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

This article reexamines the social ecology of intimacy and some meanings we assign to 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. The concept of structural differentiation points to a historical process in which institutional structures move toward increasing complexity and functional specificity. Economic production, home maintenance, child rearing, health care, education, and leisure - all once fused together as home activities - separate from each other and become more autonomous and specialized. As people are then pulled outside the gemeinschaft to meet many of their needs, they enter a variety of social circles and life worlds. They grow more mobile and more individuated, even from other household members. The use of space becomes more privatized, reflecting this process of individuation. In households and at work, then, everyone craves a separate, private little niche.