over a long period of time. In this situation, third parties are members of groups, and they are relationally close to fellow group members but distant from others. When conflicts between groups occur, they thus support one side and oppose the other, and they may join in retaliatory violence against members of rival groups. Other social configurations are conducive to other forms of violence or even to peace. For example, where there are cross-cutting ties, such as where people are relationally close to members of other groups, third parties are more likely to promote peace. Recently, Black has moved beyond the study of how conflicts are handled to examine the origin of conflict itself. Moral Time identifies the causes of clashes of right and wrong in human relationships. In doing so, this theory invokes a new explanatory concept—the idea of movement in social time — and thus extends the pure sociological approach. Black and others have also moved beyond conflict and social control to develop explanations of ideas, predation, welfare, research, and other forms of social life. For example, Black's theory of ideas explains the content of ideas with their social structures. Just as each conflict has a social structure that consists of the social characteristics of the disputants and third parties, every idea—every statement about reality—has a social structure consisting of the characteristics of the source, subject, and audience. For example, the subject of an idea may be intimate or distant from the source: People have ideas about family members and friends as well as strangers. The subject may also be high or low in social status: People have ideas about senators and businessmen as well as skid row vagrants. But ideas vary depending on their social structures. Black's explanation of voluntarism and determinism, for example, states that ideas about high status subjects are more likely to be voluntaristic (to invoke free will). The theory would predict, then, that people would offer voluntaristic explanations of senators and businessmen and deterministic explanations of skid row vagrants. Practitioners and scholars A number of sociologists have used at least some elements of Black's theoretical strategy in their work, including Professors M.P. Baumgartner, Marian Borg, Bradley Campbell, Mark Cooney, Ellis Godard, Allan Horwitz, Scott Jacques, Marcus Kondkar, Jason Manning, Joseph Michalski, Calvin Morrill, Scott Phillips, Roberta Senechal de la Roche, and James Tucker. Criticism While prominent sociologists such as Randall Collins, Karen A.