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  • Critical theory

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    Definitions

    Social structure—'entities or groups in definite relation to each other ... relatively enduring patterns of behaviour and relationship within social systems that shape the behaviour of actors within social systems ... institutionalised norms or cognitive frameworks that structure the actions of actors in the social system' (Wikipedia, 2007).

    Absolutism—the doctrine of an absolute or non relative reality that is independent of or unconditioned by anything outside itself.

    Relativism—the rejection of the view that there are universal truths about the world based on its essential characteristics. There are only interpretations of the world.

    Idealism—the metaphysical view that all reality consists of mind and its ideas.

    Scientific realism—the view that the subject matter of scientific research and scientific theory exists independently of our knowledge of it, and that the goal of scientific research is to describe and explain both observable and unobservable aspects of the world. Scientific realism holds that there are knowable, mind-independent facts, objects, or properties.

    Critical realism—like scientific realism, except it raises its claims within the social sciences.

    Anti-realism—rejects the view that there are knowable mind-independent facts, objects, or properties.

    Empiricism—the view that knowledge of the world is limited to what can be observed.

    Capitalism—an economic system in which the means of production are privately owned and operated for profit.

    Text—in social reserch could refer to written words, conversation, pictures, film, architecture, a piece of art, or a social event.

    Introduction

    This topic introduces the critical realism of Roy Bhaskar and the Western European Marxist tradition. Critical theory, when capitalised, is associated with thinkers from the Frankfurt School (Horkheimer, Adorno, Marcuse, Habermas), a group of German scholars interpreting Marxist thought in the 1920s. This topic will also consider the influence of hermeneutics upon the development of the Frankfurt School and contemporary Critical theory.

    In previous topics we learned that scientific realism attempts to validate its claims with reference to empirical data taken to reflect an objective reality. Logical positivism argues for the need to accept only that knowledge which can be empirically verified in direct experience. Interpretivism and social constructionism attempt to understand society and culture through lived experience. There is an emphasis upon the active role of human beings in the interpretation and production of culture.

    In this topic we will see that Critical theory aims to understand what conditions human experience, in the form of social structure, ideology or concepts, and how our experience can be freed from these forms of domination. The key insight of thinkers in this topic compared to those we have looked at previously is that the subject and consciousness are conditioned, or are products of culture and society. For thinkers within the Critical tradition, we are shaped or constituted by conditions beyond ourselves, and these conditions are often oppressive or limiting of our freedom and must be transcended.

    From a Critical theory perspective, interpretivism and social constructionism do not place enough emphasis upon the deeper, more enduring social structures, concepts or social interests that precede, shape and delimit events and experience. Interpretivism and social constructionism are seen to be just as at risk as scientific realism and logical positivism of uncritically reproducing the social order, including its oppressive aspects. This happens, according to a Critical theory perspective, because interpretivism and social constructionism do not place enough emphasis upon the way that experience, common sense, or lay understanding is socially produced and reproduced often serving dominant political interests. The emhasis upon distinguishing between real and subjective, distorted, conceptual or ideological orders of existence is what gives Critical Theory its distinctiveness, a theme we began to see emerging in phenomenology, introduced in the last topic. 

    Critical realism

    From Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge, pages 58-62.

