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The Secret Lives of Friends

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The Public Life of Friendship

Part of the book series: Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life ((PSFL))

Abstract

The timing of women’s mass entry into paid work coincides with the evolution of industrial economies to the point where white-collar occupations predominate, where the biggest industries are in the service sector. Spatially this translates into open-plan offices, with ICTs and mobile phones on desks ‘always on’. Collectively, this creates a sense of being always visible, accessible and available. Women experience this time pressure and sense of being rushed most acutely because they bear the dual burden of domestic labour and paid work. However, workplace friends provide women (and all workers) with a ‘refuge from the glare of public life’, but it no longer does this from an institutionally separate private sphere, but from within the workplace itself.

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Notes

  1. 1.

    Banana Time (1959) was based on Donald Roy’s experience of working in a factory. It became one of the most highly cited ethnographic studies papers in organization and industrial sociology. Roy describes how industrial workers made work and workplaces more tolerable by building relationships and engaging in off-task acts of camaraderie to break up the day.

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  1. University of Sydney, Sydney, Australia

    Jennifer Wilkinson

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  1. Jennifer Wilkinson
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Correspondence to Jennifer Wilkinson .

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Wilkinson, J. (2019). The Secret Lives of Friends. In: The Public Life of Friendship . Palgrave Macmillan Studies in Family and Intimate Life. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03161-9_5

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  • DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-03161-9_5

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  • Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham

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