Friendship and the social self in business success literature

Abstract

What can we learn about the cultural meanings of friendship and personal bonds by turning to popular business success literature? Can it help to make sense of the new social spirit of capitalism? Social theory still takes as its object of criticism the bounded, autonomous, liberal subject, yet in the new business success literature, one finds instead a social conception of the person and a celebration of values like community, trust and reciprocity. Critical assessments of homo economicus are being incorporated into the success literature, often by cribbing from scholarly critique that has long invoked friendship as a counterpoint to instrumental relations of capitalism. We argue that in spite of these broad cultural shifts in ideas around what makes for successful business people, the view of friendship and selfhood advanced in the success literature gets caught in its own contradictions. The incorporation of friendship and social conceptions of the self into business success literature raises questions about how best to develop a relevant and critical concept of friendship in contemporary cultural and social theory.

Keywords

Friendship networking personhood self-help spirit of capitalism

In this article, we address the cultural meanings of personal relationships, particularly friendships, and we do so by treating discourses of friendship in relation to the new social spirit of capitalism (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007). Our strategy is to turn to popular advice books in the business success literature, particularly books on networking. In the 1990s and 2000s, just as the concept of networks was becoming important for social science theorizing (e.g. Castells, 2009), a number of popular books appeared that offer practical advice for networking and for building friendships and other relationships as professional resources. Regardless of what one thinks of these books (one colleague’s response to our plan to study networking books was ‘blah, how gross!’), they provide a valuable resource for understanding the cultural meanings of personal relations today. Indeed, success literature is a site where the self-help genre and modern therapeutic culture find expression in contemporary work and personal life (see also Illouz, 2008; McGee, 2005; Mäkinen, 2015; Tiaynen-Qadir and Salmenniemi, 2017).

Success literature may aim to offer advice on how best to make and exploit connections, but our interest is less in the advice itself than in the moral languages and cultural ideals that underlie it. How do these books conceive of the value and meaning of friendship and personal ties at work? What notions of selfhood and personhood underlie the advice offered? How do the authors conceive of notions of community, generosity and commitment, particularly as these manifest under the conditions of market capitalism and the competitive world of work and business? We asked how the authors draw new moral distinctions between those who succeed and those who fail (or who simply remain mediocre without ever developing their talents). What qualities, according to this literature, must people possess to succeed in the world of work today?

We approach success literature as a cultural resource (Swidler, 1986) that provides one access point to a new moral landscape of personhood, social bonds and connecting with others in personal and professional activities today. That the new success literature celebrates the value and meanings of friendships and other personal connections raises a number of key theoretical issues related to contemporary debates on capitalism and its ‘new spirit’ (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007).

Curiously, for books so blatantly about the instrumental use of personal connections and so focused on impression management, one overriding theme is the need for authenticity and transparency in social relations. Yet perhaps this is not surprising since the success literature aims to rescue ‘networking’ from its associations with superficial instrumentality. These authors want to elevate networking to the level of genuine connections and ‘real’ friendships that they argue form a meaningful life. Perhaps more surprising is the kind of person success literature authors disparage. Indeed, these authors do not promote the virtues of a calculating, self-interested subject who leaves behind her personal ties when entering the world of business. The authors we studied are as hostile to this figure as any of the great sociological critics of utilitarian individualism and homo economicus. According to the success books, the lonely modern subject is yesterday’s figure and an example of the new loser, the person who fails because they are unable or unwilling to adapt to the new ‘social’ basis of contemporary capitalism. What this person lacks is the skill set for appreciating and establishing authentic connections with others. Success today, according to the books we consulted, requires a will to connect and a talent for sociability, as well as an attitude that is less calculating and more attuned to the reciprocity that networked forms of work require. Strikingly, the new success literature, in emphasizing the social basis of personhood and the collective nature of exchange, shares more with Marcel Mauss (1967 [1925]) on reciprocity and personhood than with classical works of modern economic theory. In a thoroughly Maussian way, Keith Ferrazzi (2009) opens Who’s Got Your Back with the epigraph, ‘A person is a person through other persons’ (p. 1), and advocates a view of the self as relational and ‘defined by other people’ (p. 37). While the sociological and anthropological literature on personhood in no way negates the possibility that the social self can be strategic (e.g. Eramian, 2018; Neumark, 2017), the selfhood promoted in the success literature is based on the opposition between an individuated, calculating economic actor and a relational subject authentically enmeshed in friendships with professional contacts. And yet, as we argue, even as the success literature celebrates the social self, it can never entirely dispense with the calculating, self-interested subject. Both continue to operate as moral and cultural categories that success authors draw on as they see fit. As such, this literature ultimately gets caught in its own contradictions around what kinds of persons its readers should strive to be. Even as the success literature promotes the social self by cribbing from sociological critiques of homo economicus, it remains thoroughly unsociological, because the sources of success and failure in business remain remarkably personal.