    1. The foremost proponent of critical realism is the British philosopher Roy Bhaskar (b1944).
    2. Critical realists agree with interpretivism that the social world is mediated by social relations, is qualitatively different from the observable natural world, and must therefore be studied in a different way.
    3. Critical realism also agrees with interpretivism that the social world is interpreted. It is socially produced and reproduced. It is both a condition and an outcome of social processes.
    4. However, Bhaskar sees an important distinction between the meaning of actions and the personal beliefs, intentions or motives of subjects such that an interpretive inquiry into the subject's own perceptions will not necessarily yield a correct reading of events.
    5. Bhaskar also believes that it is possible to describe and explain unobservable aspects of the world, thereby rejecting the empiricist view that knowledge can only be obtained via sense experience.
    6. This conception flows from Bhaskar's layered conceptualisation of reality. 
    7. Reality, for critical realists, comprises three elements: the empirical, the actual and the real. The empirical pertains to what is observed. The actual pertains to events, whether or not they are observed. The real consists of the underlying structures or mechanisms that constitute and produce events.
    8. Real structures or mechanisms, for Bhaskar, exist independently of our observations of them. That is, they exist whether we observe them or not.
    9. These structures can generate observable events, or cause manifest phenomenon.
    10. Critical realism aims to explain phenomenon by revealing the underlying structures and mechanisms that cause them.
    11. Interpretivism is seen to entail an unnecessary relativism in which nothing can be said to exist beyond interpretation. Interpretivism is also criticised because it fails to shed light on the underlying structures or mechanisms that shape the social context and subjective experience.
    12. Positivism and scientific realism are seen to entail an unnecessary absolutism in which observable data are assumed to reveal universal laws.
    13. For critical realism, causality operates as a tendency or pattern, rather than as an absolute law that determines the relationship between events as for scientific realism. The causal power of structural laws depends upon context or conditions. Structures are not always predictable, but arise from the specific social forces within a given time period and cultural context.
    14. Critical realism must therefore theorise about possible relations or tendencies between social events or phenomenon, and then seek empirical evidence to establish whether the relationship exists. It does not assume that empirical data reflects universal laws or underlying objective realities because ahistorical laws simply do not exist for critical realists. The mechanisms that cause social events and phenomena are understood to be relative and changeable.

    Critical realism and Critical Theory aim to avoid both the absolutism of positivism and scientific realism and the relativism within interpretivism and social constructionism by offering knowledge about socially constituted structures or mechanisms, upon which to build social action and political change. Perhaps the simplest way to understand what is distinctive about Critical realism is with the concept of social structure. Within Critical realism, social structures are understood as the relationships that exist between stratified social groups, for example groups based on gender, race, class, ethnicity, or religion. Within Critical realism, social structures determine individual, organisational and social behaviour and outcomes, but they are also shaped by the actions of individuals, groups and organisations. Critical realism aims to offer a scientific analysis of 'real' social structures. Like scientific realism, critical realism also rejects the logical positivist insistence that knowledge of the world can only be gained through direct observation or experience. For Critical realists, social structures exist independently of our knowledge of them, and they can be theorised independently of direct experience.

    Critical Theory has also been influenced by Marxism and hermeneutics. These will be discussed in turn below.

    Karl Marx

    From Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, chapter 6.

    In epistemological and theoretical terms Critical Theory is very different from the work of Karl Marx (1818–1883). However, Marx’s work has been extremely influential on the direction of social thought in general, including that of the Frankfurt School and Critical Theory.

    Some of the central tenets of Marx’s thought:

    1. Dialectical materialism (historical materialism)—societies are composed of inner contradictions that drive historical transformation (influenced by Hegel’s dialectic).
    2. Economic determinism–the means and forces of production (developments in the technological mode of subsistence) determine social relations of production.
    3. ‘Superstructure’—legal, political and cultural forms are built upon the ‘real foundation’ of the economic base.
    4. Exploitation occurs when workers labour beyond what is necessary to reproduce their livelihoods and produce a surplus for capitalists.  
    5. Ideology—the production and distribution of ideas by those who are economically dominant.
    6. ‘False consciousness’—accepting values and norms generated by the ruling elite that do not represent things as they really are.
    7. Marxist ontology—an understanding of human beings as productive in their very nature. Work is seen to express who we are and to fulfil us.
    8. Alienation (becoming a stranger to oneself)—within capitalism labour and its products become alien to us because they are owned by someone else. We no longer know ourselves, or find fulfilment in our labour.
    9. Proletarian revolution–in which workers must revolutionise society in order to restore humanity.

    The Frankfurt School of thought first emerges in the debates of the 1920s after Marx’s death. It was also strongly influenced by phenomenology and hermeneutics and emphasises culture as distinct from economics while retaining Marx’s emphasis upon social change and activism. From Marx, Critical theory learns to explain individual experience in relation to larger economic and social events, interests and ideologies.

