Skip to main content
SpringerLink
Log in

Social Club Sociability

  • Chapter
  • First Online:
The Nation and the Promise of Friendship

Part of the book series: Cultural Sociology ((CULTSOC))

Abstract

In order to understand how intermediate social institutions transform strangers into acquaintances and friends, we need to consider how they occasion a non-instrumental “social club sociability” along the lines of the expressive sociability highlighted by Simmel. With the growing differentiation of modern institutional life, compatriots increasingly participate in a wide range of social clubs where they face demands to cooperate with strangers. Each social club presents its own informal norms of conduct and codes of exclusive communication, nourishing feelings of familiarity, exclusivity, and mutual loyalty. This sense of competence in making friends is carried over from one institutional setting to the next. The chapter presents brief historical examples of a variety of social clubs and their implications for civic or national life, culminating with the case of “phatic exchange” on online social media sites, such as Facebook.

This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.

Access this chapter

Log in via an institution
eBook
USD 19.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Available as EPUB and PDF
  • Read on any device
  • Instant download
  • Own it forever
Softcover Book
USD 27.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Compact, lightweight edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info
Hardcover Book
USD 99.99
Price excludes VAT (USA)
  • Durable hardcover edition
  • Dispatched in 3 to 5 business days
  • Free shipping worldwide - see info

Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout

Purchases are for personal use only

Institutional subscriptions

References

  • Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1988. “Culture and Political Crisis: ‘Watergate’ and Durkheimian Sociology.” In Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, edited by Jeffrey. C. Alexander, 187–224. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Jeffrey C. 1997. “The Paradoxes of Civil Society.” International Sociology 12 (2): 115–133.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2004. “Cultural Pragmatics: Social Performance Between Ritual and Strategy.” Sociological Theory 22 (4): 527–573.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2006. The Civil Sphere. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Alexander, Jeffrey C. 2012. Performative Revolution in Egypt: An Essay in Cultural Power. London: Bloomsbury Academic.

    Google Scholar 

  • Almog, Oz. 2000. The Sabra: The Creation of the New Jew. Berkeley: University of California Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Anderson, Benedict. [1983] 1991. Imagined Communities: Reflections on the Origins and Spread of Nationalism. London: Verso.

    Google Scholar 

  • Armony, Ariel. 2004. The Dubious Link: Civic Engagement and Democratization. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Arnaboldi Valerio, Andrea Passarella, Maurizio Tesconi, and Davide Gazzè. 2011. “Towards a Characterization of Egocentric Networks in Online Social Networks.” In On the Move to Meaningful Internet Systems: OTM 2011 Workshops, edited by Robert Meersman, Tharam Dillon, and Pilar Herrero, 524–533. Berlin: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhabha, Homi K. ed. [1990] 2013. Nation and Narration. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Bhagat, Smriti, Moira Burke, Carlos Diuk, Ismail Onur Filiz, and Sergey Edunov. 2016. “Three and a Half Degrees of Separation.” Facebook Research, February 4. https://research.fb.com/three-and-a-half-degrees-of-separation/. Accessed September 29, 2017.

  • Billig, Michael. 1995. Banal Nationalism. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Black, Barbara. 2012. A Room of His Own: A Literary-Cultural Study of Victorian Clubland. Athens, OH: Ohio University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • boyd, danah., and Nicole B. Ellison. 2008. “Social Network Sites: Definition, History, and Scholarship.” Journal of Computer‐Mediated Communication 13 (1): 210–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Brubaker, Rogers and Frederick Cooper. 2000. “Beyond ‘Identity.’” Theory and Society 29 (1): 1–47.

    Google Scholar 

  • Calhoun, Craig. 1991. “Nationalism, Political Community and the Representation of Society: Or, Why Feeling at Home is Not a Substitute for Public Space.” European Journal of Social Theory 2: 217–231.

    Google Scholar 

  • Capdeville, Valérie. 2016. “‘Clubbability’: A Revolution in London Sociability?” Lumen: Selected Proceedings from the Canadian Society for Eighteenth-Century Studies 35: 63–80.

    Google Scholar 

  • Caplan, Gregory A. 2003. “Militarism and Masculinity as Keys to the ‘Jewish Question’ in Germany.” In Military Masculinities: Identity and the State, edited by Paul R. Higate, 175–190. Westport: Praeger.