Thinking about the place of friendship in the business success literature allows us to consider the meaning of personal bonds in light of what Boltanski and Chiapello (2007) call the new spirit of capitalism. This is a social spirit that celebrates personal connectedness through networking and forms of sociability that extend beyond the traditional boundaries of the firm. Understanding the role of friendship ideals and practices in contemporary capitalism provides a much-needed perspective on the cultural meanings of personal bonds and a richer, more nuanced account of friendship than one currently finds in contemporary social and political theory. Contemporary theories of friendship, particularly various neo-Aristotelian and neo-Tocquevillian approaches, idealize friendship as a relationship characterized by ethical norms of equality, freedom and trust (Allen, 2004; Derrida, 1997; Devere and Smith, 2010; Schwarzenbach, 2009). Friendship, from this perspective, appears not only as a good to be promoted, but also as a philosophical construct that can be harnessed to the work of social criticism, in particular, critique of the lonely modern subject. The problem, however, is that the personal world of friendships is thought to be at odds with and the solution to the dominant tendencies of modern capitalist societies: indifference, unbounded accumulation and the ruthless pursuit of self-interest over collective goods. In taking such a stance, contemporary approaches to friendship in social and political thought risk continuing a long tradition where the personal and the economic are believed to constitute separate and ‘hostile worlds’ (Zelizer, 2005). While scholars have troubled the distinction between public and private, between personal solidarities and economic rationalities and between calculating individuals and social selves (e.g. Cooper, 2017; Illouz, 2007; Zelizer, 2005), business success authors’ blending of the personal and the economic raises key questions for scholars of modern personal and political life: what if today’s friendship ideals are not counter to the modern economic subject but its very modus operandi? What would that mean for the place of friendship in contemporary social theory?

To clarify, we do not suggest that approaches to friendship that emphasize its norms are simply mistaken, and elsewhere we have argued for the value of addressing such norms (Mallory and Carlson, 2014). But what we do argue for in this article is the need for a richer approach, one not so beholden to the common sense distinction between economic and personal life. From the point of view of classical works such as Aristotle’s account of friendship, it is easy to see friendship as a lost good in need of recovery to overcome the excesses of individualism (e.g. Bellah et al., 1985: 115–118). But from the perspectives in the success literature we consulted, friendship looks less like a lost good than a mode of sociability easily adaptable to capitalism’s new social spirit. In an era of networked or liquid sociality, the informality of friendships is well suited to a world where bonds cut across institutional contexts and embody qualities that are both public and private, personal and professional, instrumental and expressive. The confluence of friendship with capitalism’s social spirit does, at the very least, suggest we should be cautious about its theoretical celebration as a source of ethical norms that inherently challenge the excesses of homo economicus. Such a confluence also invites us to reflect on the symbolic meanings of friendship and the multiple and contradictory ways those meanings can be mobilized in scholarly and popular discourse. Hence our core argument: that contradictory visions of selfhood underlie the view of the person in the new success literature, a tension that shows how this literature never fully absorbs the critique of homo economicus because of its persistently asocial view of what makes people successful in business.

We emphasize that what follows is a study of discourses of friendship – that is, ways of thinking and talking about friendship (Carrier, 1999: 22; Miller, 2018) – and not of friendships per se. Kurth (1970) draws an important distinction between friendship and friendly relations, and it may well be that most actual business networks are composed of mere friendly relations and other weak ties, rather than of deep friendships. But in our view, this makes the success literature’s incorporation of discourses of friendship all the more fascinating, precisely because the discourse of authentic friendship can be put to work as a cultural resource in a field generally defined by instrumental contacts and friendliness rather than friendship.

We develop our argument in three parts. First, we outline the place of friendship in social and political theory and the reasons theorists are attracted to its critical potential. Second, we discuss our research methods and two themes we found in our analysis of business success literature: (1) the celebration of networking as authentic friendship and (2) an emphasis on social personhood, where we noted a tension between individuated and relational selfhood. Third, we conclude with what our findings mean for the place of friendship in contemporary social and cultural theory.

Friendship and the lonely modern subject

Before turning to our analysis of the new success literature, we track the cultural transformations of friendship as it moves from a critical ethical ideal at odds with the contractual world of economic exchange to a core ideal of the new spirit of capitalism. The success books we consulted stake their claim to relevance and originality by proclaiming a new social landscape for work and business where old ways of thinking and acting no longer work. Most crucially, they reject the long-standing cultural tradition that posits an opposition between personal solidarities and economic rationalities (Illouz, 2007; Zelizer, 2005). The authors claim to be guides to a new world of work premised on the confluence of personal bonds and economic principles, where the boundaries between public and private, personal and professional, and the useful contact and genuine friend become blurred. But for any of this blurring to seem novel, we must consider the long-standing belief that personal bonds and economic relationships are organized around incompatible principles. While scholars like Illouz (2007), Cooper (2017) and Zelizer (2005) are critical of this belief, they stress its ongoing power as a moral and cultural framework, which is why it demands attention here.

