Personal Relationships and Personal Networks
eBook - ePub

Personal Relationships and Personal Networks

Malcolm R. Parks

Share book
  1. 316 pages
  2. English
  3. ePUB (mobile friendly)
  4. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - ePub

Personal Relationships and Personal Networks

Malcolm R. Parks

Book details
Book preview
Table of contents
Citations

About This Book

The effort to understand personal relationships has traditionally focused on the individual characteristics of participants. Personal Relationships and Personal Networks takes this analysis a step further, focusing on research linking participants' feelings and actions within a given personal relationship to the larger social context surrounding it. Author Malcolm R. Parks expands on the idea that the initiation, development, maintenance, and dissolution of relationships are inextricably connected to each participant's social network-a perspective that allows for a better appreciation of our connection to the world, and a greater understanding our significant power as social actors.This book offers a new way to consider basic notions about how relationships form, such as how particular people meet, and how relationships are started. Among many findings, the volume demonstrates that individuals in relationships feel closer and generally more connected when they also have a greater amount of contact with the members of each other's personal networks and when they believe that network members support their relationship. Additional topics discussed include how this social context model is applicable to different types of relationships; how participants interact with network members; how social networks are involved in the deterioration of personal relationships; and what drives change in relationships.Students, researchers, and professionals in a wide variety of disciplines such as communication, psychology, sociology, anthropology, family studies, clinical psychology, public health nursing, education, and social work will find this book useful, as will anyone seeking to better understand their own personal relationships.

Frequently asked questions

How do I cancel my subscription?
Simply head over to the account section in settings and click on “Cancel Subscription” - it’s as simple as that. After you cancel, your membership will stay active for the remainder of the time you’ve paid for. Learn more here.
Can/how do I download books?
At the moment all of our mobile-responsive ePub books are available to download via the app. Most of our PDFs are also available to download and we're working on making the final remaining ones downloadable now. Learn more here.
What is the difference between the pricing plans?
Both plans give you full access to the library and all of Perlego’s features. The only differences are the price and subscription period: With the annual plan you’ll save around 30% compared to 12 months on the monthly plan.
What is Perlego?
We are an online textbook subscription service, where you can get access to an entire online library for less than the price of a single book per month. With over 1 million books across 1000+ topics, we’ve got you covered! Learn more here.
Do you support text-to-speech?
Look out for the read-aloud symbol on your next book to see if you can listen to it. The read-aloud tool reads text aloud for you, highlighting the text as it is being read. You can pause it, speed it up and slow it down. Learn more here.
Is Personal Relationships and Personal Networks an online PDF/ePUB?
Yes, you can access Personal Relationships and Personal Networks by Malcolm R. Parks in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Languages & Linguistics & Communication Studies. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Information

Publisher
Routledge
Year
2017
ISBN
9781351554527

Chapter One
Framing Personal Relationships

We humans are social animals down to our very cells. Nature did not make us noble loners. Instead we are in our most natural state when we are with families, lovers, enemies, friends, acquaintances, fellow workers, leaders, followers, and all the rest who light the constellations of human affiliation. Our social character is much more than a matter of living arrangements. It is the essence of what we are, as Pasternak (1958) emphasized in Doctor Zhivago:
What is it about you that you have always known as yourself? Your kidneys? Your liver? Your blood vessels? No. However far back you go in your memory, it is always in some external, active manifestation of yourself that you come across your identity—in the work of your hands, in your family, in other people. You in others—this is your soul. This is what your consciousness has breathed and lived on and enjoyed throughout your life … You have always been in others and you will remain in others …. This will be you—the you that enters the future and becomes part of it that enters the future and becomes part of it. (p. 60)
Often the things that we hold closest in our lives remain the most elusive. So it is with our personal relationships. For some, personal relationships represent mysteries that either cannot or should not be unraveled. Some prefer the mystery, believing that a scholar’s understanding will somehow spoil their personal relationships. Scientific research, however, is no more likely to spoil personal relationships than understanding the principles of refraction is likely to spoil the beauty of a rainbow. If anything, the history of science teaches us that the quest for scientific understanding enriches our appreciation and fills us with new wonder.
Scientific research over the past 40 years, and especially over the last 20, has indeed enriched our appreciation of the role played by close relationships. I begin with a survey of some of those findings in this chapter. I will not fully summarize the research in any one area but I will show that close relationships are central among our public values, pivotal in larger societal arenas, and critical to our mental and physical health. In the next section of the chapter, I review the basic perspectives available for the understanding of personal relationships. These perspectives have also evolved over time. Although a healthy diversity of views remains, I believe there is increasing recognition that our personal relationships do not exist in isolation from one another. Understanding how our personal relationships influence one another and how changes in one relationship are linked to the participants’ other relationships is the goal of this book. I introduce what I call the social contextual perspective at the end of this chapter and explicate it in greater detail in chapter 2.

