Since 1945, the practical solution to the Swedish Social Democratic Party’s ideological goals of ‘solidarity, equality and planning’ always tended to be yet another sweeping welfare state reform. Delivery was in keeping with the ideological rhetoric. However, increasingly the high taxes to support the reforms met with strong criticism from the party’s core blue-collar voters, disgruntled about marginal taxation and VAT. Yet, when in 1981 the party totally reformed its taxation policies by reducing marginal taxation, it infuriated key members and voters who felt that high-end earners benefitted unfairly. Moreover, the U-turn had knock-on practical effects on welfare state expansion. In 1982, Prime Minister Olof Palme stated that the welfare state could expand, ‘but not as a share of the total economy’. Suddenly, tax and welfare state ceilings had been put in place, with efficiency drives becoming increasingly necessary, leading to further U-turns when the party dropped most of its resistance to privatisations and to the marketisation of the welfare state. Yet the party’s rhetoric about the need for welfare state expansion and criticism of lower taxes remained intact. No longer does the delivery square with the rhetoric. Gradually, practical decisions have placed the party in an ideological dilemma.

The category of friendship called “friends and fun” popularized via gay sex/dating apps captures a pre-existing reality among queer people around the world: that friendships include a continuum of sexual, romantic, and sentimental affects and practices. In Beirut, this category takes on specific utility amidst power relations that define (un)acceptable ways for embodying intimate relations: it enables queer men to conceal their intimacies by adjusting their behaviors to suit the norms of male–male friendship. As queer men move their relationships from the privacy of the bedroom to the publicness of the street, they act like friends while holding contrasting sexual and romantic affects under the surface of these embodied practices. The chapter argues that “friends and fun” derives its meaning from the practices men undertake as an embodied response to the sexual and gendered exigencies of public space, thus showing how friendship practices and categories do not merely challenge, but also shore up power relations.

This chapter examines the character of British Labour as a reformist party. Drawing on work of United States diplomats reporting back to Washington, and the work of Egon Wertheimer, a social democratic journalist in London during the 1920s, alongside other sources, it advances an original perspective on Labour politics, one that is based around its empiricism, its antipathy to theory, and its insularity. It argues that such empiricism is grounded in the circumstances of its foundation, the decisions of key actors in its early years, and the wider context of British politics. In turn, such a practical outlook shaped the party’s insularity and general lack of concern with developments elsewhere. Focusing on the years of the Attlee government between 1945 and 1951 alongside other material, the chapter examines how this orientation shaped Labour politics. It asks whether the party can be considered ‘exceptional’ in comparison with European social democratic parties. It concludes that empiricism and insularity offer revealing insights into the Labour Party and its approach to politics, insights that have frequently been neglected in scholarly enquiry.

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.