In the modern classics of social and political theory, friendship is almost universally understood as a private and personal relationship, a social bond developed at a distance from and at odds with the public world of politics and economics. Adam Smith, for example, distinguishes sharply between the sympathy that animates friendship and the self-interested motives of market exchange (Silver, 1990; Smith, 1981 [1776]: 26–27). For Smith, the very separation of the personal and the economic is what purifies each relation, allowing each to operate more fully in accordance with its own principles. Other writers stress that there is a deep antagonism between the ideals of friendship and the broader social world. Rousseau, for example, argues that authentic friendship is not possible in a bourgeois society, and he draws heavily on friendship ideals in his social criticism. In Rousseau’s view, the people of the newly emerging bourgeois society were too alienated both from each other and from their own authentic selves to be capable of true friendship (Berman, 2009; Rousseau, 1953 [1782/1798)]. In the 19th century, a version of this Rousseauean view became particularly influential and formed the basis for a powerful cultural narrative: industrial capitalism was driving a breakdown of social bonds and leaving no connections between people other than a cold ‘cash nexus’ (Mazlish, 1989).

The 19th century gendered distinction between a private, feminine domestic sphere and a public, male instrumental sphere further embedded the idea of a separate personal sphere at odds with the market (Zelizer, 2005: 24). This view still shapes gendered ideas about family, relationships, work and markets even though critics reject the strict division between public and private. Scholars such as Cooper (2017) argue that family has never been simply external to the market. Likewise, Illouz (2007: 15–18) describes how psychologists’ entry into the field of management in the 1920s fused the values of personal and public life by producing the figure of homo sentimentalis, with its ‘feminine’ ethic of intimate connection that ‘softened’ the traditional masculinity of the firm.

The point we want to stress is that, in spite of scholarly work that unsettles the distinction, the cultural meanings of friendship have been shaped by the opposition of friendship to market relations. Friendship acquires its symbolic significance in modern culture because the friend stands in contrast to the disembedded, calculating figure of homo economicus, who makes and breaks bonds to advance self-interest in a way ‘uncorrupted’ by affection. The contrast with market exchange is part of what lends friendship its idealized status as a warm bond of commitment in modern social theory. In the works of sociologists and social theorists, friendships are generally understood as personal relations formed on the basis of choice, and as bonds in which friends value and recognize each other for who they are as persons, rather than for instrumental reasons. As sociologists have clarified (e.g. Allan, 1989; Spencer and Pahl, 2006), these idealized representations of friendship are not accurate descriptions of what flesh-and-blood friendships are typically like in practice. However, the cultural ideals do constitute what we can call friendship’s imaginary – that is, the shared ideals, meanings and symbols that inform how people think about or imagine friendships, how they are ‘thought of, longed for, argued over, betrayed, fought for, and negotiated’ (Illouz, 2007: 7). In its association with ideals of freedom, equality and justice, friendship would seem to be a model of democratic relationships. Indeed, Giddens (1991: 87–98) describes friendship as a form of the ‘pure relationship’, and many other scholars have turned to friendship because they see it as a rich source of ethical norms for theorizing social solidarity between citizens and strangers (e.g. Allen, 2004; Devere and Smith, 2010; Schwarzenbach, 2009).

In a similar vein, Devere and Smith (2010) argue that contemporary theorists turn to friendship because it ‘allows us to see again the connective tissue that ties persons to persons and motivates our commitment and adherence to values such as justice, democracy and mutual concern’ (p. 352). In a classic example, Bellah et al. argue that the classical meaning of friendship – its connection to morality and the idea of the public good that one finds, for example, in Aristotle – is now threatened by the rise of a national competitive occupational structure. With the rise of modern individualism and competitive relations at work, ‘“[f]riendliness” became almost compulsory as a means of assuaging the difficulties of these interactions, while friendship in the classical sense became more and more difficult’ (Bellah et al., 1985: 118). In a context in which people mainly seek ‘their own private good or the good of the organizations that [employ] them’ (Bellah et al., 1985: 118), it is more difficult for people to ‘understand the moral meaning that was once given to such relationships’ as friendship (Bellah et al., 1985: 115). In short, the normative meanings of friendship are currently driving much of the scholarly interest in friendship, and they are the source of what scholars see as its rich critical potential.

What is important for our purposes is that the same idealized qualities of friendship that theorists emphasize as counter-forces to the excesses of capitalist relations are also called upon by success literature authors to bolster the new social spirit of capitalism. Cultural ideals, like moral discourses of friendship, can be used by different people and for different purposes, including both critical scholars and business success authors. But this mobility of the language of friendship does raise questions about its ongoing critical potential. With this in mind, we turn now to representations of friendship in popular business success literature.

