Friendship in the workplace is alternately approached as a resource to be leveraged or a liability to be managed. In leadership development, where practitioners carefully cultivate their subjectivities, appearing adequately self-aware and open-minded is valued highly. How do leadership development practitioners’ use of complaints in their workplace, in ways both formal and informal, serve as an affordance for friendship? Considering this example raises questions about what it means to make friendship useful at work and in other contexts, and it suggests that separating the “goods” of friendship from the “bads” is a misleading and problematic endeavor.

Across Europe, centre-left parties are a shadow of their former selves. This chapter argues for a voluntarist approach to understanding the left’s decline. It argues for the causal import of the dilution of the left’s traditional profile or “brand,” namely its shift to the centre on economic issues, the weakening of its class-based political appeals, and its growing association instead with ‘progressive’ positions on non-economic issues during the late twentieth and early twenty-first centuries. This transformation created a disjuncture between voters’ preferences on key issues and the policy options and political appeals offered by centre-left parties. The representation gap that emerged between centre-left parties and low-income, non-college-educated voters created an opportunity for other parties to capture such voters over time, particularly as new voters came into the system with very different views of what centre-left parties stood for. As a result, over the course of a generation right-populist parties replaced centre-left ones as the largest parties of low-income, non-college-educated voters in Western Europe.

Chronological age is a common feature in the organization of North American society. From institutional to everyday spaces and our cultural practices of association within these spaces, age segregation is the norm. Yet, intergenerationality persists in its various forms. One such space in which intergenerationality occurs is the skatepark, and one such form is that of organic intergenerational friendships forged between youth and adults. In this study, the phenomenon is explored through data gathered from eighteen semi-structured, on-site interviews with twenty participants at a skatepark in a mid-sized city in southwestern Ontario, Canada. Through these interviews, three main themes are identified: (1) making intergenerational friends at the skatepark, (2) practices of youth-adult intergenerational friendship, and (3) perceptions of youth-adult intergenerational friendship. These three themes contribute to the overall argument of the chapter that youth-adult intergenerational friendships simultaneously disrupt boundaries and patterns of age/generational differences in friendship while also reinforcing such differences in both subtle and explicit ways.

Even as friendship carries overwhelmingly positive connotations, the categories of “fair-weather friend” or “frenemy” indicate that less-than-ideal friendship is commonplace. What remains poorly understood is how people make sense of the persistence of their imperfect friendships. Drawing on studies of difficult friendships and friends who cohabitate, this chapter offers an interpretive perspective on how and why friendships that people characterize as difficult persist. Using the concept of the “good enough friend,” we unsettle ubiquitous yet simplistic directives of modern therapeutic culture to “cut off” difficult relationships. We argue that the potential for ease and difficulty are equally inherent to what friendship is, and that by attending to “difficult” ones and how people evaluate their worth, we can better understand how people navigate concord and conflict in personal life. We advance the intervention that a critical friendship must resist hierarchies of intimacy inherited from Western philosophical traditions that rank easy, pleasurable friendships as inherently “better” than ambivalent ones, which may also have core places in people’s lives.

The afterword synthesizes the chapters in this volume to draw out themes, lessons, and future directions and acknowledges the importance of the ethnographic approach of this work. We expand on the three themes of ideals in tension with practices, the shifting nature of acquaintanceship to friendship, and the enactment of public and private across space and place. We argue for three valuable insights gained from reading these chapters together. First, they point towards the importance of how people read our intentions, friendship performances, and relationships. Second, friendships impinge on our ontological security. Third, there are rhythms to connections across space. Interactions are temporally bound and accounting for the temporal is helpful in completing analyses of friendships. Ultimately, we show how these chapters sit at the intersection of critical theory and symbolic interaction. We also underscore that this volume marks not the end, but a beginning of a renewed research agenda on critical friendship, one that began with contributors who were mostly strangers but who are now mostly friends.

This chapter examines the history of social democracy as an ideology implemented by a strategy of incremental reforms. It considers the purely electoral prospects of social democratic parties and asks whether it matters that they are in office. It then summarizes the current situation of social democracy. Finally, thinking about the future, it focuses on reactions of this movement to the spectre of climate change.

Friendship is largely perceived as a private and highly positive relationship. By interrogating friendship performances undertaken by girls at school and on social media, this chapter illuminates the public and critical aspects of friendship. I draw on performative theory and the sociology of personal life to analyze data from two ethnographic studies, one conducted with girls in an elementary school in Israel and the other conducted with girls in an antiracist youth work organization in Scotland. I analyze the aims, content, and outcomes of friendship performances as well as the contexts that shape them. I argue that successful friendship performances strengthen and validate these relationships, especially in socially intensive settings, while failed performances reflect and lead to friendship difficulties and breakdowns. Moreover, as friendship is relatively uninstitutionalized and its obligations unclear, publicly performing friendship enables individuals to elucidate their desired friendship characteristics and try to live up to their demands.

