James R. Beniger is Associate Professor of Communications and Sociology at the Annenberg School for Communication, University of Southern California, in Los Angeles. He holds a B.A. magna cum laude in history from Harvard University and an M.S. in statistics, and an M.A. and a Ph.D. in sociology, all from the University of California at Berkeley.

Beniger has published two sole-authored books. The Control Revolution: Technological and Economic Origins of the Information Society (Harvard University Press, 1986) gained a full-page review (with brief biography) in the New York Times Book Review and the lead review (and cover illustration) in the special book review edition of Science, journal of the American Association for the Advancement of Science. Now in its third printing, The Control Revolution won the eleventh annual Association of American Publishers award for "the most outstanding book in the social and behavioral sciences" and the Phi Kappa Phi Faculty Recognition Award; the 1989 softcover edition was selected by the New York Times Book Review as a "Notable Paperback of the Year." Recently Harvard University Press announced contracts to publish The Control Revolution in two additional languages: in Italian by UTET Libreria, an Italian book publisher, by December 1995; and in Mandarin Chinese by Laureate, a U.S. book publisher specialized in foreign translations for export, by May 1996.

Beniger's first book, Trafficking in Drug Users: Professional Exchange Networks in the Control of Deviance, was selected by the American Sociological Association for its competitive Rose Monograph Series and published by Cambridge University Press in both hardcover (1983) and paperback (1984).

He has also published several refereed articles, chapters in edited books, and book reviews each year since 1976 on the subjects of technology and social change, mass media and public opinion, and popular culture and the arts. Beniger has been a member of the editorial boards of Public Opinion Quarterly, Journal of Communication, Critical Studies in Mass Communication, Communication Theory, and Knowledge, among other academic publications. For five years he was Associate Editor of Communication Research and author of its regular "Far Afield" book review feature. He has served on the Board of Overseers of the General Social Survey, NORC, University of Chicago, and has held two year elected terms both as Publications Chair and as Secretary-Treasurer of the American Association for Public Opinion Research (AAPOR); he has been a consultant to the Office of Technology Assessment of the U.S. Congress for nearly a decade.

In 1989, Beniger toured the Soviet Union with a group of scholars to advise the Soviet Academy of Sciences on the government's Five-Year Plan for the "informatization" of the Soviet economy. He was selected to give the 1988 Samuel Lazerow Memorial Lecture, sponsored by the Institute for Scientific Information, Philadelphia, and to write the annual Keio Communication Review invited distinguished foreign paper sponsored by Keio University, Tokyo, Japan. As elected Chair of AAPOR's 50th Anniversary Conference, held last May 18-21 in Fort Lauderdale, Florida, Beniger has organized more than g00 members of the 1500-member organization on an Internet list, AAPORNET, which he continues to manage.

During college, Beniger was a Harvard Crimson editor and a freelance arts critic for the Boston Globe. On a National Newspaper Fund fellowship, he worked as Staff Writer for The Wall Street Journal in Chicago, where he helped to cover the 1968 Democratic National Convention, with a front-page byline story about President Lyndon Johnson on the opening day of the Convention. Following college, Beniger taught history, English and creative writing at the International College in Beirut, Lebanon, and at a secondary school in Cali, Colombia, work which led him to travel through some 40 countries on five continents. Before beginning graduate school, he served for a summer as the Acting Books and Arts Editor of the Minneapolis Star.

During graduate school, Beniger worked for a year as a Research Associate of the Bureau of Social Science Research in Washington, D.C., and as a lecturer in UC-Berkeley's undergraduate pre-med program, Health Arts and Sciences. His first full-time university positions were in the Department of Sociology at Princeton, where he was Assistant Professor for eight years. While at Princeton, he held the position of Visiting Assistant Professor at Yale for one semester. He has held his current position at USC's Annenberg School for Communication, with a courtesy appointment in Sociology, since 1985.