The Politics of Social and Personal Relationships

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’.