    Google Scholar 

  • Collins, Randall. 2004. Interaction Ritual Chains. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cooley, Charles, H. [1909] 1962. Social Organization. New York: Schocken.

    Google Scholar 

  • Cvijikj, Irena Pletikosa, and Florian Michahelles. 2014. “Online Engagement Factors on Facebook Brand Pages.” Social Network Analysis and Mining 3 (4): 843–861.

    Google Scholar 

  • Davetian, Benet. 2009. Civility: A Cultural History. Toronto: Toronto University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dingley, James. 2008. Nationalism, Social Theory and Durkheim. Basingstoke: Palgrave Macmillan.

    Google Scholar 

  • Donath, Judith, and danah boyd. 2004. “Public Displays of Connection.” BT Technology Journal 22 (4): 71–82.

    Google Scholar 

  • Dromi, Shai M. 2016. “For Good and Country: Nationalism and the Diffusion of Humanitarianism in the Late-Nineteenth-Century.” The Sociological Review Monographs 64 (2): 79–97.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, Emile. [1902] 1960. The Division of Labor in Society. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Durkheim, Emile. [1915] 2003. “The Elementary Forms of Religious Life.” Translated by Karen E. Fields. In Emile Durkheim: Sociologist of Modernity, edited by Mustafa Emirbayer, 109–121, 140–141. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eliasoph, Nina. 1996. “Making a Fragile Public: A Talk-Centered Study of Citizenship and Power.” Sociological Theory 14 (3): 262–289.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eliasoph, Nina, and Paul Lichterman. 2003. “Culture in Interaction.” American Journal of Sociology 108 (4): 735–794.

    Google Scholar 

  • Eriksen, Thomas Hylland. 2007. “Nationalism and the Internet.” Nations and Nationalism 13 (1): 1–17.

    Google Scholar 

  • Etzioni, Amitai. 1996. The New Golden Rule: Community and Morality in a Democratic Society. New York: Basic Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Facebook. 2017. “Stats.” https://newsroom.fb.com/company-info. Accessed September 29, 2017.

  • Fernback, Jan. 2007. “Beyond the Diluted Community Concept: A Symbolic Interactionist Perspective on Online Social Relations.” New Media & Society 9 (1): 49–69.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gellner, Ernst. 1983. Nations and Nationalism. Oxford: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gerth, Hans Heinrich, and Charles Wright Mills, eds. [1948] 1998. From Max Weber: Essays in Sociology. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, Ervin. 1959. Presentation of Self in Everyday Life. Garden City, NY: Doubleday.

    Google Scholar 

  • Goffman, Ervin. 1967. Interaction Ritual: Essays on Face-To-Face Behavior. Chicago: Aldine.

    Google Scholar 

  • Gorski, Philip S. 2000. “The Mosaic Moment: An Early Modernist Critique of Modernist Theories of Nationalism.” American Journal of Sociology 105 (5): 1428–1468.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, Jürgen. [1962] 1991. The Structural Transformation of the Public Sphere: An Inquiry into a Category of Bourgeois Society. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Habermas, Jürgen. 1995. “Citizenship and National Identity.” In The Condition of Citizenship, edited by Bart Van Steenbergen, 20–35. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Haine, William Scott. 1996. The World of the Paris Café: Sociability Among the French Working Class, 1789–1914. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Hoffmann, Stefan-Ludwig. 2001. “Civility, Male Friendship and Masonic Sociability in Nineteenth-Century Germany.” Gender and History 13 (2): 224–248.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jacob, Margaret C. 1991. “The Enlightenment Redefined: The Formation of Modern Civil Society.” Social Research 58 (2): 475–495.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jakobson, Roman. [1960] 1999. “Linguistics and Poetics.” In The Discourse Reader, edited by Adam Jaworski and Nikolas Coupland, 54–62. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • James, Paul. 1996. Nation Formation: Towards a Theory of Abstract Community. London: Sage.

    Google Scholar 

  • Jensen, Jakob Linaa, and Anne Scott Sørensen. 2013. “‘Nobody Has 257 Friends’: Strategies of Friending, Disclosure and Privacy on Facebook.” Nordicom Review 34 (1): 49–62.

