The claim that friendship has a larger and more public significance beyond what it means for individuals is at the heart of this book. For over three centuries, scholars have described friendship as a private and individual relationship. Even the most recent attempts to define friendship frame it within the individualizing processes of late modernity, stressing its underlying links with individual choice, intimacy and identity. In this context, friendship acquired the label as a flexible relationship most befitting the twenty-first century (Allan 2008). Because we choose our friends, friendship can look like an easy-fit, designer-label relationship which can be applied to suit our lifestyle and identikit. From this standpoint, much has been written about friendshipās role in the transformation of intimacy and personal life (Jamieson 1998; Smart 2014), and its part in setting benchmarks for elective forms of solidarity, families of choice and personal community. This book argues that the flexibility of friendship, which derives from its voluntary, non-institutional structure, has also equipped it for a public life at work, in neighbourhoods and in activities we have come to define as civil society.
Friendship, of course, has many meanings, from the detached, stranger-like relationships on Facebook, to one-on-one relationships of personal contact and physical closeness. There are also gradations of friendship, from the transient friendships of childhood to friendships that last for life. While recognizing these distinctions, I am discussing the kind of friendship that involves a face-to-face relationship between two adults encompassing elements of privacy and intimacy. Friendship has an intrinsic dyadic structure (Simmel [1906] 1950; Oliker 1989; Blatterer 2014), based on a small group of two which means it can adapt to most social scenarios. Friendship is open and based on choice which means it can develop and be maintained into most situations, including public ones, like work. Unlike other personal relationships, such as married couples, which are institutionally anchored, friendship is under the control of the two individuals involved and depends on their negotiation (Jerrome 1992). Thus, it is not an external set of rules which maintains or constrains a friendship, but the wishes of friends to be together.
In pre-modern societies, there was little distinction between public and private, yet friendships were an important part of public life and community. In the modern era, when sociology developed, friendships became personal relationships, treated as inimical to public life. In late modern societies, friendships have again acquired status and significance as public relationships, which are developed and also maintained within public settingsāat work, online, in neighbourhoods and within civil society. Sociologists of friendship have long argued that friendships are part of societies (Adams and Allan 1998). Friendships are shaped by the social relations, networks and historical processes in which they are embedded. These contextual factors are as important to the development of friendship, and the forms friendships take, as are the individual circumstances of peopleās lives and the personal characteristics which attract us to those who become our friends.
One of the main arguments in the book is that friendships create personal spaces within the public realm, especially at work, but also in other public settings, which means that individuals experience parts of their personal lives in public. The examination of friendshipās public life within this book reveals a potential within friendship to improve the quality of working life for individuals. At a structural level, it may also be seen that āthe public life of friendshipā contains the means to resolve new social problems broadly experienced, related to womenās careers, time scarcity, work and family and the balancing of both.
It is true that friendship can also have negative aspects. It can be a difficult relationship with an obvious potential to disrupt oneās public life. How, for example, can we deal with a friendship we no longer want? Breaking up with a friend can be challenging, and this challenge also arises from friendshipās open structure and voluntarism. Moreover, because it involves self-identification, it can be detrimental to oneās sense of self when it goes wrong. It can also involve ethical pressures to remain true to oneās friend even when the friendship is making unacceptable demands. Meeting up with friends from oneās past life can also be confronting, especially if those once common interests no longer have any meaning in oneās life (Smart et al. 2012). However, the negative aspects of friendship are not my concern here. Rather, my discussion of friendship is intended to counter those historical accounts and theoretical debates which have kept friendship firmly locked outside public life. (This legacy is explored in Chapters 2 and 3 of the book.) As I discuss it, friendship is a unique relationship that has the potential to solve social and structural problems. It is a relationship which contains the elements or conditions for building a shared life with others, while respecting the integrity of individuals. As such, the book demonstrates that friendship has the potential to address common concerns in a world where individualism abounds, concerns which are related to work as well as community, neighbourhood and the possibility of a civil society. In bringing friendshipās public life into focus, the larger social significance of friendship will also become clear.
The Modern Legacy of Public and Private
To the average Generation Y, or virtually anyone born after 1970, the distinction between public and private barely registers in the course of their everyday lives. Yet within the social sciences, our lives are differentiated into a public world of work, utility, commerce and politics, and a private world of individuality, intimacy, family and friendship (Silver 1990). This has been an enduring legacy of modernity which continues to inform our thinking. It presents challenges when we categorize friendship as a relationship we have at work and in the other parts of life defined as public. Although the primary argument in this book is that friendship has become an important part of our lives in public, such as at work, part of this argument concerns the way this theoretical legacy has explained and framed modern friendship in relation to private and public life.
The argument in this book is consistent with some contemporary understandings of āpersonal lifeā: āPersonal life is ā¦ not private ā¦ it is lived out in relation to oneās class position, ethnicity, gender and so onā (Smart 2014). Carol Smart does not deny that living a personal life involves making choices and exercising oneās agency but, she argues, we always do this in relation to others and to the choices they make (Smart 2014: 28). Thus, while having a personal life does invoke an idea of the self (which is consistent with late twentieth-century conceptualizations of personal life) (e.g. Zaretsky 1976), the parts of our lives that we understand to be personal also involve reflections of our relations with others. Similarly, Vanessa May (2011) argues that personal life is relational, and states that we do live out parts of our personal lives in public (May 2011: 168). My argument about the significance of contemporary work friendships, and the other cases of public friendship I examine, expands on this claim by focussing on friendship itself. Friendship itself, I argue, creates a space within public settings in which to experience our personal lives. This happens not just because personal life is relational, although this is certainly relevant, but also because of the nature of friendship itself, which has properties not necessarily shared by all other personal relationships. Moreover, what I try to show throughout my argument is the significance of this claim in relation to the theoretical legacy which positions friendship outside the public domain.
Friendship clearly derives much from its status as a personal relationship but, I argue, the classification of modern friendship solely as a private relationship aligned with the private sphere, ...