Relational Composition

Instructor: David Krackhardt

This module is about combining social relations. This is very familiar in the case of kinship relations, where we are used to combining relations like "spouse of" (S) and "parent of" (P). For example, if we construct the compound relation PS, you have the 'parent of the spouse of' relation, commonly known as the in-laws. In this module, we apply similar processes to a number of social relations, including "friend of" and "boss of" and examine the social significance of compound relations like "the friend of my boss".