Friendship--An Introduction
January 2004
Banner photo: Hokkaido, Japan ©SEKAI BUNKA PHOTO
Friendship as a Source of Social Change
What does the word "friendship" mean to you? Posing this question to a gathering of adults from all over the world would elicit almost as many answers as there were people in the group. Certain themes would inevitably emerge, such as emotional closeness and caring, understanding and openness, and dependability and commitment, but the answers would vary according to the cultural, economic, political and social environments in which those answering the question lived. Furthermore, even if those answering this question were all from the same part of the world or country, their responses might vary according to their social class, ethnicity, gender and age, to name a few factors. Of course, it would be possible to discern patterns in the responses.
For example, in most Western countries, members of the working class or ethnic minorities might emphasize the importance of sharing material resources more than middle- or upper-class members of the majority would. Men would tend to mention doing things with their friends, and women would remark about sharing intimacies with theirs. Reflecting their concern with identity formation, young adults might emphasize similarity between friends more than older adults would. What would be most obvious is the tremendous variation in emphasis across cultures and social groups.
Why is there such a lack of agreement on the definition of friendship? Although the perceived boundaries of "family" and "neighborhood" might vary across cultural context, there is some degree of social consensus about what constitutes a family tie or neighbor relationship and what they entail; kin are related biologically or legally, and neighbors live in close geographic proximity to each other. In other words, in contrast to "friendship," these types of relationships are generally institutionalized.
In some societies, however, friendship is institutionalized. In other words, obligations to friends are socially mandated, and commitments to friends are publicly celebrated. For example, in rural Thai society, a ritual in which the participants pledge mutual devotion and unconditional loyalty formally initiates special friendships. Sacred power can be invoked whenever one party violates the vows. Within this type of society, friendships do not vary as much as they do in those in which friendship is perceived to be voluntary, as it is in most Western countries.
The Freedom to Choose Friendships
Although in some cultural contexts, the meaning of friendship is open to interpretation and therefore varies, it is important not to overemphasize how much freedom of choice people in these settings have regarding friendship. In such societies, friendship choices are not wholly fortuitous; neither is amicable behavior arbitrary. If friendship is voluntary in Western countries, for example, why do adults tend to choose friends of the same sex, age, race, religion, geographic area and status levels? As Graham Allan of the University of Keele observed, freedom regarding friendship in Western societies is not as great as it initially appears. Expectations exist regarding who can be chosen as friends, how they are to be treated and what it is acceptable to expect of them.
As Rosemary Blieszner of Virginia Polytechnic Institute and State University once noted, Western conceptions of friendship are derived from the Greek classics. Plato wrote that true friendship meets basic human needs and desires, such as to strive to be good, to be affiliated with others, to seek self-understanding and to love and be loved. Aristotle elaborated on the notion of ideal versus illusory friendship by defining three types of friends, each of which serves different functions. According to him, utilitarian friendships and those formed solely for pleasure are imperfect forms of friendship. In contrast, perfect friendship, which benefits both partners, occurs between people who admire each other's qualities of goodness, mutually value the benefits of the friendship and take pleasure in each other's presence. Cicero's typology of friendship included two forms, a superficial type between dissimilar persons who affiliate out of self-interest and a deeper type between friends who are similar in character and virtue.
Functions of Friendships for Individuals
However "friendship" is defined and perceived in a culture, it is generally seen as important for identity and self-image, happiness and psychological well-being, health and longevity and, in some cases, wealth and success. Researchers have substantiated most of this folk-wisdom with considerable success. For example, since the early 20th century, scholars have been convinced that peer relationships are important for the development of identity and self-concept among adolescents. Similarly, since the 1960s when Marjorie Lowenthal and Clayton Haven, then of Harvard University, demonstrated that having a confidante was important to older adult mental health or certainly since the 1970s when Reed Larson of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign documented the clear connection between friendship activity and psychological well-being, gerontologists have realized that friendship matters.
[Peter Schickert/Still Pictures]
Nonetheless, it is not clear whether friendship leads to happiness or happiness leads to friendship, because researchers have not studied multiple groups of people born at different times repeatedly as they age. One exception is a study that began in 1928 and followed the same participants of varied ages through 1983. In an analysis of these data, it was found that during the younger years of old age, involvement with friends predicts how long individuals will live, possibly because friendships contribute to happiness and well-being.
Research documenting the connection between friendship and material success is less plentiful. There are some exceptions, however. For example, in the 1970s, Mark Granovetter of Stanford University reported that the most effective method of finding a job is by consulting with friends of friends, demonstrating the importance of weak and therefore diverse social ties. Similarly, in the late 1980s, Vladimir Shlapentokh of Michigan State University documented that about three-quarters of friends in the Soviet Union borrowed money and necessities from one another, illustrating the connection between friendship and survival in an economy of scarcity.
