Description
Book SynopsisFrom Aristotle to contemporary soap operas, friendship has always been a subject of fascination. This book describes the varied nature of personal relationships, and also locates friendship in contemporary debates about individualization and the supposed collapse of community.
Trade Review"How many friends do you have? How important are friends in your life? How important is friendship to the health of a nation? These are the kind of questions that Liz Spencer (with colleague Ray Pahl) has been investigating. It's a subject that their discipline, sociology, has largely neglected, leaving it to the novelists and agony aunts. Their findings, as recorded in ... Rethinking Friendship, require us to do just that. Rethink."--John Sutherland, The Guardian "Perceptive, thought-provoking and wholly accessible, this book contributes to broader debates about friendship and will appeal to a wide audience from general readers to academic scholars and students interested in the literary field of informal social networks. Unequivocally, this book delightfully delivers essentially what it promises to. It is an empirically grounded and methodologically sound exploration, which is rich in detail and convincingly uncovers the persistence of hidden solidarities where family members are considered to be friends and friends take on family-like status. Here, the everyday is rethought in a new light which shines on old solidarities and new forms of social cohesion, successfully debunking the myth of an alleged lack of commitment and trust in declining personal relationships."--Sharon Elly, Sociology
Table of ContentsForeword ix Acknowledgements xi INTRODUCTION 1 CHAPTER ONE: The Fragmentation of Social Life? 9 CHAPTER TWO: Capturing Personal Communities 32 CHAPTER THREE: The Nature of Friendship 57 CHAPTER FOUR: Patterns of Friend-Making 87 CHAPTER FIVE: Friends and Family: The Case for Suffusion 108 CHAPTER SIX: Personal Communities Today 128 CHAPTER SEVEN: Micro-SocialWorlds in theMaking 156 CHAPTER EIGHT: Hidden Solidarities Revealed 190 APPENDIX: HowWe Carried Out Our Study 213 Notes 241 Index 293