    Google Scholar 

  • John, Nicholas A., and Shira Dvir-Gvirsman. 2015. “‘I Don’t Like You Any More’: Facebook Unfriending by Israelis During the Israel-Gaza Conflict of 2014.” Journal of Communication 65 (6): 953–974.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, Danny. 2006. The Men We Loved: Male Friendship and Nationalism in Israeli Culture. New York: Berghahn Books.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, Danny. 2012. “Institutionalized Erasures: How Global Structures Acquire National Meanings in Israeli Popular Music.” Poetics 40 (3): 217–236.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaplan, Danny, and Orit Hirsch. 2012. “Marketing Nationalism in the Absence of State: Radio Haifa During the 2006 Lebanon War.” Journal of Contemporary Ethnography 41 (5): 495–525.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kaufman, Jason Andrew. 1999. “Three Views of Associationalism in 19th-Century America: An Empirical Examination.” American Journal of Sociology 104 (5): 1296–1345.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kornhauser, William. [1959] 2013. Politics of Mass Society. Abingdon: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Kroneberg, Clemens, and Andreas Wimmer. 2012. “Struggling Over the Boundaries of Belonging: A Formal Model of Nation Building, Ethnic Closure, and Populism.” American Journal of Sociology 118 (1): 176–230.

    Google Scholar 

  • Lajosi, Krisztina, and Andreas Stynen, eds. 2015. Choral Societies and Nationalism in Europe. Leiden: Brill.

    Google Scholar 

  • Licoppe, Christian, and Zbigniew Smoreda. 2005. “Are Social Networks Technologically Embedded?’ Social Networks 27 (4): 317–335.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malešević, Siniša. 2011. “The Chimera of National Identity.” Nations and Nationalism 17 (2): 272–290.

    Google Scholar 

  • Malinowski, Bronisław. 1923. “Supplement 1: The Problem of Meaning in Primitive Languages.” In The Meaning of Meaning, edited by Charles Kay Ogden and Ivor Armstrong Richards, 296–336. London: Routledge & Keegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mallory, Peter. 2012. “Political Friendship in the Era of ‘the Social’: Theorizing Personal Relations with Alexis de Tocqueville.” Journal of Classical Sociology 12 (1): 22–42.

    Google Scholar 

  • Marwick, Alice E., and danah boyd. 2011. “I Tweet Honestly, I Tweet Passionately: Twitter Users, Context Collapse, and the Imagined Audience.” New Media & Society 13 (1): 114–133.

    Google Scholar 

  • Miller, Vincent. 2008. “New Media, Networking and Phatic Culture.” Convergence 14 (4): 387–400.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mosse, George L. 1975. Nationalization of the Masses: Political Symbolism and Mass Movements in Germany from the Napoleonic Wars Through the Third Reich. New York: Meridian.

    Google Scholar 

  • Mosse, George L. 1996. The Image of Man: The Creation of Modern Masculinity. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nagel, Joan. 1998. “Masculinity and Nationalism: Gender and Sexuality in the Making of Nations.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 21 (2): 242–269.

    Google Scholar 

  • Nashif, Esmail. 2008. Palestinian Political Prisoners: Identity and Community. London: Routledge.

    Google Scholar 

  • Offe, Claus. 1999. “How Can We Trust Our Fellow Citizens.” In Democracy and Trust, edited by Mark E. Warren, 42–87. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Papacharissi, Zizi and Maria de Fatima Oliveira. 2012. “Affective News and Networked Publics: The Rhythms of News Storytelling on #Egypt.” Journal of Communication 62 (2): 266–282.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pateman, Carole. 1989. The Disorder of Women: Democracy, Feminism and Political Theory. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Pickus, Noah. 2005. True Faith and Allegiance: Immigration and American Civic Nationalism. Princeton: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, Robert. 2000. Bowling Alone. New York: Simon and Schuster.

    Google Scholar 

  • Putnam, Robert, Robert Leonardi, and Raffaella Y. Nanetti. 1993. Making Democracy Work: Civic Traditions in Modern Italy. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Rainie, Lee, and Barry Wellman. 2012. Networked: The New Social Operating System. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Ringmar, Erik. 1998. “Nationalism: The Idiocy of Intimacy.” British Journal of Sociology 49 (4): 534–549.

    Google Scholar 

  • Romani, Gabriella. 2007. “A Room with a View: Interpreting the Ottocento through the Literary Salon.” Italica 84 (2–3): 233–246.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schaich, Michael. 2008. “The Public Sphere.” In A Companion to Eighteenth-Century Europe, edited by Peter H. Wilson, 125–140. Malden, MA: Blackwell.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schiller, Nina Glick, Tsypylma Darieva, and Sandra Gruner-Domic. 2011 “Defining Cosmopolitan Sociability in a Transnational Age. An Introduction.” Ethnic and Racial Studies 34 (3): 399–418.

