With the 50th anniversary of the journal, this special issue takes stock of the progress that has been made within sociology to become a more globally oriented discipline and discusses the new challenges for the future that emerge as a consequence. From its inception, classical sociology was primarily concerned with the European origins of processes of modernity that were to become global. There was little discussion of how the global might be understood in terms of structures, processes and social movements not directly identified as European but nonetheless contributing to modernity. The challenge for sociology has been to take into account these other phenomena and to rethink its core categories and concepts in light of newly understood alternative formations of the global and the social movements that bring them about.