    Critical hermeneutics

    From Crotty, M 1998, The foundations of social research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, chapter 5, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge (pages 58-62), and Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    Hermeneutics originates in biblical studies, and refers to the practice of interpreting obscure or symbolic biblical texts in order to unearth their hidden meaning. The term gradually came to refer to a philosophical perspective, and to scholarly ‘readings’ of non scriptural texts, practices, events, and situations driven by a concern to understand cultures or historical periods that are different from our own. 

    There is a consistent theme of the ‘hermeneutic circle’, a term from Friedrich Schleiermacher (1768–1834). The hermeneutic circle refers to an approach in which an understanding of a text in its entirety emerges by reference to its individual parts, and in which an understanding of the parts of a text arise from an understanding of the text as a whole.

    Hermeneutics comes in two competing forms. The first we looked at in the last topic, and follows Dilthey and Weber's concept of Verstehen. The second follows Heidegger and Gadamer, summarised below, and is sometimes referred to as Critical hermeneutics.

    Dilthey saw social phenomena as derived from subjectivity or human consciousness. Within interpretive hermeneutics the focus in textual analysis is on understanding the consciousness or meaning of the author and the social actors of the time. The hermeneutics of Heidegger and Gadamer introduces the idea that the social context is the source of subjective and textual meaning. Critical hermeneutics:

    1. introduces a critical emphasis on language as central to human life and experience—language shapes us and our world (rather than humans or the world shaping language);
    2. inherits from its past life as scriptural interpretation a tendency to mine texts for deeper significance, and to explain how texts can or should be applied;
    3. attempts to explain or make intelligible something that is in some way hidden, indirect, strange, separated in time or place, or outside experience;
    4. holds that we can only understand and articulate ourselves as culturally and historically located beings—speech, writing, art, behaviour, law, institutions, and therefore experience itself, are all products of time and place;
    5. attempts to gain an understanding of the text that goes beyond the author’s understanding or ability to articulate; authors bring implicit meanings and intentions that they do not themselves recognise.   

    Heidegger’s hermeneutic existentialism:

    From Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, 1999, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    1. Martin Heidegger (1889–1976) paved the way for hermeneutics in his early work.
    2. Heidegger was critical of philosophies of subjectivity from Descartes onward which envisaged being as an enduringly present property, essence or substance (for example, beings of reason, thought, perception, spirit), also referred to as the 'metaphysics of presence'.
    3. He argued that these received versions of the subject do not describe a naturally occurring thing, but abitrarily select some feature of human experience and use it to describe human existence as a whole. But for Heidegger this side steps the real question: What is the nature of our being?
    4. The German word dasein, literally 'being-there' or human existence, is the object of heidegger's thought.
    5. Rather than examine ways of theoretical or reflective being, as other philosophers do, focusing on the self as a mind that represents material objects, Heidegger was interested in the 'average everydayness' of our being, the state of prereflective agency, when we are absorbed in practical affairs.
    6. Heidegger rejected the received view that subjective experience or consciousness is enclosed within an interior space that is separate from the exterior objective world. For Heidegger, dasein is in the world and belongs to it. The world conditions our experience and the context within which we live.
    7. Dasein has three basic 'existentials': it is thrown into an existing world not of its choosing; it acts in the world shaping future possibilities and identity; it is discourse, always 'addressing and discussing' the entities that show up in its absorbtion in everyday situations. 
    8. 'The unity of these dimensions—being already in a world, ahead of itself, and engaged with things—Heidegger calls care. This is what it means to say that humans are the entities whose being is at issue for them. Taking a stand on our own being, we constitute our identity through what we do' (Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, 1999, p.371).
    9. The embeddedness of our existence in culture leads to the all too common problem of inauthenticity for Heidegger, in which we drift with the crowd, enact stereo-typed roles, and disengage from defining our own lives. In doing so we avoid the fact that we are finite beings facing death (the culmination of our possibilities).
    10. When we face up to this we can transform our lives into authenticity, in which we take responsibility for what our lives are adding up to as a whole.
    11. Because our lives are inseparable from the community, authenticity means seizing upon the possibilities within our community to achieve a shared goal.