Friendship in Historical Context
So, there is no doubt that friendship is important to individuals in many and various ways. The question remains whether it has become more or less central to individual lives over time. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, German scholars such as Max Weber and Ferdinand Toennies argued that the importance of friendship had declined with industrialization and urbanization. Social environments were increasingly diverse and therefore, because friendships are likely to form between people who are similar to each other, less conducive to friendship formation. Furthermore, because the newly developing bureaucracies hired people based on their qualifications for jobs rather than on their interpersonal connections, people relocated from their communities of origin to pursue careers, and impersonal economic incentives destroyed the love and trust that had previously existed among coworkers.
In the 1960s, Eugene Litwak of Columbia University rejected the notion that close relationships and bureaucratic organizations are incompatible and argued instead that they perform different but complementary tasks. He pointed out that families, friends and neighbors are better than bureaucratic employees at accomplishing simple and unpredictable tasks. Because of their personal commitment to each other, they require less supervision and, because of their familiarity, they communicate more effectively.
Furthermore, he argued that families are best at handling tasks that require long-term commitment, neighbors are most useful when accomplishing tasks requiring immediate or face-to-face interaction, and friends are well suited to handle tasks where similar experiences and values are important, such as helping someone cope with bereavement or make critical decisions. Therefore, he concluded, friendship has not decreased in importance; its function has merely changed.
More recently scholars have argued that in the process of industrialization and modernization, the more communal social life of the past has been replaced with a concern for the private world of home and family. Whereas in the past, social lives centered on relationships with coworkers and neighbors, now improvements in transportation and communications technologies have reduced the importance of local ties. Some scholars have argued that this has led to increased isolation, but others, such as Barry Wellman of the University of Toronto, have argued that people are now free to develop a wider variety of friendships.
Effects of Friendship on Society
Thus far this discussion of the functions of friendship has been limited to the benefits that accrue to individuals, but scholars have also observed that friendship affects society. For example, Stacey Oliker of the University of Wisconsin-Milwaukee described how friendship upholds the institution of marriage. Similarly, Pat Connor of the University of Limerick has argued that friendship reinforces the class structure. In other words, friends teach people what is expected of them and, because friends are similar to each other, the result of this process tends to be the preservation of the status quo, not changes to it.
As the composition of friendship networks changes, however, the function of friendship has the potential to become less conservative. If the development of friendship is no longer dependent on proximity and face-to-face interaction, if people now maintain diverse networks with friends who live in circumstances very different from their own, and if friends continue to influence each other's lives, friendship may foster social change and decrease divisiveness rather than reproducing a social order in which distinctions among social groups are emphasized.
Faster, more efficient and more accessible communications and transportation technologies have made it possible for friendship networks to become more diverse. It remains to be seen whether people will use new technology, such as the Internet, to increase the geographic and social diversity of their friendship networks or merely to maintain relationships they would have established anyway.
In Western society, interventions into family life are quite common. Individuals, partners and families engage therapists to help them resolve problems and improve communication. Communities are organized with families in mind. Social policies are designed to support and enhance relationships among kin.
[Owen Middleton]
In contrast, conscious interventions into friendship are rare, perhaps because friendship is perceived to be voluntary and free from societal constraints. Friendship interventions do, however, take place. For example, friends sometimes utilize the same counseling services that families use to resolve interpersonal problems. Similarly, community planners in post-World War II Britain and the United States designed "garden cities" or "new towns" in which they placed households close together and located shopping, schools and other community facilities centrally. Their goal was planning towns that established and reinforced a sense of community.
Although academic researchers have not examined how social policies affect friendship, they surely do. For example, when governments supported the development of the Internet and other new forms of communication and transportation technology, they inadvertently implemented an intervention into people's social lives. In marked contrast to the garden city or new town movements, the development of the Internet might increase the diversity of international social networks rather than contribute to the solidification of local homogeneous ones. Again, it remains to be seen if this fortuitous consequence of the constant quest for increased access to information will be realized.
If positive social change is to occur, if culturally and geographically diverse friendship networks are to be developed, and if social conflict is to be reduced, it is important for communities and societies to develop policies and establish programs that encourage interactions between people who are different from each other and to implement these programs and policies consciously and systematically. Eliminating the digital divide is but one possibility. Sponsoring conferences, concerts and other events that bring people from diverse backgrounds and cultures together is another. Discouraging residential segregation, offering need-based scholarships to schools and supporting international exchange programs are all additional examples. There are myriad possibilities.
Of course, though frequent interaction is an important precursor to friendship, it is not the only one. Frequent interactions must be pleasant and meaningful in order to serve as foundations for friendship. So, if friendship bonds are to be forged between members of different cultures, potential friends must not be ethnocentric; they must be schooled in cultural relativism so that they do not mistakenly assume that unfamiliar thoughts, feelings and behaviors are inferior to those that are familiar.
In summary, when social life is structured so that interaction among people from different backgrounds and cultures occurs routinely, when different lifestyles are generally viewed as interesting rather than as threatening, and when diverse friendship networks are commonplace, friendship could potentially change the social order rather than simply reproduce it.
Rebecca G. Adams is professor of sociology at the University of North Carolina at Greensboro. She has written and edited several books on friendship, including Placing Friendship in Context, with Graham Allan.