    Google Scholar 

  • Schwarz, Ori, and Guy Shani. 2016. “Culture in Mediated Interaction: Political Defriending on Facebook and the Limits of Networked Individualism.” American Journal of Cultural Sociology 4 (3): 385–421.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, Georg. 1949. “The Sociology of Sociability.” Translated by Everett C. Hughes. American Journal of Sociology 55 (3): 254–261.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, Georg. [1915] 1950. The Sociology of Georg Simmel. Translated by Kurt H. Wolff. Glencoe, IL: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simmel, Georg. [1922] 1955. Conflict and the Web of Group Affiliation. New York: Free Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Simonson, Peter. 1996. “Dreams of Democratic Togetherness: Communication Hope from Cooley to Katz.” Critical Studies in Media Communication 13 (4): 324–342.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Anthony D. 1983. “Nationalism and Classical Social Theory.” British Journal of Sociology 34 (1): 19–38.

    Google Scholar 

  • Smith, Philip. 2011. “Book Review: ‘Civility: A Cultural History.’” Teaching Sociology 39 (3): 329–333.

    Google Scholar 

  • Soffer, Oren. 2013. “The Internet and National Solidarity: A Theoretical Analysis.” Communication Theory 23 (1): 48–66.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tavory, Iddo. 2016. Summoned: Religious Life in an Orthodox Jewish Neighborhood. Chicago: Chicago University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Theiss-Morse, Elizabeth, and John R. Hibbing. 2005. “Citizenship and Civic Engagement.” Annual Review of Political Science 8: 227–249.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thompson, Kenneth. 1993. “Durkheim, Ideology and the Sacred.” Social Compass 40 (3): 451–461.

    Google Scholar 

  • Thomson, Irene Taviss. 2005. “The Theory That Won’t Die: From Mass Society to the Decline of Social Capital.” Sociological Forum 20 (3): 241–448.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tiryakian, Edward. 1988. “From Durkheim to Managua: Revolutions as Religious Revivals.” In Durkheimian Sociology: Cultural Studies, edited by Jeffrey C. Alexander, 44–65. New York: Oxford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tocqueville, Alexis De. [1835/1840] 2003. Democracy in America. New York: Penguin.

    Google Scholar 

  • Tönnies, Ferdinand. [1887] 1955. Community and Association. London: Routledge and Kegan Paul.

    Google Scholar 

  • Weber, Eugen. 1976. Peasants into Frenchmen: The Modernization of Rural France, 1870–1914. Stanford: Stanford University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wellman, Barry. 2002. “Little Boxes, Glocalization, and Networked Individualism.” In Digital Cities II: Second Kyoto Workshop on Digital Cities, edited by Makoto Tanabe, Peter van den Besselaar, and Toru Ishida, 10–25. Heidelberg: Springer.

    Google Scholar 

  • Wimmer, Andreas. 2002. Nationalist Exclusion and Ethnic Conflict: Shadows of Modernity. New York: Cambridge University Press.

    Google Scholar 

  • Zhuo, Xiaolin, Barry Wellman, and Justine Yu. 2011. “Egypt: The First Internet Revolt?” Peace Magazine 27 (3): 6–10.

    Google Scholar 

Download references

Author information

Authors and Affiliations

  1. Department of Sociology and Anthropology and Gender Studies Program, Bar-Ilan University, Ramat-Gan, Israel

    Danny Kaplan

Authors
  1. Danny Kaplan
    View author publications

    You can also search for this author in PubMed Google Scholar

Corresponding author

Correspondence to Danny Kaplan .

Rights and permissions

Reprints and permissions

Copyright information

© 2018 The Author(s)

About this chapter

Check for updates. Verify currency and authenticity via CrossMark

Cite this chapter

Kaplan, D. (2018). Social Club Sociability. In: The Nation and the Promise of Friendship. Cultural Sociology. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78402-1_3

Download citation

  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-78402-1_3

  • Published:

  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

  • Print ISBN: 978-3-319-78401-4

  • Online ISBN: 978-3-319-78402-1

  • eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)

Publish with us

Policies and ethics

Search

Navigation