Australia has often been a striking and fertile ground for experiments in social democracy. The Australian Labor Party (ALP) is one of the oldest members of the centre-left party family, although it is often overlooked in broader accounts of social democracy. This chapter considers the record of the ALP from 2016 to 2025, under two leaders: Bill Shorten (2013–2019) and Anthony Albanese (2019–). Under Bill Shorten, the party’s agenda can be described as ‘technocratic social democracy’. It developed a wide-ranging, redistributive, policy-rich approach, albeit often using indirect or ‘technocratic’ fixes to existing policy settings. It was an ambitious agenda that was, however, soundly rejected at the 2019 federal election. Following this defeat, the party began a policy reset under Antony Albanese, which is best captured as ‘thin’ or ‘new’ labourism. Albanese’s agenda was focussed on labourist goals, seeking material gains for specific sectors of the labour force. It undertook a range of practical measures, often with little fanfare or overarching narrative. Overall, these varieties of practical social democracy have entailed significant trade-offs, and the ALP faces future structural threats as it continues to redefine its historic mission.

This chapter examines how the Finnish Social Democratic Party (SDP) came to support the process of financial liberalization, while serving in a coalition government between 1987 and 1991. Financial liberalization is widely perceived as emblematic of a neoliberal turn in reformist politics. The chapter examines how a practical social democracy approach can shed light on the interaction between ideology, practical challenges, and coalitional imperatives that shaped policy-making and led to the SDP’s endorsement of financial liberalisation in Finland. It analyses these reforms in the context of the Finnish political economy and the development of social democratic economic policy. The chapter shows that financial liberalisation was debated extensively within the party and the government. The policy reforms were justified as a solution to key practical challenges, but also as a way for the SDP to promote traditional social democratic objectives. The chapter considers the implications of this case for understanding the embrace of markets by social democratic parties.

This contribution to understanding friendship as a distinct social relationship examines the distinction between friendship dyads and groups of friends by focusing on the communicative dynamics of intimacy and discretion. Drawing on the work of Simmel and Luhmann, I argue that dyadic friendship supports intimate communication characterized by immediacy, mutual disclosure, and the suspension of self-consciousness. The addition of a third party, however, shifts interaction into public mode, requiring increased discretion and greater communicative management. I offer a formal account of how the number of participants alters the quality of interaction and suggest that while intimacy is not a constant feature of friendship, it nevertheless remains a constitutive potential. To conclude, I argue that groups of friends can be intimate social formations only insofar as endogenous, “private” dyadic bonds are formed.

The British Labour Party is unique among social democratic parties in the way that over the past generation programmatic change has, rather than being incremental, been sudden and sharp, taking the form of paradigm shifts, as the term is understood by Peter Hall. This brief survey of the party over the last thirty years uncovers four actual or attempted paradigm displacements under the leaderships of Tony Blair, Ed Miliband, Jeremy Corbyn, and Keir Starmer. The chapter argues that Labour’s propensity for paradigm shifts is due to two principal factors: fluctuations in social learning processes and instabilities in institutional settings, in particular the structure of power within the party. It finds that the learning process, while to a degree evidence-based, is inherently both subjective and political, with much depending on how problems are framed and the lessons of the past interpreted. But the most important variable explaining why Labour is prone to a greater extent than other social democratic parties to ideological volatility is the fluidity of its power structure which, in turn, reflects its institutional structure, especially its pluralist and federal character.

Agriculture has been an unloved policy area in the history of Germany’s Social Democratic Party (SPD). Already lying at the intersection of interest-based constituency politics, party ideology, electioneering, fiscal and trade policy, economics, welfare, and government coalition-making, farm policy became even more complicated when the geopolitical question of European agricultural integration arose in the 1950s. Throughout, the SPD remained concerned that farmers could rise against democracy if their demands went unmet. The SPD’s policy preference was for economic rationalisation and low agricultural tariffs, mitigated by an active (but not excessive) welfare policy for farmers. Instead, government support for farmers and agricultural protectionism actually increased under SPD-led governments in the 1920s and again in 1969–1974. Political objectives to attract farm support and lessen rural antagonism towards social democracy ran against the party’s policy preferences. In the exercise of practical social democracy, choices have to be made. This chapter argues that, in the end, agricultural policy proved to be a second-order policy. Party leadership bartered the SPD’s preferred agricultural policy away to gain the political breathing space they needed to carry on in government and implement first-order priorities that lay closer to their hearts.

This concluding chapter discusses the main contributions of the volume, notably the implications of adopting a practical approach to social democracy. It also considers the key analytical lessons from the chapters for understanding the evolution of reformist politics, policy-making as well as the role rhetoric, language, and ideology. It also reflects on the wider implications of this agenda by examining its relevance to other parts of the world, such as Latin America (Brazil) and East Central Europe (Poland), and other policy areas, notably immigration. The analysis implies that the core logic of practical social democracy could be applicable across a wide range of countries and policy areas, but it also highlights that the specific nature of the feasible trade-offs between governance, electoral, and organisational imperatives vary across such settings and over time, thereby contributing to the diversity of reformist parties and policies.