ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on how structure is studied in Amsterdam School (AS) research and notes that such research has to a large extent not systematically explicated how to study structures empirically. It suggests that an alignment with critical realism could help to clarify AS's approach to social explanation. The transnationalization of class formation has become possible only as the relations of production have progressively transnationalized. Hence, in their empirical analyses, the AS scholars found it necessary to account for the main structural transformation that enables this process: the emergence of a globally integrated form of capitalism. Advancing a relational conceptualization of structures, critical realists regard social reality as stratified: in addition to a surface level of manifest events and phenomena, reality contains a deep layer of underlying structures. In this contribution, the authors have referred to the AS as if it were a currently existing 'school'.
