Books On Social Class

Abstracts Bibliography Syllabi Journals

SOCIOLOGY INDEX

Sociologyindex, Sociology Books 2008

Social Class

 

The term social class is used in various ways in sociology. It usually implies a group of individuals sharing a common situation within a social structure, usually their shared place in the structure of ownership and control of the means of production. In land based economies, class structures are based on individual's relationship to the ownership and control of land.

Class can refer to groups of individuals with a shared characteristic relevant in some socio-economic measurement (for example all individuals earning over $50,000 a year): it then has a statistical meaning rather than being defined by social relationships.

While class is extensively used in discussing social structure, sociologists also rely on the concept of status, which offers a more complex portrait in which individuals within a class can be seen as having quite differentiated social situations.

A social class is, at its most basic, a group of people that have similar social status.

Karl Marx distinguished four classes in capitalist societies:

  • a bourgeois class who own and control the means of production,

  • a petite bourgeoisie of small business and professionals,

  • a proletariat of wage workers and a lumpenproletariat of people in poverty and social disorganization who are excluded from the wage earning economy.

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS
The awareness of individuals in a particular social class that they share common interests and a common social situation. Class consciousness is associated with the development of a ‘class-for-itself’ where individuals within the class unite to pursue their shared interests.

CLASS CONSCIOUSNESS, FALSE
Where members of a social class absorb and become committed to values and beliefs that serve and support the interests of other classes rather than their own. The concept assumes that there is an objective ‘class interest’ of which its members are unaware.

CLASS CRYSTALLIZATION
Where the divisions between social classes become obvious and somewhat fixed: it is difficult for individuals to change their social class because their whole life situation - income, wealth, education, status - is shaped by their class location.

CLASS FRACTION
Usually used by political economy theorists in discussion of the corporate class to acknowledge significant segmentation of this class. It is commonly linked to such distinctions as that between finance-based capital and industrial-based capital, each viewed as having different interests and perspectives. This is a useful concept in avoiding the simplistic view that the ‘corporate class’ is a necessarily unified group.

CLASS-FOR-ITSELF
A class of individuals conscious of sharing a common social situation and who unite to pursue common interests.

CLASS-IN-ITSELF
A social class composed of individuals who objectively share class membership - they share social and economic situation - yet who are unconscious of their class membership or of shared interests that unite them.

 
CLASSICAL CONDITIONING
A basic form of learning whereby a neutral stimulus is paired with another stimulus that naturally elicits a certain response; the neutral stimulus comes to elicit the same response as the stimulus that automatically elicits the response.

Class is defined in terms of market situation. A class exists when a number of people have in common a specific casual component of their life chances in the following sense: this component is represented exclusively by economic interests in the possession of goods and opportunities for income under conditions of the commodity or labor markets.

When market conditions prevail (eg, capitalism), property and lack of property are the basic categories of all class situations. However, the concept of class-interest is ambiguous. Collective action based on class situations is determined by the transparency of the connections between the causes and the consequences of the class situation. If the contrast between the life chances of different class situations is merely seen as an acceptable absolute fact, no action will be taken to change the class situation.

A class in and of itself does not constitute a group (Gemeinschaft). ''The degree in which social action and possibly associations emerge from the mass behavior of the members of a class is linked to general cultural conditions, especially those of an intellectual sort'' (929). ''If classes as such are not groups, class situations emerge only on the basis of social action.''