The Significance of Personal Relationships

Public Values and Personal Relationships

In the most direct sense, personal relationships are important because we think they are. It is certainly true that both the individual and society depend on many types of relationships besides close ones and that personal development and creativity often flourish during periods of comparative social isolation (Parks, 1982; Storr, 1988). Nonetheless, most people still view their personal relationships as the primary centers of meaning and well-being in their lives. Close relationships contribute to our lives in ways that financial success, social status, and physical health do not (Chapple & Badger, 1989). Public opinion polls over the last 30 years consistently show that nothing ranks ahead of relationships with family and friends as sources of meaning in people’s lives (e.g., Moore, 2003).
The belief that personal relationships are vital extends across all age groups. Young people, for instance, often believe that divorce, loss of friends, and other disruptions in their personal relationships will have long-lasting negative effects on their lives (Riesch, Jacobson, & Tosi, 1994). Looking back over their lives, the elderly often point to their close relationships as their greatest sources of satisfaction and accomplishment (Long, Anderson, & Williams, 1990).
Our public discourse regularly honors these values. Former First Lady Barbara Bush, for example, delivered this eloquent reminder in her 1990 commencement speech to the graduates of Wellesley College:
As important as your obligations as a doctor, a lawyer or a business leader may be, your human connections with spouses, with children, with friends, are the most important investment you will ever make. At the end of your life, you will never regret not having passed one more test, not winning one more verdict or not closing one more deal. You will regret time not spent with a husband, a child, a friend, or a parent. (Butterfield, 1990, p. 1)
The significance we attribute to personal relationships extends far beyond polling results and public exhortations. It reaches down to our basic beliefs about the forces that cause illness. In their now classic study of heart attack victims Croog and Levine (1977) found that nearly one third believed that marital problems had been a major cause of their heart attack. And just over one third of the victims who had children believed that difficulty with the children had been an important contributor to their illness. These views were shared both by male victims and their spouses. These beliefs were also persistent, showing up again in a survey a year after the original heart attack. Most important, these beliefs were well placed. As I show in a later section, more recent research has demonstrated that there is indeed a link between disrupted patterns of personal relationships and physical health.

