ASA governing Council as Past-president until August 2011. Her Presidential Address, given at the 2010 meetings in Atlanta, was entitled "Constructing Citizenship: Exclusion, Subordination, and Resistance," and was printed as the lead article in the American Sociological Review (2011, 76(1) 1-24).

Todd Gitlin (born 1943) is an American sociologist, political writer, novelist, and cultural commentator. He has written widely on the mass media, politics, intellectual life and the arts, for both popular and scholarly publications.

In his youth, Gitlin was a political activist, beginning in 1960, when he joined a Harvard group called Tocsin, against nuclear weapons. In 1963 and 1964, Gitlin was president of Students for a Democratic Society; he was elected, he writes, because "none of the other four candidates, each of whom was experienced, was willing to serve," since "we mistrusted power, including our own! Recruiting leaders was hard." (Letters to a Young Activist, p. 117) He helped organize the first^{[citation needed]} national demonstration against the Vietnam War, held in Washington, D. C., on April 17, 1965, with 25,000 participants, as well as the first civil disobedience directed against American corporate support for the apartheid regime in South Africa - a sit-in at the Manhattan headquarters of Chase Manhattan Bank on March 19, 1965. In 1968, he signed the “Writers and Editors War Tax Protest” pledge, vowing to refuse tax payments in protest against the Vietnam War.

Neil Joseph Smelser (born July 22, 1930, Kahoka, Missouri) is an emeritus professor of sociology at the University of California, Berkeley. He was an active researcher from 1958 to 1994. His research has been on collective behavior.

He received his undergraduate degree from Harvard University in 1952. From 1952-54, he was a Rhodes scholar at Oxford University where he studied economics, philosophy, and politics. At 24, he co-authored "Economy and Society" with Talcott Parsons. He earned his Ph.D in sociology from Harvard in 1958, and was a junior fellow of the Society of Fellows. He was the fifth director of the Center for Advanced Study in the Behavioral Sciences from 1994-2001. He retired in 1994 and is now an emeritus professor.

His value added theory (or strain theory) argued that six elements were necessary for a particular kind of collective behaviour to emerge:

Troy Duster is a sociologist with research interests in the sociology of science, public policy, race and ethnicity and deviance. He is a Chancellor’s Professor of Sociology at UC Berkeley and professor of sociology and director of the Institute for the History of the Production of Knowledge at New York University. He contributed to White-Washing Race: The Myth of a Color-blind Society.

He is the grandson of civil rights activist Ida B. Wells-Barnett. In 1970, he published "The Legislation of Morality," in which he showed how the moral indignation regarding addiction at the time of the Harrison Narcotic Law (1914) pointed fingers not at the middle- and upper-class users of drugs but at the lower classes of Americans.