Roland Robertson

Roland Robertson was a British-American sociologist, born August 7, 1938, who taught for many years at the University of Pittsburgh before becoming professor emeritus of sociology and international relations at the University of Aberdeen in Scotland. He is best known as one of the founding theorists of globalization studies, developing an early and influential account of globalization as a long-run process of the compression of the world into a single social space alongside an intensified consciousness of the world as a whole. He served as president of the Association for the Sociology of Religion in 1988, reflecting an early career interest in religion and social theory that fed into his later globalization work. He died April 29, 2022.