Success literature and capitalism’s new social spirit

Our categories, particularly ‘success literature’, deserve some explanation. Business success literature includes topics such as creativity, habits, decision making and leadership styles. Our interest, however, is in success books that specifically offer advice on the use of relationships to succeed at work. There are some unique characteristics and aims of these books, but they should be understood both within the wider self-help genre and in relationship to the much longer tradition of writing about relationships at work. As McGee (2005: 4, 18) argues about the self-help genre, the success literature has the defining characteristics of seeing its readers as personally inadequate and offering inspirational calls to self-improvement – in this case, to promote strong personal ties and greater economic success. The writing on work relationships is perhaps best characterized by Carnegie’s (1936) notion that personal advancement depends on getting along with others. However, as we discuss below, one newer aspect of the books we consulted is the emphasis on the social self and authentic connections. Unlike in Carnegie (1936: 52), today’s success authors underscore that those only out for themselves or who develop ties only to better ‘handle’ others are doomed to fail in work and in life.

Our approach to studying success literature was to develop a broad familiarity with success literature while ensuring analytical depth by studying a smaller number of books in detail. We consulted the New York Times bestseller lists, read blog posts and relevant magazine articles, consulted library catalogues and searched Amazon.com. We chose our smaller sample by searching the New York Times bestseller lists from 1997 to 2017 in the non-fiction, business and advice categories, and we identified bestselling books that offer advice on how to use personal relationships for success at work. Using these lists, we compiled a list of 25 titles. Of those books we selected six for in-depth analysis, focusing on their rhetorical strategies and their definitions of personhood, the social bond and success. We also kept in mind Arlie Hochschild’s (2003) strategy in her study of self-help literature of paying attention to ‘magnified moments’ (p. 14), that is, stories about high points and low points used to dramatically emphasize an idea. The selected books were Jack Carew’s The Mentor (1998), Patrick Lencioni’s The Five Dysfunctions of a Team (2002), Logan et al.’s Tribal Leadership (2008), Keith Ferrazzi’s Who’s Got Your Back (2009), a follow-up to his influential Never Eat Alone (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014 [2005]) and Adam Grant’s Give and Take (2013). While these books constitute our sample, our discussion is supplemented with references to other examples from the genre.

Networks as authentic friendships: ‘strive to deepen every friendship’

What we find in contemporary business success literature is that the modern economic subject is not particularly lonely, or shouldn’t be, at least. It is impossible, our authors argue, to be successful if you do not care for your business relationships such that each transaction can be a win-win. And this win needs to be more than economic. It needs to be a relational success. Success book authors are typically defensive about the concept of networking and its dismissal as instrumental glad-handing. As Ferrazzi and Raz write in Never Eat Alone, we are in ‘an entirely new era of business’, and ‘“Networking,” once a dirty word, has become the lingua franca of our times’ (2014: xiv). Indeed, this is precisely why they turn to the discourse of authentic friendship to make networking admirable. Never Eat Alone speaks the language of capitalism’s critics, and argues for a business ethic based on rich social bonds. The personal and the professional are not ‘hostile worlds’, but productively entangled aspects of a fundamental human sociality in which our relations may be useful, but they are also part of the good life. In Who’s Got Your Back Ferrazzi (2009) pushes this line even further as the result of a discovery – in one of those ‘magnified moments’ (Hochschild, 2003: 14) – that one needs not just networks, but also a set of close friends if one is to be successful, ‘the kind of close, deep relationships with a few key people who would do whatever it took to make sure I never failed, and for whom I would do the same’ (Ferrazzi, 2009: 13, emphasis in original). These genuine friendships are opposed to a variant of the ‘new loser’ – what Ferrazzi and Raz (2014 [2005]) call the ‘networking jerk’. This is the stereotypical ‘hyper-contact-builder’ and ‘card counter’ who ‘fails to grasp the nuances of authentic connecting’ and who does not ‘know the first thing about creating meaningful relationships’ (p. 58).

In the new literature on networking, cultivating positive relationships is about cultivating authenticity. You have to want to make relationships and genuinely be useful to others for its own sake. Otherwise your relations won’t be useful! Indeed, even in the infamously aggressive field of sales, intimate relations are described as fundamental. Jack Carew’s The Mentor (1998) is emblematic in this regard. The long-term key to successful selling, Carew argues, is true friendship. Rather than emphasizing hard-sells and manipulative techniques of closing deals, Carew writes,

… when you are very open and trusting with another person, your two souls are connected. This is what they call anam cara – a friendship so strong that when you are blessed with it, the bond of two committed people magnifies and multiplies the potential for growth and prosperity. (p. 26)

Genuine connections, for Carew, are opposed to the calculation behind neoliberal models of cost cutting and individual profit seeking. Carew (1998) unloads a blistering critique of late 20th-century economic ideology:

Hatchet men and women have come in and chopped up enterprises into new and more streamlined business models. And in the process, some of the older parts of the original model have been discarded, tossed on the junk heap. Our heroes – and their wisdom – are gone. Some of us have no mentors. (p. iii)

For Carew, positive long-term human relationships are at the heart of economic life. Professional networks include both mentoring relations within businesses and deep friendships with clients and customers. Carew (1998) argues that the true spirit of sales is to ‘Strive to deepen every friendship’ (p. 30).

