Tony Bennett is Research Professor of Social and Cultural Theory in the Centre for Cultural Research at the University of Western Sydney. He is also a Professorial Fellow in the School of Culture and Communication at the University of Melbourne and a Visiting Professor at the Open University in the UK. Recent publications include Culture: A Reformer's Science (Sage, 1998), Pasts Beyond Memory: Evolution, Museums, Colonialism (Routledge, 2004), and Culture, Class, Distinction, with Mike Savage, Elizabeth Silva, Alan Warde, Modesto Gayo-Cal and David Wright (Routledge, 2008).

Patrick Joyce is Professor Emeritus at the University of Manchester, and currently Visiting Professor of Sociology at the London School of Economics and Fernand Braudel Fellow in History at the European University Institute, Florence. He has published widely on the history of work, class and popular politics, in recent times developing an interest in historical aspects of governmentality. His publications include Visions of the People (Cambridge University Press, 1991), The Oxford Reader on Class (Oxford University Press, 1995), The Social in Question (Routledge, 2001), and The Rule of Freedom (Verso, 2003).