Title Herbert Spencer : social Darwinism, 1857
Description This Web page provides extracts from 'Progress: its laws and cause' by Herbert Spencer, originally published in the Westminster review vol.67 (April 1857). The extracts included from this social Darwinist tract deal specifically with race and class. These extracts have been published as part of the Internet modern history sourcebook, edited by Paul Halsall at Fordham University, and an introduction is provided giving historial context.
http://www.fordham.edu/halsall/mod/spencer-darwin.html

Title Upstream : The bell curve

Description This Web page provides coverage of aspects of the debate relating to The bell curve, the controversial book by Charles Murray and Richard Herrnstein published in 1994, which attempted to provide a scientific basis of the relationship between social class, race and intelligence. The page is hosted by a Web site dedicated to contemporary right-wing thought, Upstream, and seeks to promote the ideas in the book and dismiss criticisms. The page does however feature a number of book reviews by both its opponents and proponents. Those in favour of the work are given more dominance and credence but there are also a number of reviews arguing against it, although these are heavily annotated with dismissive comments. Despite its heavy bias, this page is useful for those interested in debates about social Darwinism in the late 20th century.
http://www.mugu.com/cgi-bin/Upstream/Issues/bell-curve/

The Center for Working-Class Studies at Youngstown State University - http://www.as.ysu.edu/~cwcs/
The CWCS at Youngstown State University in Youngstown, Ohio, was the first center of its kind in the United States devoted to the study of working-class life and culture. The CWCS creates social spaces for civic and academic conversations on working-class life and culture and its intersections with race, gender, and sexuality and serves as a clearinghouse for information on working-class culture, issues, and pedagogy.

Official Social Classifications in the UK - The practice of officially classifying the British population according to occupation and industry began in 1851. David Rose, Associate Director and Professor in the ESRC Research Centre on Micro-social Change, University of Essex, examines the history and process of the practice. - soc.surrey.ac.uk/sru/SRU9.html

Sociologyindex

Books On Social Class

Sociology Books 2008

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How Class Works : Power and Social Movement Book by Stanley Aronowitz
“Once again Stanley Aronowitz has shaken up our complacent notions about social reality, and challenged his readers with a provocative reflection on past, present, and future popular movements for change. Whether one agrees with Aronowitz or not, there is something worth thinking about on every page of this, his newest, book.”—Phil Nicholson, Long Island Newsletter

Although Americans like to believe that they live in a classless society, Stanley Aronowitz demonstrates that class remains a potent force. Defining class as the power of social groups to make a difference, he explains that social groups such as labor movements, environmental activists, and feminists become classes when they make demands that change the course of history.

“With How Class Works Aronowitz puts the subject of social class squarely on the intellectual agenda--though in a new, inclusive, and dynamic form. Like his influential False Promises, How Class Works is both intellectually exciting and morally challenging.”--Barbara Ehrenreich

“In How Class Works Aronowitz argues for the enduring vitality of the concept of social class as a way of understanding social relations. This is a significant contribution to social theory, an argument certain to be widely considered, debated, and tested.”
--George Lipsitz, author of American Studies in a Moment of Danger

“An intellectually captivating book on a topic that remains as timely and significant as ever.”--Howard Kimeldorf, University of Michigan

Intellectual Property

Medical Tourism

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New Working-class Studies
Book by John Russo (Editor), Sherry Lee Linkon (Editor) - April 1, 2005

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Talk That Counts: Age, Gender, and Social Class Differences in Discourse Book by Ronald K. S. MacAulay - 2005
In Talk That Counts, distinguished sociolinguist Rinals Macaulay provides a new way of examining sociolinguistic variation. Linguists traditionally take a limited sample of linguistic data from a given population and look at phonological and morphological variables. Macaulay proposes a much different and highly quantitative approach to the study of variation, which correlates features of discourse with three social categories: social class, gender, and age. He uses as data a sample from 33 speakers of English in Glasgow, and his conclusions indicate that age accounts for the greatest number of differences, followed by gender, with social class accounting for the most variation within a group. Macaulay's work offers a new methodological paradigm to an audience of sociolinguists and others like sociologists concerned with discourse analysis.

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The Old Social Classes and the Revolutionary Movements of Iraq : Third Edition Book by Hanna Batatu -  2004

"An indispensable foundation for any thoughts regarding the creation of a new Iraqi political order"--Christian Science Monitor

"Batatu's book is by far the best book written on the social and political history of modern Iraq."--Ahmad Dallal, Stanford University

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Social Inequality: Patterns and Processes
Book by Martin Marger - June 18, 2004

This text provides an introduction to key concepts, current research findings, and theories in social inequality.

