Book contents
- Critical Friendship in the Modern World
- Advances in Personal Relationships
- Critical Friendship in the Modern World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Critical Intimacies, Differences, and Ruptures
- 1 Critical Friendships Revisited
- 2 Youth–Adult Intergenerational Friendships
- 3 Complaint and Friendship
- 4 What Makes Difficult Friendships Persist? Justifying the “Good Enough Friend”
- Part II Critical Sociabilities beyond the Private
- Part III Critical Relational Junctures
- Part IV Afterword
- Index
- References
3 - Complaint and Friendship
Navigating Shifting Inclusions
from Part I - Critical Intimacies, Differences, and Ruptures
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 27 February 2026
Book contents
- Critical Friendship in the Modern World
- Advances in Personal Relationships
- Critical Friendship in the Modern World
- Copyright page
- Contents
- Contributors
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part I Critical Intimacies, Differences, and Ruptures
- 1 Critical Friendships Revisited
- 2 Youth–Adult Intergenerational Friendships
- 3 Complaint and Friendship
- 4 What Makes Difficult Friendships Persist? Justifying the “Good Enough Friend”
- Part II Critical Sociabilities beyond the Private
- Part III Critical Relational Junctures
- Part IV Afterword
- Index
- References
Summary
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.
Keywords
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- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Critical Friendship in the Modern World , pp. 60 - 77Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2026
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