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Scientific specialties have taken a part of human life and dissected it, such as in studies of childhood, adolescence, gerontology, and lately, even studies of adult life. In taking on the human life course as a unit, we must transcend the temporal division of life into different stages, and to combine the different role-set within the space of the society, to find the unique lives for their whole course. Biographies are humanistic expressions centering on the life course, using a definite set of rules of evidence. The large changes, which go beyond any definition of stability, can be analyzed by the principles of catastrophe theory: they may seem too obvious to need the mechanisms of such a heavy mathematical theory, but they can provide a framework in which to fit the public data which we are able to obtain.

The rise and decline of the encounter movement is the history of a technological innovation. Some followers of this movement may even call it the most important invention of the century. In 1947 two events of cultural significance occurred. One was the production of Tennessee Williams' play, "A Street car Named Desire," which started a postwar development in American drama. The other was the first session of the National Training Laboratory at Bethel, Maine which inagura-ted the successful rise of the movement of T-groups, sensitivity training and encounters. The National Training Laboratory, and the movement which sprang out of it, tries to teach people how to act with strangers, how to live in a world of high mobility and new events, how to deal successfully with these by modifying or even rejecting the interaction patterns of social convention. The original philosopher of the sensitivity training movement, Kenneth Benne, discussed the relationship of the individual and the group in contemporary literature.

Fashion is in many ways an extreme of cultural activity. Although fashion is almost synonymous with arbitrary, short-term changes, long-term trends can be discerned which are indications of cultural conditions. Fashion is therefore influenced strongly by all three factors: social norms, individual self-expression, and technology. Within the latitude given by these norms, fashion also gives a place for individual expression. Fashion in modernism depends on social norms, individual self-expression, technical opportunities, and the initiative of the fashion designer. The effort of modernism has been to break tradition, leading to claims of the priority of the individual over social norms. The use of labels for display is also an example of another aspect of modernism in fashion design the obliteration of the distinction between visual and verbal presentation. Social identity manifested in a wealth of messages corresponds better to the social conditions of modernism than the older sumptuary conditions based on social class.