    Gadamer’s historical hermeneutics:

    1. Hans-Georg Gadamer (1900–2002) foregrounded and sought to understand not the author's meaning or what people meant in the past, so much as the tradition within which the author, cultural actors and the text stand. It is these traditions that ultimately constitute the subjectivity of the author and other cultural agents, as well as the meaning of cultural artefacts. 
    2. For Gadamer, the interpreter or the hermeneutic scholar can hope to move beyond their own historical perspective and understand the past because we are ourselves embedded in the past–human beings stand in traditions, and traditions exist within language. ‘Tradition is not an object of historical knowledge, but part of one’s very being’. 
    3. The trick for the interpreter is to filter out ‘local and limited prejudice’ and individual viewpoint in order to form a genuine understanding of developments or changes in historical tradition. (The historian is looking for what is truly historical within themselves and in the present in order to understand significant developments in the past). 
    4. So historical hermeneutics aims to offer a history of changes or developments in human traditions that are understood to be at the core of human consciousness and experience.

    Critical Theory

    From Crotty, M 1998, The foundations of social research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney, chapter 5, and Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge, pages 52-58.

    Horkheimer

    1. Max Horkheimer (1895–973) was the first director of the Frankfurt School.
    2. He was concerned with a split within German research between the vitalism of direct experience and the rigour of empirical research. He sought a melding of philosophy and science that could capture and theorise the lived reality of social life, rather than simply reproduce fragmented ideological accounts–a critical theory of the social order. This led to an interdisciplinary program of research in which philosophical theory was tested against empirical evidence.
    3. The early Critical Theorists Herbert Marcuse (1898–1979) and Max Horkheimer called for a 'critical tribunal' based on the capacity of human beings to reason. They believed that human beings are capable of acting autonomously to create and control their lives in the pursuit of meaningful pleasures so long as they are free of relations of social domination. The capacity to reason was seen as fundamental to our ability to critique the irrationalism of capitalist society which produces false needs and wants while failing to meet our real needs and wants.
    4. Critical Theory challenges logical positivism's denial of the scientific validity of critical reason (for logical positivists reason falls outside experiential knowledge and is not therefore accepted as a basis of knoweldge).

    Adorno

    1. Theodor Adorno (1903–1969) became a member of the Frankfurt School in 1938.
    2. Adorno was a musical composer and musicologist and combined his interest in philosophy with aesthetics.
    3. He worked closely with Horkheimer and led the latter away from the empirical side of his social theory towards a more social philosophical bent.
    4. We see the critical phenomenological and hermeneutic flavour of Adorno’s ideas in his insistence upon the domination and oppressiveness of concepts, and their inability to capture the fullness and richness of the things they represent.
    5. For Adorno, knowledge acquisition involves a process in which we utilise pre-existing concepts in order to identify and classify realities into manageable totalities. Adorno refers to this process as identitarian thinking, born of our need to know reality, or to reduce the difference between the subject and the object of knowledge.
    6. For Adorno, the problem with identitarian thinking is that we lose much of the richness of reality–there is 'more' in reality than the concept can capture. Hence, for Adorno, identitarian thinking is subjectivistic although it denies being so.
    7. Instead, Adorno advocates a critique of identity, a 'dialectical', 'nonidentical', or 'aesthetic' cognition which reverses the order given to us by traditional philosophy, in which the non-conceptual is to be grasped by conceptual means. Adorno advocates favouring the object rather than the concept. This non-identitarian way of knowing looks for what the concept fails to capture; what is 'beyond the sphere of control of the concept', or 'tabbood by the concept'. 
    8. Adorno recognises that we can never get beyond identifying and classifying, but he argues we can and should dwell on the gap between the concept and reality. This allows us to see the resemblances between concepts and things, but also to multiply the differences between them, to see particularity and non-conceptuality, aspects which tend to be dismissed as transitory and insignificant. 
    9. Adorno challenges the primacy given to genuiness and authenticity by 'bourgeois morality', and the assumption that we are each of us unique, individuals. For Adorno, the individual self, one concept among others, is given to us by society, as is all of its content. Claims to be an individual and to be genuine are untruths; compulsive repetitions of concepts which, like other concepts, narrow or delimit what actually is.
    10. For Adorno, on the contrary, the greater our engagement with social forms, and the more we recognise and embrace the fact that mimicry or mimesis is the condition of human life, the more genuine we become (because we understand what we really are). 
    11. Rather than allow our experience to be defined conceptually, or believe conceptuality can capture what we experience (that we are or should be 'genuine individuals' for example), we should dwell in experience itself (foregrounding the object experience, rather than the concepts of experience).   
    12. This kind of 'mimetic conduct' renders our experiences a 'constellation' or 'trial arrangement' that is always shifting and incomplete, a creative unfolding in which concepts are never allowed to fix our identity or experience. This is an aesthetics of existence.
    13. For Adorno, this aestethics of existence or 'immanent criticism' rejects the power of concepts to define consciousness and reality and opens the path to social and historical change. It offers us the means by which we can resist the forms of social domination that depend upon an acceptance of the pre-existing concepts that fix our sense of what is real, disallowing the objects of our perception to continually unfold within specific contexts, and to suggest to us new lines of action.
    14. Despite the emphasis on philosophy, Adorno did not then retreat from the Marxist insistence on social change. His concern with consciousness and with art arises from his sense of the need for a more revolutionary consciousness among the proletariat, and a more subversive role for art.