Personal Relationships in Society

Most of us think of our personal relationships as just that—personal. Yet our closest relationships have public as well as private dimensions and, as such, are tied to societal issues that transcend the individual concerns of participants. Some connections are obvious. Most children are raised within the context of a set of personal relationships. Beyond this, however, our personal relationships are tied to larger societal concerns in at least four arenas. They are primary sites of economic decision making and consumption. They play a special role in the process of organizational innovation. They act as reference points and training grounds for participation in larger social institutions. Finally, their disruption creates massive social service costs that are paid by society as a whole.
Personal Relationships and Consumer Activity. Personal relationships are big business. Forecasts of Valentine’s Day spending appear each year in business publications. The impact of world events is duly noted, as in 2003, when newspapers predicted rising prices for Valentine’s Day chocolate as the result of civil war in the Ivory Coast, the world’s largest cocoa producer (Hagenbaugh, 2003). Efforts to market the holiday extend to nearly every corner of the consumer economy. Traditional gifts of chocolate and flowers are joined by jewelry, private dinners, exotic trips, and occasionally, downright odd gifts. A few years ago, for instance, one company offered a “Love Me Doo” manure service for organic gardeners on Valentine’s Day (Krafft, 1994). Groups once thought outside the Valentine’s Day market, such as homosexual males, are increasingly targeted by advertisers (Newman & Nelson, 1996). Even modest gestures become monumental in the aggregate. In 2005, for example, Americans exchanged over 200 million Valentine’s Day cards, nearly one card for every person in the total U.S. population. And according to the National Retail Federation, Valentine’s Day spending in the United States in 2005 exceeded $13 billion (Weber, 2005). Valentine’s Day is second only to Mother’s Day in terms of restaurant business and flower sales. Almost half of adult Americans send Mother’s Day greetings and over one third of those with middle or higher incomes send flowers (Waldrop, 1990, 1992). Total retail flower sales in the United States were estimated at $18.5 billion in 2001 and, according to consumer tracking surveys, over 90% of these sales were intended for people with whom the buyer had a close relationship (“Size of Floral Industry,” 2003). To give one last example, Mother’s Day, Father’s Day, and school graduations combine to make late spring the second busiest period, after Christmas, for sales of books (Kinsella, 1996). In short, the “relational holidays” represent major retail events, not just in the United states, but in many other countries as well (e.g., McMurdy, 2003).
Weddings, too, are significant economic events in the United States as well as other countries with burgeoning consumer economies. Commercial wedding services that arrange ceremonies, presents, photographs, and banquets have boomed in the growing economies of India and China (Basu, 2005; Yang, 1994). Between 1997 and 2002, for example, the average cost of a wedding in Shanghai nearly doubled to $18,000 in U.S. dollars (“Wedding Costs,” 2002). Families in the oil rich United Arab Emirates frequently take out loans and borrow from friends in order to meet the social expectation for an extravagant wedding. The problem became so severe that the government established a fund to curb the impact of rising marriage costs on families (K. Evans, 1996).
Weddings are very big business in the larger consumer economies of the world, particularly in Japan and United States. Estimates of average wedding costs in Japan vary dramatically with some exceeding $100,000. The most conservative guesses are that wedding costs in Japan are typically no more than expensive weddings in the United States. Estimates of the average cost of a wedding and honeymoon in the United States hover between $20,000 and $30,000 (“Wedding and Honeymoon Statistics,” 2003). One way to appreciate these figures is to consider that the amount Americans spend on weddings each year exceeds the gross domestic products of approximately two thirds of the countries in the world.
Aside from the wedding itself, the decision to marry has economic consequences for home sales, the sales of major and minor appliances, and the sales of truckloads of other consumer goods. Ironically, the decision to divorce sometimes produces exactly the same economic consequences. And because most people remarry, the divorce business and the wedding business are locked together in a yin and yang of unending economic consumption.
Whole industries have grown up around our desire to appear physically and hence relationally attractive. In 2001, Americans spent $6.9 billion on cosmetic surgery (National Clearinghouse of Plastic Surgery Statistics, 2001). They also spent $52.7 billion on personal care and cosmetic products and an additional $39 billion on weight loss programs and products (“Personal Care,” 2001; “U.S. Weight Loss,” 2002). Skin-care products alone generated over $50 billion in worldwide sales in 2004 (Tsiantar, 2005). Certainly some of this money can be attributed to valid health concerns, but much more of it can fairly be attributed to the desire to establish or maintain personal relationships with others.
Close personal relationships also influence spending in more subtle ways. People often decide where to shop or what services to purchase on the basis of advice from friends and family. For instance, the choice of holiday gifts for friends or family members is typically based on suggestions from third parties or on perceptions of how giving the gift will appear to others in one’s social circle (Lowrey, Otnes, & Ruth, 2004). Although people may say they select physicians on the basis of their expertise and the way they manage their practices, it appears most of the information used to make these judgments comes from the opinions of friends and relatives (“Picking Physicians,” 1986).
These examples only hint at the complex interplay between economic choices and personal relationships. We try to change relationships through purchases of products and services that have been carefully crafted and advertised to appeal to, or perhaps create, our relational ideals. We celebrate relationships through consumption. We compete in order to improve our status in the eyes of close friends and relatives. We seek the advice of close friends and relatives before spending our money. All these linkages between economic choice and personal relationships are experienced as private matters, but in the aggregate, they have profound effects on the economy as a whole.
Personal Relationships and Organizational Innovation. Personal relationships also play a pivotal role in the way that new goods, services, and ideas are created. Innovation fires the engines of modern consumer economies. Organizations must innovate on a more or less continuous basis if they are to survive ever increasing global competition, accelerating technological change, and ever more demanding consumers.