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Class and Schools: Using Social, Economic, and Educational Reform to Close the Black-White Achievement Gap
Book by Richard Rothstein - May, 2004

Arthur E. Levine, president, Teachers College, Columbia University
... powerful volume that needs to be read by scholars, policy makers, and practitioners who have the capacity to shape tomorrow.

Book Description
It seems to be a common-sense argument that, if teachers know how to teach reading, or math, or any other subject, and if schools emphasize the importance of these tasks and permit no distractions, children should be able to learn regardless of their family income or skin color. But this perspective is misleading and dangerous. It ignores how social class characteristics in a stratified society like ours influence learning in school. For nearly half a century, the association between social and economic disadvantage and the student achievement gap has been well known to economists, sociologists, and educators. Most, however, have avoided the obvious implication of this understanding, that raising the achievement of lower-class children requires that public policy address the social and economic conditions of these children’s lives, not just school reform.

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Boston Against Busing: Race, Class, and Ethnicity in the 1960s and 1970s
Book by Ronald P. Formisano - April 1, 2004

This work offers a convincing and dispassionate assessment of an emotionally charged subject: court-ordered school desegregation in Boston and, most particularly, the white backlash associated with it. Calling the conflict a "war that nobody won," Formisano ( The Transformation of Political Culture: Massachusetts Parties, 1780s-1840s ) examines the social and economic roots of what he terms "reactionary populism," concluding that more than simple racism underlay it. Class was an important issue, as evidenced by the frustration of city residents dictated to by legislators and members of the media whose own children attended schools in the "lily white suburbs," beyond the reach of the controversial desegregation plan. He describes the variety of white responses to the court order, for example, South Boston's collective hard-core resistance in marches and clashes with police and West Roxbury's more individualist (white flight) and legalist approach. Here, too, are the public characters, such as Boston School Councillor Louise Hicks, and the street theater of protest, such as a mothers' prayer march led by Hicks counting her rosary beads.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

From Library Journal
Sailing in the wake of Common Ground , J. Anthony Lukas's prize-winning study of Boston's busing crisis ( LJ 8/85), Formisano focuses upon the white antibusers who, he believes, were more diverse in motivation and tactics than the rock-throwing mobs on television. Using interviews, press accounts, and the enormous secondary literature, he argues, as have Lukas and others, that race and class were knotted together in this "war nobody won." Formisano writes with empathy for the antibusers yet doesn't dismiss their racism; he finds little to praise between both sides' principals and concludes that school desegregation must confront "suburban residential apartheid." Lukas's journalistic tour de force is still the book to read on busing in Boston, but this, the most accessible scholarly work, may be the book to study. It is recommended for most academic and many public libraries.
- Robert F. Nardini, North Chichester, N.H.
Copyright 1991 Reed Business Information, Inc.--This text refers to an out of print or unavailable edition of this title.

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What's Class Got to Do With It?: American Society in the Twenty-First Century
Book by Michael Zweig (Editor) - March 31, 2004

"Whether in regard to the economy or issues of war and peace, class is central to our everyday lives. Yet class has not been as visible as race or gender, not nearly as much a part of our conversations and sense of ourselves as these and other ‘identities.’ We are of course all individuals, but our individuality and personal life chances are shaped—limited or enhanced—by the economic and social class in which we have grown up and in which we exist as adults."—from the Introduction
The contributors to this volume argue that class identity in the United States has been hidden for too long. Their essays, published here for the first time, cover the relation of class to race and gender, to globalization and public policy, and to the lives of young adults. They describe how class, defined in terms of economic and political power rather than income, is in fact central to Americans’ everyday lives. What’s Class Got to Do with It? is an important resource for the new field of working class studies.
About the Author
Michael Zweig is Professor of Economics and founder of the Center for Study of Working Class Life at the State University of New York at Stony Brook. Among his books is The Working Class Majority: America’s Best Kept Secret, also from Cornell.

