"Impatient with popular and academic hand-wringing over 'prolonged adolescence' (or young people's unwillingness to grow up), Blatterer in this overdue sociological treatise on the changing nature of adulthood in Western society counters that such judgments unfairly draw on obsolete norms of adulthood... Blatterer's writing is eloquent...his arguments are well considered, important, and thought-provoking."- Choice

Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the "storm and stress" period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the...

Everyday Friendship conceptualises the lived experience of intimacy in a world in which the terms and conditions of love and friendship are increasingly unclear. Drawing on writing on friendship, love, and intimacy by such thinkers as Simmel and Kracauer, Elias, Goffman, Luhmann and Honneth, the book charts the modern meaning of intimacy and the freedoms it offers, as well as the continued challenges of entrenched gendered assumptions in everyday relations of affection, trust and respect. It shows that the analysis of the 'small world' of dyads can give important clues about society, and in...

In Friendship, Francesco Alberoni offers a wide-ranging analysis of intimacy. Traversing disciplines, he untangles the meanings of friendship from family and friendly relations, from love and passion and the everyday experiences of coupledom. Friendship is the just relationship. Rather than based on exchange, it is an encounter between two intimates that repudiates the logics of the market, the depersonalizing norms of modern bureaucracy and the objectives of collectivities whether they be couples or social movements. Intimate and just, friendship partakes of the world while resisting...