Ray Pahl - Böcker

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.

This is an accessible sociological exploration of the troubles many people face in a new age of anxiety, drawing on interviews with various "successful" individuals and examining the meaning of "success" today.

Friends can help to form the basic structure of our lives but we very often take them for granted. Friends can sometimes be regarded as an oppressive burden when they appear to be greedily demanding too much of us. How to get the balance right is a perennial concern and the subject of much fiction and drama. But has this always been the case or is the nature and meaning of friendship changing in contemporary society? Ray Pahl explores these issues as well as discussing who needs friends most and when, how friends make us the people that we are and whether friendship is a new metaphor for morality. Pahl brings refreshing new insights to a form of relationship that has changed in its meaning and significance since the classical discussion by Aristotle. Drawing on a wide range of material, including history, philosophy, psychology and sociology, he focuses it into distinctive shafts of light which illuminate different aspects of this rich and multi-faceted topic. Understanding friendship is important at the private level, as we struggle with the problem of personal identity in a kaleidoscopic world, and also at the public level where inappropriate friendship emerges as cronyism or subtle varieties of political corruption. This accessible jargon-free book will appeal to a wide readership, since it does much to illuminate a fascinating topic at many different levels.