Intimacy in the Public Realm: The Case of Co-workers

This article reexamines the social ecology of intimacy and some meanings we assign to public and private. Historically, structural differentiation turns the home world into a segregated compartment of society, but it similarly structures the “public” realm. Intimate refuges may then arise throughout the differentiated social structure, as people intermingle in functionally specific settings to pursue their purposes, and as they find or create private spaces to elaborate this intimacy. I use the General Social Survey and the Northern California Community Study to generate findings on co-workers. Finally, I note some advantages of conceptualizing intimacy, private worlds, and institutional locales as analytically distinct, and I consider how co-worker intimacy is an active, constructive process, whether it has conservative or transformative consequences.