Patrick Lencioni, author of a bestselling series on leadership and teamwork, argues that functional teams have five basic behaviours, ones that sound a lot like those we often hear applied to life partnerships. Functional teams (1) trust each other, (2) openly argue with each other, (3) commit to plans and decisions, (4) hold each other accountable and (5) focus on successfully completing the collective project (Lencioni, 2002: 189–190). However, while Carew (1998), for whom every person is a potential buyer, suggests that we should strengthen every relationship (p. 30), Lencioni emphasizes ‘drawing the line’ between functional and dysfunctional relationships. In his ‘leadership fable’, much of the plot tension involves the question of who does not belong on the board. And who does not belong? The isolated individual, the new loser who tries to go it alone, unable or unwilling to form cooperative relationships. J.R., the first character in the fable to quit the corporate board claimed that ‘he just didn’t want to waste any more of his time at off-site meetings working out people’s personal problems’ (Lencioni, 2002: 128). Yet for Lencioni, J.R. has missed the point. By contrast, Kathryn, the stern but caring CEO in this business fable, contends that the personal is good business. Indeed, the second to leave, Mikey, the director of marketing, also fails to realize the value of close relationships in the workplace. One of Mikey’s worst habits, according to Lencioni, is rolling her eyes (Lencioni, 2002: 21) during meetings, a dysfunctional strategy that prevents constructive disagreement. In Lencioni’s analysis, the long-term prognosis is bleak for anyone unable to build trust and connection at work.

In spite of their divergences, Lencioni and Carew both emphasize the importance of positive and long-term social bonds to business success. This view is strongly supported by Adam Grant’s Give and Take (2013), which emphasizes the importance of long-term social investments made with no guarantee of economic returns, and Logan et al.’s Tribal Leadership (2008). Logan et al. (2008) argue for a dialectical relationship between leaders and social networks, rejecting the idea of self-made men and women in favour of underlying social and cultural ‘tribal dynamics’ (p. 8). However, rather than critiquing economic tribalism as corruption, Logan et al. celebrate the economic and social value produced by building strong social networks. In the stages of development into a successful business leader, the final two stages involve transcending ego-driven orientations and committing to collective goals. Logan et al. write that ‘“I” language is out, and “we” language is in’ (p. 125). Indeed, the fundamental epiphany (Logan et al. describe their entire system of stages as epiphanies) is of our basic sociality: ‘I Am Because We Are’ (p. 125). Likewise, Grant (2013) writes that givers, who have the social faith to contribute to the success of others without calculating the returns, are more successful in the long-run than either manipulative takers, or the socially more common matchers, who follow the tit for tat norm of reciprocity (p. 45).

Building authentic bonds in business is not just for the extroverted and outgoing, either. Devora Zack’s Networking for People Who Hate Networking (2010) also aims to change the negative image of networking as cynical manipulation. Zack (2010) emphasizes the importance of authenticity to networking, since ‘The more authentic you are, the more resilient and valuable networks you create’ (p. 4). She emphasizes the power of introverts to develop ‘meaningful connections’ (Zack, 2010: 41). Failures, this new success literature repeatedly emphasizes, are inauthentic and cynical about relationships.

‘We are the people we interact with’ / ‘greatness is anyone’s to seize’

As we argue, there is a fundamental tension in the view of social personhood presented in the new success literature. On one hand is the porous, composite self who is constituted by relationships with others. We are ‘not just connected to others’, write Ferrazzi and Raz, ‘We are the very product of the people and networks to which we are connected. Who you know determines who you are – how you feel, how you act, and what you achieve’ (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014: 17–18). Likewise, they write, ‘Your network is your destiny, a reality backed up by many studies in the newly emergent fields of social networking and social contagion theory. We are the people we interact with’ (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014: xiv). Ferrazzi and Raz might have been reading Marcel Mauss. In this way, Never Eat Alone works with a complex notion of social bonds formed through the giving and receiving of gifts. Rather than a tale of a Lockean individual painstakingly accumulating personal property, Never Eat Alone suggests that the secret to success is to realize that individualism is a myth, that selves are porous, and that people are composed of their relations.

