Blackwell Reference Online

Extract

While friendship evokes a good deal of interest in popular culture, there has until quite recently been little interest in it among social scientists. Sociologists in particular have failed to pay much heed to friendship, apparently accepting a conventional view that it represents an individual, and consequently idiosyncratic, relationship rather than one structured by social organization or having much social (as distinct from personal) consequence. Recently, though, this has begun to change, partly as a result of the rise of “the personal” in interpretations of the changes that are occurring in what has been termed late or postmodernity. In particular, changes in the demographic patterning of marriage and partnership, including the rising incidence of cohabitation, gay partnerships, and divorce, have led to sociologists showing increased interest in the ways informal ties of friendship are socially constructed and the part they play within contemporary social formations. Until the 1980s, a sociological concern with friendship was most evident in community studies. The focus of these studies on the character of local social relationships meant that often they paid heed to the extent and patterning of informal ties of sociability. While the information they contained was generally very limited, they served to highlight the social differentiations that were evident in the informal ... log in or subscribe to read full text