Blatterer, Harry, Everyday Friendships: Intimacy as Freedom in a Complex World.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
H arry Blatterer's Everyday Friendships makes a significant and original contribution to the scholarship on personal and intimate life.The book argues for renewed attention by sociologists to friendship, and to one of its forms in particular: friendship as an intimate and dyadic relation between two individuals.The study of friendship remains marginal in sociology, especially in comparison to familial, romantic, or erotic relations.Moreover, as Blatterer argues, those studies that do address friendship typically do not address its dyadic, intimate forms, but instead subsume friendships under broader rubrics such as networks, communities, or civil society.The problem with these approaches, according to Blatterer, is that friendship becomes a kind of "sinkhole" concept, a catchall term for a jumble of voluntary social bonds, ranging from close and intimate long-term bonds to the weak ties of acquaintances and instrumental contacts (6, 56).By contrast, Blatterer aims to develop a more analytically precise concept of friendship, one that distinguishes "the weak ties of friendly relations" from "the strong ties of friendship" (56).His approach is to treat friendship as an intimate relation, and to study it in relation to the historical development of the intimate sphere in Western modernity.Friendship, for Blatterer, is a bond based on trust, respect, and justice, and it is sustained by care, support and affection (5, 62).It is thus shaped by and instantiates-however unevenly or imperfectly-various normative ideals of modern intimacy.Most important among these ideals, for Blatterer, is freedom, which he understands as the ability to be oneself in the company of another, and to shape the terms of one's relationships relatively free from cultural prescription (6, 27).The source of friendship's relational freedom lies in what Blatterer calls its "institutional deficit" (65).While friendship is certainly a social relationship in the Weberian sense of a meaningful way of orienting to others, it is nonetheless not a full-fledged social institu-
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.002 | 0.007 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.002 | 0.002 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.005 | 0.017 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.007 | 0.010 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.004 |
| Research integrity | 0.003 | 0.004 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.006 | 0.001 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".