Different kinds of relationships are important at different points in the innovation process. The simple spread of information about new ideas seems to be facilitated best by the media and by our weaker, less personal relationships, our “weak ties” (e.g., Granovetter, 1973; E. M. Rogers, 2003). But there is a large difference between simply hearing about a new idea and developing a new product or service. In the workplace innovation occurs most frequently as a collective process. Even the mythic lone inventor must convince others to implement, manufacture, market, and sell his or her innovation. Thus innovation becomes rooted in talk about new ideas. By definition, however, talking about new ideas entails risk and uncertainty. Discussing a new idea opens one to the possibility of disagreement and rejection. As a result, talk about new ideas tends to be quite selective in the workplace. People are likely to limit such discussions to those they already trust, to their closer, more personal relationships.
This idea is illustrated nicely by a series of studies by Albrecht and her colleagues (Albrecht & Hall, 1991a, 1991b; Albrecht & Ropp, 1984). They examined innovation talk in several different kinds of organizations including a school system, a research unit, a hospital, an electronics manufacturing plant, a social service agency, and an engineering firm. In each case they found that up to two thirds of the talk about new ideas occurred in more personal work relationships. The willingness to talk about new ideas was strongly correlated with trust and the willingness to share personal and social interests. Studies of innovation in other countries also point to the importance of informal relationships in industrial firms (Kivimäki et al., 2000). Friendships appear to play a particularly critical role in helping people locate new sources of information, reformulate problems, and validate their ideas (Cross, Rice, & Parker, 2001).
These findings not only underscore the importance of personal relationships in the workplace, but also help explain why more formal innovation programs such as “integrated product teams” or “quality circles” often fail when they are imposed on workers who do not already have established relationships with one another. Nor is it enough simply to create common spaces where informal interaction can occur and then hope that innovation will follow. Organizational leaders must take an active role in supporting the underlying relational environment that ultimately promotes innovation.
Personal relationships play one final role in the innovation process. They usually supply the money. Although a deal of attention has been given to the role of venture capital firms in supporting new companies, the fact is that most of the financial backing for new companies comes from the founders’ friends and families. Only 12% of America’s fastest growing private companies in 2000 had received venture capital during their early phases. The rest relied on money raised through personal contacts. Overall, founders and their friends and families contributed just over 70% of the $144.6 billion dollars invested in new companies in the United States in 2001 (Bygrave, 2003).
Personal Relationships and Socialization. Perhaps the most obvious way in which personal relationships are linked to greater societal concerns is through their role as agents of socialization. They act as training grounds and reference points for participation in larger social systems (Goode, 1982). Family supervision and attachment, for example, appear to be among the best predictors of whether male adolescents will engage in criminal activity (e.g., Goldstein, Davis-Kean, & Eccles, 2005; Hoffmann, 2003). Family supervision and attachment are also among the best predictors of whether adolescents smoke, drink, or use drugs (e.g., Augustyn & Simons-Morton, 1995; D. R. Wright & Fitzpatrick, 2004).
Family and friends remain primary reference points for us even as adults and even in areas where society already has institutions to guide us. In one survey of over 18,000 American women, for example, 90% said that they would seek out a friend if they needed guidance on a moral issue. About 33% said they would also turn to their husbands. Only about 3% said they would consult a member of the clergy (“Clergy Not a Big Help,” 1989). Clergy and other formal helpers also lagged far behind family and friends when 1,000 corporate executives were asked to whom they would turn if they faced ethical questions (“What Bosses Think About Corporate Ethics,” 1988). Only 1% said that they would turn to a member of the clergy. Although many (44%) of these executives reported that they relied only on themselves, nearly an equal number (39%) named either friends or spouses as their most trusted confidants.
Personal Relationships and Social Costs. On the negative side, disrupted personal relationships pose serious social and economic costs that all citizens pay in the form of lost productivity and higher taxes. Although easily illustrated, the overall magnitude of these costs is difficult to determine. This is partly because relational disruptions fan out to produce myriad social effects. A divorce, for example, may increase the demand for counseling services, community supported child care, and medical assistance. Depending on the circumstances, it may also create new demands on everything ranging from the schools to child welfare services. Beyond this, new demands for social services for the elderly may be created when divorces among their adult children take time and money that might have been used to aid them.
The social costs of disrupted relationships are also difficult to quantify because our measures of relational disruption are so imprecise. Most calculations of social effects of relational disruption are based on comparisons of married persons to separated or divorced persons. The standard assumption is that an intact marriage, no matter how dysfunctional, is less disrupted than a relationship characterized by separation or divorce. Although this may be true generally, it ignores the fact that intact, but dysfunctional, conflict-ridden relationships also create significant costs for society as a whole. Thus our procedures are inadequate and, if anything, probably underestimate the true social costs of disrupted personal relationships. Even so, the costs of disrupted or inadequate personal relationships can be seen in at least two areas: productivity in the workplace and performance in the classroom.
Private life and work life are not separate social worlds; they interpenetrate in nearly every way. Difficulty on the job, for example, has long been recognized as a source of marital difficulties (Komarovsky, 1971; Westman, 2001). By the same token, satisfaction and productivity on the job are linked with the availability and stability of personal relationships. People with supportive families and co-workers are more likely to show up for work, enjoy their jobs, and be committed to remaining on the job (L. A. King, Mattimore, D. W. King, & Adams, 1995; Parker & Kulik, 1995). Conversely, separation, divorce, and low marital quality are associated with absenteeism, greater job stress, and lower job satisfaction (Keller, 1983; S. J. Rogers & May, 2003). Moreover, the stress surrounding a divorce is often manifested as difficulty in the workplace (Schultz & Henderson, 1985). Men and women alike report greater job satisfaction when their spouses are supportive, but spousal support may have a greater impact on women’s job satisfaction whereas co-worker support may be more important for men (Krokoff, 1991; Roxburgh, 1999).
The costs of disordered personal relationships also extend into the classroom. Although there are numerous age and gender diffe...

Table of contents