Rethinking Friendship
eBook - PDF

Rethinking Friendship

Hidden Solidarities Today

  1. English
  2. PDF
  3. Available on iOS & Android
eBook - PDF

Rethinking Friendship

Hidden Solidarities Today

About this book

From Aristotle to contemporary soap operas, friendship has always been a subject of fascination. But scholarly investigation of the broad social relevance of friendship has been neglected. Rethinking Friendship describes the varied nature of personal relationships today, and also locates friendship in contemporary debates about individualization and the supposed "collapse of community." Exploring friendships with partners and family as well as "friends," the book reveals ways in which friends and friendlike ties are an important and unacknowledged source of social glue.


Using a rigorous analysis of in-depth interviews, the authors develop a set of innovative concepts--friendship repertoires (the range of friendships people have); friendship modes (the way people make and maintain friendships over time); and patterns of suffusion (the extent to which boundaries between friends and family become blurred). These concepts form the basis of a typology of personal communities that vary in the roles played by friends, family, partners, and neighbors.


Combining scholarly depth and rich description, this absorbing and accessible book will appeal to all those interested in informal social relationships, including students of methodology and policymakers. With its challenge to pessimistic commentators, Rethinking Friendship urges us to resist sweeping generalizations and to acknowledge the sheer diversity of social life today.

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Yes, you can access Rethinking Friendship by Liz Spencer,Ray Pahl in PDF and/or ePUB format, as well as other popular books in Social Sciences & Sociology. We have over one million books available in our catalogue for you to explore.

Table of contents

  1. Cover
  2. Title Page
  3. Copyright Page
  4. CONTENTS
  5. FOREWORD
  6. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
  7. INTRODUCTION
  8. CHAPTER ONE: The Fragmentation of Social Life?
  9. CHAPTER TWO: Capturing Personal Communities
  10. CHAPTER THREE: The Nature of Friendship
  11. CHAPTER FOUR: Patterns of Friend-Making
  12. CHAPTER FIVE: Friends and Family:The Case for Suffusion
  13. CHAPTER SIX: Personal Communities Today
  14. CHAPTER SEVEN: Micro-Social Worlds in the Making
  15. CHAPTER EIGHT: Hidden Solidarities Revealed
  16. APPENDIX: How We Carried Out Our Study
  17. NOTES
  18. INDEX