James J. Chriss is Professor of Sociology in the Department of Sociology and Criminology at Cleveland State University. His primary areas of research and scholarly interest include social control, policing, law and society, sociological theory, and criminological theory. His work engages both classical and contemporary theoretical perspectives, with particular attention to the role of social control in modern societies and its implications for law, governance, and policing practices.
He is the author of several books, including Social Control: An Introduction, third edition (Polity, 2022), a widely used text in the field, and Reintroducing Talcott Parsons (Routledge, 2025), which revisits Parsons’s theoretical contributions for contemporary sociological debates. His most recent book is Habermas and the Transformations of Critical Theory, an edited volume co-edited with Amirhosein Khandizaji (Palgrave, 2026).