On the other hand, Ferrazzi and Raz still tell the myth of how anyone can make it and become successful (or join the ‘club’ as they put it), which relies on the old vision of self-interested, bounded, economic subjects who make it on their own. Ferrazzi uses himself as an example, narrating his rise from mill worker’s son to successful businessman as rooted in learning ‘that the individual who knows the right people, for the right reasons, and utilizes the power of these relationships, can become a member of the “club,” whether he started out as a caddie or not’ (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014: 5). He tells his life story as an ‘if I can do this, anyone can’ narrative. In a dazzlingly asocial view of social capital, one that relies on the doggedly persistent individual whose success is theirs to pursue, Never Eat Alone goes so far as to say, ‘… generosity, authenticity, and a belief that greatness is anyone’s to seize, regardless of economic background, ethnicity, age, or gender, so long as they provide ever increasing value to others – are thankfully here to stay’ (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014 [2005]: xv–xvi).

While less explicit in its framing of the self as relational, Grant’s (2013) Givers and Takers likewise posits that there is a porous dimension of the person who thrives in the contemporary business world. Grant describes Peter Audet, a financial advisor, who explains his approach to business relationships: ‘The more I help out, the more successful I become. But I measure success in what it has done for the people around me’ (Grant, 2013: 256). What this suggests is a view of the self in which success is not contained within the bounded individual. Rather, success is derived from the success of others; therefore, the sources of success are located within the selves of others, too. Grant (2013) concludes his book with the notion that ‘what we do at work becomes a fundamental part of who we are’ (p. 259). Since for Grant, ‘what we do at work’ must be fundamentally about reciprocity with others, he is ultimately suggesting that those relationships, too, become part of who we are.

Similarly, there are passages where Carew sees people as fundamentally social and the social bond as an end in itself. Caring for friendships is not only not contradictory to selling something but it is also the very condition of a successful business relationship. Carew sees people as both salespeople and as called to connect with others. According to his model of personal growth ‘It’s the journey of life that shapes our souls’ (Carew, 1998: 36), and our relationships with others are fundamental to this process. Yet alongside this emphasis on sociality, Carew emphasizes the importance of individual choices, especially the importance of honesty. Every salesperson will face the temptation to lie, and if you make ‘the fatal error of lying to the customer’ (Carew, 1998: 36) the only way out is to repent and attempt to repair the relationship. In his emphasis on critical decisions and their long-term consequences for both business success and personal virtues, he incorporates a sociological sensitivity to the effects of the environment, but nonetheless also emphasizes the importance of personal habits cultivated by the individual (Carew, 1998: 49). Using a form common to the success literature, a fictional set of conversations between characters in a fictional business, Carew’s character ‘The Mentor’, intones ‘Selling will become the key to success, wealth, and prosperity in the twenty-first century. The skills of selling are no longer the exclusive domain of the sales professional. In this environment, everyone needs selling skills’ (Carew, 1998: 5–6). Here, however, the contradictory view of personhood in the success literature emerges, as sales are personal skills to be cultivated, ones that become all the more important as people must apply them to all spheres of life, including personal relationships. There is thus a current in Carew (1998) that suggests that success is a matter of personal initiative and treating the self as a personal project on which to work. He advises that effective salespeople learn to develop self-admiration (p. 45), and that in developing habits of success, ‘Perfection is not unrealistic’ (p. 54). Once again, even as the success literature promotes the virtues of the relational self, it can never quite shed the bounded, autonomous self.

Three critical, interrelated insights follow from these findings, each of which points to a decidedly – and paradoxically – asocial view of social life given these books’ valorization of sociality. First, the discourse underlying these books produces new distinctions concerning the character of those who fail or succeed. There are those with the skills to connect with others, and those who have not invested the time to develop them – those who are still duped by ‘John Wayne individualism’ (Ferrazzi and Raz, 2014: 7) as the road to success. From a sociological perspective, these new distinctions between the successful and the losers still have nothing to do with material inequality or the uneven distribution of capital, even while the books speak the language of social capital. Indeed, Ferrazzi and Raz (2014) reject a sociological understanding of social capital by insisting that ‘success in golf, and in life, ha[s] nothing to do with class’ (p. 6). Social capital in these books is a question of personal character and skills. It is an unsociological social capital that lacks the critical edge it has in Bourdieu’s (1986) work. Darcy Rezac et al. (2005), citing Robert Putnam, defines social capital in his bestseller on networking as ‘the connections amongst people and the good things created from those connections. The central premise of social capital is that our personal networks all have value’ (p. 11). In Rezac’s view, there is none of Bourdieu’s acidic assessment of the merit-free looping effects of social connections, and those without social capital have only themselves and their personal shortcomings to blame. Thus, the new social spirit of capitalism ultimately fosters obliviousness to the social. It absorbs 20th-century social criticism of capitalism and drains it of its critical potential.

