Friendship, Sociology and Social Structure

Abstract

This article is concerned with the contribution that sociology has made to our understanding of the ways in which friendships are socially patterned. Rather than treating these ties as individual or dyadic constructions, it examines how the social and economic contexts in which they develop influence their form. It focuses particularly on the impact that social location has on friendship, arguing that both class and status divisions are important for understanding the character of informal solidarities. However, both of these must be seen as dynamic, for neither class nor status characteristics are fixed; both alter biographically and historically, and as they alter they pattern the friendships individuals sustain. The final section of the article attempts to explicate how structural change at the end of the 20th century will affect friendship. While some theories of privatization imply that informal relationships are becoming less significant socially, the argument developed here is that the transformations of late modernity are likely to result in informal solidarities of friendship becoming more central.

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