Introduction: The Death of Ordinary Relationships?

Abstract

The book’s title comes from Raymond Williams’ (1979) observation that ‘many people are brought through quite profound disorders by the actual development of ordinary relationships’ (1979, p.184). For Williams, ‘the principle that you can only be brought through emotional crisis by a professional’ is an ‘extraordinary characteristic notion of bourgeois-bureaucratic society’. The potential of ‘ordinary relationships’ is much debated in the current neoliberal climate, but the shifting balance in formal and informal relationships has long been core to sociology and its attempts to understand the nature of sociability and intimacy (Misztal, 2005). A dominant concern, from Rieff (1966) and Lasch (1979; 1984) to Rose (1990), Illouz (2007; 2008) and Hochschild (2012) has been with the professionalization of our emotional lives. Ordinary relationships are positioned here as something we have lost, to be mourned; yet their nature, what we are assumed to have lost, is not seriously engaged with. This book questions whether such mourning is justified — whether the death of ordinary relationships has actually occurred — and sets out to be explicit about the exact nature of the ordinary.