    Habermas

    From Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge, pages 52-58.

    1. Jurgen Habermas (b 1929) is a leading contemporary exponent of Critical Theory.
    2. He joined the Frankfurt School in the mid 1950s as Adorno's research assistant, although he came to reject what he saw as an 'uninhibited skepticism concerning reason' (in Crotty, 1998:139) in Adorno's work.  
    3. Habermas is interested in the foundations and methodology of the social sciences and in developing a critique of positivism.
    4. Habermas agrees with interpretivism that 'reality' is interpreted, only meaningful within specific existing cultural and historical contexts. Knowledge produced by the natural sciences is therefore imbued with taken-for-granted cultural assumptions, and is not objective as it claims.
    5. Habermas introduces the concept of 'interest', 'cognitive interests' or 'knowledge-constitutive interests'. 'Interests' guide people in how they constitute reality and organise their experience. These interests determine what can count as an object of knowledge, as well as the methods that can be used to produce and justify what counts as knowledge.
    6. Habermas offers a threefold typology for the interests that shape human knowledge. The empirical-analytic sciences, including both the natural sciences and the social sciences, aim to exploit knowledge for the purposes of prediction, control and domination over nature and social relations. The historical-hermeneutic, or cultural or human sciences, aim to understand communication within and between social groups. The third, critical theory, aims for emancipation from the relations of domination within social relations. Habermas was interested in overcoming the limitations of understanding in the social sciences and of developing an emancipatory and explanatory social science.
    7. The truth of a critique within Critical Theory is established not by observation, as for the empirical-analytic sciences, but via critical reason and open dialogue.
    8. Through the course of evolution human beings have developed a form of communicative competence that is unique to our species. This communicative competence involves the ability to reach mutual understanding.
    9. What qualifies as reasonable is grounded in time and place, and the life world of human beings. Consensus emerges from the inter-subjective recognition of criticisable validity claims (propositional truth, normative rightness, and subjective truthfulness). A rational person interprets the nature of their desires and feelings in light of culturally established standards of value, and is reflective about the value standards informing their desires and feelings.
    10. Communicative rationality depends upon 'ideal speech situations' in which participants are free to question or refute the claims of other speakers. Within these contexts 'rational consensus' emerges because rational people who are free of the pressures of social distortion and constraint, will inevitably find agreement.
    11. Rationality is a communicative process, not a state of mind or an absolute standard.
    12. The truth that emerges is normative rather than absolute─it is grounded in the structure of social action and language.

    For Habermas, the knowledge produced by Critical theory is seen to utilise, but transcend the status of the empirical-analytic and historical-hermeneutic sciences in that it offers knowledge subjected to rigorous processes of free and rational discourse, and therefore free of social distortion.