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Structure of Social Stratification in the United States, The (4th Edition)
Book by Leonard Beeghley - March 10, 2004

This text examines the structure of stratification in the United States, focusing on the way one's class location influences his or her life opportunities. Beeghley takes a structural point of view that distinguishes between individual and structural-level explanations of stratification, and shows how three dimensions of stratification (class, gender, and race/ethnicity) are interconnected. Anyone interested in reading about social stratification or the sociology aspects of poverty and wealth.

From the Back Cover
The Structure of Social Stratification in the United States examines the structure of stratification in the United States, focusing on the way one's class location influences his or her life opportunities. Beeghley takes a structural point of view that distinguishes between individual and structural-level explanations of stratification, and shows how three dimensions of stratification (class, gender, and race/ethnicity) are interconnected. The fourth edition includes important new data on the extent of wealth inequality in the U.S.

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Psychological Meanings of Social Class in the Context of Education
Book by Joan Ostrove, Elizabeth R. Cole, Joan M. Ostrove (Editor) - December 1, 2003

This issue of the Journal of Social Issues explores psychological meanings of social class in the context of education. In this article we propose an outline for a critical psychology of social class and discuss why education is a useful context for examining relations between class and individual psychology. We consider how research and theory in the study of race and gender can and cannot inform a psychology of social class. We introduce three themes that organize the issue and the articles that illustrate them. The articles in this issue address all levels of education, include data from within and outside of the United States, and investigate perspectives of individuals from a range of social class groups.

"What I remember most about school was that if you were poor you got no respect and no encouragement. I mean if you didn't have cute ringlets, an ironed new uniform, starched shirts, and a mother and father who gave money to the church, you weren't a teacher's pet and that meant you weren't encouraged." -- a working-class woman respondent interviewed in Luttrell, 1993

Class differences were boundaries no one wanted to face or talk about. It was easier to downplay them, to act as though we were all from privileged backgrounds, to work around them, to confront them privately in the solitude of one's room, or to pretend that just being chosen to study at such an institution meant that those of us who did not come from such privilege were already in transition toward privilege . It was a kind of treason not to believe that it was better to be identified with the world of material privilege than with the world of the working class, the poor.--hooks, 1989

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Revolution And Counterrevolution: Class Struggle In A Moscow Metal Factory (International Studies in Social History) Book by Kevin Murphy- April 1, 2005

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Social Mobility In Europe
Book by Richard Breen (Editor) - January 30, 2005
Social Mobility in Europe is the most comprehensive study to date of trends in intergenerational social mobility. It uses data from 11 European countries covering the last 30 years of the twentieth century to analyze differences between countries and changes through time. The findings call into question several long-standing views about social mobility. We find a growing similarity between countries in their class structures and rates of absolute mobility: in other words, the countries of Europe are now more alike in their flows between class origins and destinations than they were thirty years ago. However, differences between countries in social fluidity (that is, the relative chances, between people of different class origins, of being found in given class destinations) show no reduction and so there is no evidence supporting theories of modernization which predict such convergence. Our results also contradict the long-standing Featherman Jones Hauser hypothesis of a basic similarity in social fluidity in all industrial societies 'with a market economy and a nuclear family system'. There are considerable differences between countries like Israel and Sweden, where societal openness is very marked, and Italy, France, and Germany, where social fluidity rates are low. Similarly, there is a substantial difference between, for example, the Netherlands in the 1970s (which was quite closed) and in the 1990s, when it ranks among the most open societies. Mobility tables reflect many underlying processes and this makes it difficult to explain mobility and fluidity or to provide policy prescriptions. Nevertheless, those countries in which fluidity increased over the last decades of the twentieth century had not only succeeded in reducing class inequalities in educational attainment but had also restricted the degree to which, among people with the same level of education, class background affected their chances of gaining access to better class destinations.

