Book excerpt: This innovative volume provides insight into the vast changes in societies now and in the near future, and highlights the need for a new sociological approach to analyse these changes. It particularly reviews and critiques existing theories of globalization and analyses how global changes affect all subsystems of social membership systems: the scientific, academic, legal and political systems. The authors propose a new theoretical paradigm in sociology to analyse this “next society”. The book studies emergent communication structures between these systems and looks at the concept of membership as a new research area in the study of the next society. In this context, it particularly assesses the problems of further modernization of Chinese society, and the directions of this modernization. This book is of interest to researchers and students of social theory, globalization studies, theory of evolution, and those studying modern Chinese society.