Abstract
This book has explored the ways in which the exclusive nature of associations of family, community and place are being challenged and reconfigured by alternative social relationships involving local and global political movements, urban voluntary associations, and new face-to-face and computer-mediated forms of belonging. New social ties are characterised as thinned out, fluid and transient. Yet they are also often expressed as intense associations and offer possibilities for confronting old inequalities. My central argument is that a friendship discourse is being used as a way of managing these rapid changes in social ties. Friendship’s flexibility and adaptability ensures that it appeals to different and sometimes contradictory discourses and social trends: neoliberal discourses and processes of individualisation as well as discourses of equality, justice and democracy. I argue that friendship is being monitored as a form of governance in Western societies, within a social capital discourse. And, conversely, by offering a discursive framework for claiming intimate relationships as non-hierarchical, friendship becomes a powerful metaphor for the postmodern condition. Alongside new, disembedded ‘postsocial relations’ mediated by Internet and cell phone technology, traditional ties are being reshaped not only by informality, speed and interactions over distance but by new ideas of the ‘self’.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Preview
Unable to display preview. Download preview PDF.
Notes
The British Social Attitudes survey of 1989 compared questions asked in the 1959 Civic Culture Study (Almond, G. A., and S. Verba (eds), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes and Democracy in Five Nations (Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press, 1963); G. A. Almond and S. Verba (eds), The Civic Culture: Political Attitudes And Dernocracy In Five Nations (Newbury Park, CA: Sage, 1989).
In Britain, 56 per cent of adults agreed that ‘most people can be trusted’ in 1959, falling to 44 per cent in 1989 according to the British Social Attitudes Survey (R. Jowell, J. Curtice, A.Park, K. Thomson, L. Jarvis, C. Bromley and N. Stratford (eds)), British Social Attitudes: Focusing on Diversity, 17th Report, (London: Sage, 2001).
The proportion of people who agreed that they trusted British governments ‘just about always’ or ‘most of the time’ fell from 39 per cent in 1974 to 16 per cent in 2000; the down turn in trust has been accompanied by a small rise in the 1990s (Jowell et al., 2001).
Participating research institutes included those from Argentina, Canada, China, Germany, Great Britain, India, Italy, Mexico, Netherlands, Nigeria, Russia, Qatar, South Korea, Turkey, United States (ibid.).
Here, Critchley (S. Critchley, S., ‘The other’s decision in me (What are the politics of friendship?)’, European Journal ofSocial Theory, 1:2 (1998), 259–79) draws on William Connolly’s (1992) concept of nonterritorial democratisa-on (W. Connolly, Identity/Difference (Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press, 1992)).
For example, in the British context, see the Department of Health (1999: 20).
Fifty-eight per cent of carers are women, and 42 per cent of carers are men. (Department of Heath, 1999:17).
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Copyright information
© 2006 Deborah Chambers
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Chambers, D. (2006). The Politics of Social and Personal Relationships. In: New Social Ties. Palgrave Macmillan, London. https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627284_9
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1057/9780230627284_9
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, London
Print ISBN: 978-0-333-98408-6
Online ISBN: 978-0-230-62728-4
eBook Packages: Palgrave Social & Cultural Studies CollectionSocial Sciences (R0)