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Experiencing Race, Class, and Gender in the United States
Book by Roberta Fiske-Rusciano, Virginia Cyrus - August 3, 2004

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Adolescent Lives in Transition: How Social Class Influences the Adjustment to Middle School Book by Donna Marie San Antonio - June 21, 2004

Research on the impact of social class variables on experiences of adolescents as they transition to middle school.

From the Back Cover
Addressing the issues of educational equity and social class diversity, Donna Marie San Antonio documents the challenges adolescents face when making the transition from elementary school to middle school. The book explores the values, resources, and ways of interacting that students from diverse economic backgrounds bring from their families and communities, and how they are enabled or discouraged from integrating these assets in their new school environment.

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Youth Deviance in Japan: Class Reproduction of Non-Conformity
Book by Robert Stuart Yoder - June 1, 2004

Based on fieldwork spanning two decades, this book presents a longitudinal study of deviance and crime among youths in Kanagawa-ken, with a focus upon two groups of young people ? a working class group and a middle-class group. The author, a long-term resident in Japan, has managed to keep in touch with his subjects for twenty years and offers vivid descriptions of nonconformity among Japanese youngsters and an in-depth analysis of the way in which youth deviance is reproduced along class lines.

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The Parlour and the Suburb : Domestic Identities, Class, Femininity and Modernity
Book by Judy Giles - April 24, 2004

Classic accounts of modernity have generally ignored or marginalized women, relegating them to the private sphere of home, sexuality, and personal relationships. The Parlour and the Suburb argues, however, that home and private life have been significant in the formation of modern feminine identities. Twentieth-century women's studies tend to focus on middle-class women, but Giles includes working-class women throughout the book. Topics covered include domestic service, suburbia, consumption practices, and the wartime figure of the housewife. The author makes excellent use of oral history, women's magazines, radio, film, and newspapers to construct a readable narrative. The Parlour and the Suburb subverts the conventional equation of domesticity with tradition, showing how domestically minded women could also be modern. The result is a re-evaluation of women's roles in the private sphere.

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The Failures of Integration: How Race and Class Are Undermining the American Dream
Book by Sheryll Cashin - April 1, 2004

From Publishers Weekly
In another of a spate of Brown v. Board of Education 50th anniversary books this season, this compelling book, beyond a lament about Brown's unfulfilled promise, argues that integrated, multi-class communities are the only fair solution. Cashin, a law professor at Georgetown, reminds us that our enduring segregation is the product of private and public choices, such as exclusionary zoning, federal mortgage insurance and urban redevelopment (which created hyper-segregation in public housing). Cashin sees inevitable costs to middle-class black separatism: African-Americans in suburbia are usually steered to enclaves in the opposite direction of economic growth; when they hit critical mass, whites flee, poorer blacks move in, schools decline and commercial and retail investors steer clear. For whites, the search for suburban privilege also has its costs: higher prices for housing, suburban sprawl and the more intangible incapacity to relate to the "other." High-poverty schools lack both models for success and activist parents, and also breed an oppositional culture—all a prelude to the extraordinary rate of black men in the criminal justice system. Cashin argues that civil rights groups should focus more on attacking housing discrimination and segregation. She also advocates other policies: break up the ghettos (such as via programs that give suburban housing vouchers to those in public housing), offer incentives for ownership in high-poverty neighborhoods, require new developments to have low-income housing and expand school choice and cross-jurisdictional choice. Cashin argues powerfully that such integration is crucial to build democracy and diminish racial barriers: "[T]he rest of society should stop fearing us and ordering themselves in a way that is designed to avoid us where we exist in numbers."
Copyright © Reed Business Information, a division of Reed Elsevier Inc. All rights reserved.
From Booklist
The landmark Brown v. Board of Education has not led to integrated education for black children, because our nation's housing patterns are stubbornly segregated along class and race lines. Because this state of affairs is not written into law, it appears to be "normal." But Cashin, a law professor, challenges this assumption, asserting that racially segregated housing, and the resultant segregated schools, is an outgrowth of government and social policies that can and should be reversed. Severely demarcated communities of winners and losers exact a high price for society overall, with the rising cost of ameliorating the results of hypersegregation. Cashin acknowledges the difficulty of getting higher income Americans to recognize the enlightened self-interest in more integrated housing, but she offers several strategies for breaking down barriers in housing patterns. This work supports the objectives of an American ideal that has been long lost in our current world. Vernon Ford
Copyright © American Library Association. All rights reserved