Second, the business success literature promotes an asocial view of social life by locating personal and professional failings within the person. While many critical social theorists have long opposed warm personal relations of friendship to cold, impersonal economic relations, what the business success literature demonstrates – perhaps unintentionally – is that friendship is characterized by a tension between affectionate and instrumental relations. Indeed, we can genuinely like our friends and value them in and of themselves, all the while finding them useful, whether for moral support, material assistance or connections to others. In practice, we rely on our friends, even as we might deny that their usefulness is the primary reason we befriend them. But where the business success literature falters in what might otherwise be a decidedly sociological argument about the dialectic of affection and instrumentality (Rawlins, 2008) is that it does not treat this duality of friendship as a structural tension. Rather, it celebrates the unification of the personal and the professional and imagines a purely symbiotic relation between them wherein better friendships make for greater economic prosperity and vice versa. The problem is, the logical extension of this perspective is that any personal strife in work friendships is not rooted in the structural contradictions of friendship, but in the shortcomings of the people involved. For example, if coworker-friends argue over whether they owe each other respect for work deadlines or the slack one cuts a friend if she is late, this is not seen as a structural problem of the dualities of the relationship, but instead underdeveloped personal skills for merging the personal and the professional into productive, pleasurable ties. Again, the result is that any lack of success at work or in personal life is located in the self, this time, specifically in the failure to resolve the structural tension between affectionate sentiment and instrumental networks in personal relationships.

Third, and notwithstanding the business success literature’s relentless critique of the disconnected, self-interested, modern subject, the basic assumptions underlying these books suggest that their perspectives may not reject the autonomous, bounded individual as much as their advice claims. Indeed, our central argument is that the discrete, individual subject is still alive and well in this literature, because the ultimate source of success and failure remains the inner qualities of the person – in this case, capacities for overcoming one’s mercenary economic interest and for fostering affectionate bonds with one’s network. Just as with the lonely, modern subject, in the business success literature these capacities remain cultivated first and foremost by the individual, but this time inflected with a relational porousness in which people need to guard against ‘negative’ people in their lives and seek out a ‘positive’ entourage. In other words, while the success literature has endeavoured to replace the lonely, modern subject with the social-relational person, what we suggest is that the individuated person with interior sources of selfhood nonetheless persists. And here, since success at work and personal life are now inseparable, personal failings are perhaps redoubled now that individuals are responsible not only for their shortcomings at work but also for lacking the wherewithal to cultivate genuine friendships. Perhaps the self the business success literature promotes is less a pure expression of the Maussian person than it is the autonomous individual subject in the clothing of the social self.

What these three insights show is that even as the success literature stakes its importance on a novel blending of economic and personal life, it is part of a larger modern phenomenon in which putative alternatives to market values, like family values or counter-culture, are harnessed to the market’s service (Cooper, 2017; Frank, 1997). For example, just as friendship does not stand outside of market relations, Rottenberg (2014) notes that feminist critique has been absorbed into neoliberal directives to women to calculate their ideal ‘work-life balance’ and celebrate the merging of public and private life as emancipatory (p. 429). In sum, it is precisely the confounding of personal and professional worlds that lets capitalism absorb its own critiques (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2007): in imagining a seamless unity of personal and professional life, success literature makes the tensions between these spheres of life vanish.

Conclusion

We have suggested that what attracts scholars to friendship are the ways its idealized ethical qualities – such as trust, reciprocity, equality and affection – provide an alternative to the contractual and instrumental bonds of homo economicus. The problem, however, is that business success literature authors offer their own critique of what they see as the outdated figure of homo economicus, and they draw on the discourse of friendship to do so. The problem for scholars interested in friendship for its critical potential, for the alternative it provides to instrumental capitalistic relations, is that the authors of success literature are now using the very ideals of friendship to bolster the new social spirit of capitalism. In this context, does the discourse of friendship still retain its critical potential in social theory? We believe it can, especially if social theorists are able to develop a richer analytical concept of friendship. The key to doing so, in our view, is to move beyond the opposition between ideals and realities of friendship since the ideals of friendship only exist when and as they circulate in everyday life and its talk. In this view, friendship can instead be understood first as a cultural resource that people can put to different uses and second, as a set of constitutive tensions, practices and relational forms.

Some might suggest that the place of friendship in business success literature is not ‘real’ friendship at all, but only an impoverished, corrupted version of it, and yet more evidence of the notion from social theory that friendship is a lost ideal in need of recovery. As Heaphy and Davies (2012) have argued, however, one major problem with contemporary scholarship on friendship is that it takes an uncritical attitude to friendship ideals. As they put it, scholars often treat ‘idealised friendships as the answer to the problematic realities of other relational forms’ (Heaphy and Davies, 2012: 312). The opposition between friendship ideals and lived realities can easily lead scholars to conclude that the ideals are at best yet unrealized in real people’s lives, at worst, false and disconnected from life ‘on the ground’. Yet instead of asking whether or not those ideals are ‘accurate’ or what ‘real’ versus ‘corrupted’ friendship is, our approach has been instead to ask what people can do with idealized discourses of friendship.