    Common threads within contemporary Critical Theory:

    From Lather, P 1986, ‘Research as praxis’, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 257-277, and Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    1. Critical Theory accepts that knowledge is historically and culturally embedded and constructed on the basis of issues of power.
    2. Critical Theory sees discourse as controlled and produced within and by rhetorical and political interests.
    3. There is the view that the relationship between concept and object is never stable and is often mediated by the social relations of capitalist production and consumption.
    4. Language is understood to be central to the formation of subjectivity, including both conscious and unconscious awareness.
    5. Certain groups in society are privileged over others, constituting an oppression that is most forceful when subordinates accept their social status as natural, necessary or inevitable.
    6. Oppression has many faces, and concern for only one form of oppression at the expense of others can be counterproductive because of the connections between them (gender, class, race).
    7. Mainstream research practices are generally implicated, albeit often unwittingly, in the reproduction of systems of class, race and gender oppression.
    8. Emancipatory knowledge reveals the contradictions that are hidden or distorted by our everyday understandings, and thereby suggests the way to social transformation.

    Research design

    Analytic approach:

    1. adopts a mixture of empirical and theoretical approaches to knowledge production;
    2. looks beyond empirical data and events to understand deeper social structure;
    3. emphasises the scientific nature of the knowledge produced;
    4. values and departs from theory about underlying structures;
    5. draws distinction between false consciousness and liberatory consciousness and tries to reveal the latter via processes of probing and deeper analysis;
    6. seeks to expose or reveal the social and historical contingency of knowledge and practices previously accepted as natural, inevitable or inviolable;
    7. seeks to reveal injustice;
    8. focuses upon relations of domination and resistance;
    9. concerned to avoid research in which researchers advance their careers on the basis of alienating and exploitative methods;
    10. concerned that theory should both resonate with and when necessary challenge ideologically driven accounts of personal experience;
    11. may involve participants in knowledge construction and validation;
    12. aims for a research process in which both researcher and researched become ‘the changer and the changed’.

    Some well known contemporary Critical theorists

    From Morrow, R A 1994, Critical theory and methodology: Contemporary social theory, Sage Publications, Thousand Oaks, p.17.

    Zygmunt Bauman, David Held, John Keane, William Outhwaite, John B. Thompson, Ben Agger, Robert Antonio, Andrew Arato, Stanley Aronowitz, Seyla Benhabib, Richard Bernstein, Norman Birnbaum, Craig Calhoun, Jean Cohen, Fred Dallmayr, Nancy Fraser, Henry Giroux, Alvin Gouldner, Martin Jay, Douglas Kellner, Tim Luke, Tom McCarthy, Paul Piccone, Mark Poster, Philip Wexler, Barry Adam, Gregory Baum, Ioan Davies, Rick Gruneau, Barb Marshall, William Leiss, Greg Niielson, John O’Neill, Marcel Rioux, Charles Taylor, Beilharz, Johann Arnason, Bob Connell, Michael Pusey, Robert E. Young, Barry Smart, Raymond Williams, E P Thompson, Stuart Hall.

    Critical theory journals

    Thesis Eleven, Theory, Culture and Society, and Theory and Society.

    References used in the development of this resource

    Audi, R (editor) 1999, Cambridge Dictionary of Philosophy, Second Edition, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge.

    Blaikie, N 1993, Approaches to social enquiry, Polity Press, Cambridge (pages 58-62).

    Crotty, M 1998, The Foundations of Social Research, Allen and Unwin, Sydney. E-book at: http://etitle.title.com.au/Openlib/libview.asp?SID=62&CID=296&FID=1&PID=1&sp=1

    Lather, P 2006, ‘Paradigm proliferation as a good thing to think with: teaching research in education as a wild profusion, International Journal of Qualitative Studies in Education, Vol. 19, No. 1, pp. 35-57.

    Lather, P 1986, ‘Research as praxis’, Harvard Educational Review, vol. 56, no. 3, pp. 257-277.

    Mansfield, N 2000, Subjectivity: Theories of the self from Freud to Haraway, Allen and Unwin, Sydney.

    Morrow, RA and Brown, DD 1994, Critical theory and methodology: contemporary social theory, Sage, London.

    Neuman, W 2000, Social research methods: Qualitative and quantitative approaches, Fourth edition, Allyn and Bacon, Boston.

    Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia 2007, 'Social structure', viewed April 24 2007, http://en.wikipedia.org/Social_structure.

    This web resource was developed by Wendy Bastalich.


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