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A Theory of Global Capitalism: Production, Class, and State in a Transnational World (Themes in Global Social Change)
Book by William I. Robinson - March 15, 2004

"Yet another book on globalization? If you think you have read too many already, think again! Here is a fresh look at the subject which shatters the illusion that globalization has to do with either free international trade or the disappearance of the state. Robinson expertly gathers the diverse threads that run through our world order and unerringly hones in on class and transnational power at the heart of it."--Ankie Hoogvelt, University of Sheffield

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Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective
Book by Fiona Devine (Editor), Mary C. Waters (Editor) - January 1, 2004

Racial and ethnic divisions in the United States originated in three distinct historical processes: (1) slavery and the forced migration of Africans in the sixteenth through the nineteenth centuries; (2) the expansion of the US through conquest of the indigenous American Indians and the annexation of Spanish-speaking people in the Southwest; and (3) centuries of voluntary immigration from around the globe.

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Harvard Works Because We Do
Book by Studs Terkel (Foreword), Greg Halpern (Introduction) - November 11, 2003

From Publishers Weekly
In April 2001, Harvard undergraduates drew national media attention when they staged a sit-in for the Living Wage Campaign, an effort to induce the university to pay its workers the same living wage guaranteed by the city of Cambridge. (Harvard had been cutting wages even while its endowment tripled.) Halpern was among the 50 students who stormed the hall housing the president's office, and this revealing volume of blue-collar narratives in the tradition of Studs Terkel's classic Working, accompanied by large, b&w photographs of the subjects, grew out of his passionate activism on their behalf. "You want to know about regular working stiffs? You want to know what I do? I unloaded from a truck probably every book you ever read at Harvard," answered loading dock shipper Gary Newmark, Halpern's first interview subject. With stories in their own words alongside proud but weary and unsmiling portraits of the chefs, line servers, custodians, guards and dishwashers who feed and clean up after an elite faculty and student body, Halpern puts a face on the daunting statistics facing America's minimum-wage workers, who must labor 80 hours a week to cover basic living expenses, according to the Economic Policy Institute. Here, we meet Rachel Herman, a transgendered chef at the Signet Society of Arts and Letters who describes her cooking as an art form. An anonymous Haitian custodian tells of the small humiliations of the job-his supervisor leaves pennies on the ground to make sure he cleans carefully. Bill Brooks, a custodian at the president's office for 30 years, describes work as escape from homesickness for the small Tennessee hometown he left decades ago. Though the book's format is not original, the rarefied Harvard setting makes America's class differences especially stark.
Copyright 2003 Reed Business Information, Inc.

New Working-class Studies

Class Struggle In A Moscow Metal Factory

Rethinking Class Class Mobility and American Social Policy

Social Class Differences in Discourse

Working-Class History of the Americas

Social Mobility In Europe

Inequality In Canada

The Old Social Classes

Class Reunion

Race Class and Gender in the US

How Class Works

Social Class Influences

Social Inequality Patterns and Processes

Youth Deviance in Japan

Class and News

Class and Schools

The Parlour and the Suburb

Boston Against Busing

The Failures of Integration

Whats Class Got to Do With It

A Theory of Global Capitalism

Stratification in the United States

Social Inequalities in Comparative Perspective

Social Class in the Context of Education

Harvard Works Because We Do

“In How Class Works Aronowitz argues for the enduring vitality of the concept of social class as a way of understanding social relations. This is a significant contribution to social theory, an argument certain to be widely considered, debated, and tested.”
--George Lipsitz