What interests us about business success literature is it is one case in which people do things with friendship ideals, or draw on them as cultural resources. When the authors of success literature invoke the discourse of friendship, they are doing so not because they are misinformed about the philosophical tradition, but because they recognize a discourse that is in some way useful to the problems at hand. In particular, what these authors are doing is trying to rescue the cynical view of networking by re-envisioning its practice as a form of friendship. They are turning to friendship to make a set of bonds that could be criticized as self-serving appear virtuous. In other words, the authors have done something unexpected, and from a theoretical perspective, paradoxical and contradictory: they blend affection and instrumentality in an optimistic way. In principle, there is nothing contradictory about both liking someone and finding them useful, although the success literature ignores the tensions that in concrete situations often make useful friendships troublesome. But our larger point here is that if some scholars turn to friendship as an aid in doing the work of critique, then we should not be surprised if others, like business success authors, turn to friendship to do the work of justification, and in this case, the work of justifying new capitalist forms of networked bonds. As Boltanski and Thévenot (2006) have argued, the same principles can be put to work both in critique and justification.

However, if the business success literature now makes the same critique of homo economicus that social theorists have advanced, is that critique still adequate? How do we respond? One way is to locate the central contradictions of friendship at the core of social analysis. Rather than imagining the social self – unlike the autonomous individual – as capable of ideal friendships free from strife, we can use the social self as a useful entry point into friendship’s inherent contradictions as it is practised in concrete lives. If the social self becomes a person through others, all the while enriching her success at work, what practical problems might this mode of sociality raise? Practices of friendship are constituted not only by the pleasures of fellow feeling, but are always also premised on managing the structural contradictions of the relationship. The tension between liking one’s friends and finding them useful is one of these constitutive tensions in the discourse of friendship, as business partners might seek personal affirmation through their friendship but always question if economic utility or genuine affection is the primary basis of their connection. And at what point does friendship become nepotism? Similarly, friendship is voluntary, yet anyone who has tried to end a friendship knows the countervailing pull of duty and loyalty. Indeed, what if a friend/business partner does something unethical? Does one choose the friend or cut ties to rescue one’s professional reputation? Friendship should be based on equality and reciprocity, but without keeping too careful an accounting of our exchanges lest we be accused of instrumentalism. Yet overlaps between friendship and business relations easily invite friends to calculate who has been gaining the most from their relationship. To do friendships, whether at work, in politics or in private life is a matter of navigating these and other tensions inherent to the relationship and its ideals. What we suggest, then, is that the critical potential of friendship can be recovered through attention to the uses of friendship discourse in everyday life – in other words, attention to how people try (and fail) to live up to friendship ideals, to how they use them as cultural ‘toolkits’ (Swidler, 1986) to make sense of their lives. Indeed, because those ideals are hopelessly contradictory, friendship is a relational form through which people learn the practical skills for negotiating broader contradictions of personal and political life, including affection and instrumentality, loyalty and freedom, choice and commitment, and public and the private. The critical potential comes from preserving and foregrounding these tensions and using them to understand real people’s friendships rather than ironing out those contradictions and treating friendship’s dualities as strictly symbiotic. Indeed, to do otherwise reproduces the classic sociological problem of treating issues much larger than one or two people as mere personal troubles – and more often than not – personal failings.

Footnotes

Acknowledgements

We thank Mike Christensen, Mervyn Horgan, Saara Liinamaa and the members of the Canadian Network for Critical Sociology for their feedback on earlier versions of this article. Thanks also to the editor, Jo Littler, and to the anonymous reviewers for their thoughtful comments and criticisms, which substantially improved the paper. Peter Karambelas provided valuable research assistance in the early stages of this project. An earlier version of this paper was presented at the annual conference of the Canadian Sociological Association.

Funding

The author(s) received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Biographical notes

Peter Mallory is an associate professor in the Department of Sociology at St. Francis Xavier University. His research focusses on social theory and personal life, and he has published articles on friendship in the works of Alexis de Tocqueville, Adam Smith, and Émile Durkheim.

Jesse Carlson is an assistant professor in the Department of Sociology at Trent University in Peterborough, Ontario, Canada. His research focusses on social theory and the sociology of morality.

Laura Eramian is a social anthropologist and an Assistant Professor in the Department of Sociology and Social Anthropology at Dalhousie University. Her research focusses on the anthropology of personhood and everyday social relationships. She is the author of Peaceful Selves: Personhood, Nationhood, and the Post-Conflict Moment in Rwanda (Berghahn Books 2018).

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