Harry Blatterer
Biographic Data
| ID | 223177 |
|---|---|
| NAME | Harry Blatterer |
| GIVEN NAMES | Harry |
| FAMILY NAME | Blatterer |
| SIGNATURE | BLATTERER H |
| AFFILIATIONS | Macquarie University |
| ORCID | 0000-0001-9532-9084 |
| VERIFIED | Yes |
| TOTAL WORKS | 23 |
| TOTAL CITATIONS | 62 |
| AUTHOR COUNT | 22 |
| EDITOR COUNT | 1 |
| FIRST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2005 |
| LATEST PUBLICATION YEAR | 2026 |
| H-INDEX | 5 |
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Reflections on Zygmunt Bauman: Visibility, privacy and prepositional sociology
This paper offers a critical reflection on Zygmunt Bauman's diagnosis of digital modernity, particularly his concern with the erosion of privacy in an era of confessional culture and performative self-disclosure. Engaging Bauman's work alongside thinkers such as Blumenberg, Honneth, Arendt and Thompson, it explores visibility as an anthropological and political condition. The paper fields the notion of ‘prepositional sociology’, inspired by Maria…
From systems to forms: Reconstructing Niklas Luhmann's approach to relationships
Niklas Luhmann's approach to relationships was ambivalent. While references to the word abound in his work, his systems theory renders 'relationship' redundant as key concept. This has made it difficult for Luhmannian theorists to describe social forms that endure beyond serial interactions. Attempts have been made to overcome this 'latency problem' by conceptualising relationships as social systems. Contending that by focusing on communication t…
Interpreter of culture, conveyor of feel: Peter Beilharz's musicality
Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the "storm and stress" period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey's end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imaginati…
Friendship and solidarity
This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. Th…
Do political theorists have friends? Towards a redefinition of political friendship
This article suggests a sensitising definition of political friendship with the view of using the concept in empirical research. I begin by identifying three tendencies in the recent literature on political friendship: (1) the tendency to ignore historical developments that rendered modern friendship an intimate relationship; (2) the construction of modern friendship as hermetically sealed in the private sphere; and (3) the conceptual conflation …
Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship
Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft ('On Friendship') and Gedanken über Freundschaft ('Thoughts on Friendship') exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in…
“This is Our Family. We do not Hide Who we are”: Stigma and Disclosure Decisions of Lesbian Parents in Australian Early Childhood Settings
This article discusses findings from a study that examined how lesbian parents make disclosure decisions in early childhood (EC) settings. Using an online survey, 62 lesbian parents in Australia shared their experiences of EC settings. Follow-up interviews with 13 parents enabled an in-depth exploration of their decisions. Disclosure in EC settings featured 3 themes: appraisal, resistance, and provocation. These parents used disclosure as a litmu…
Friendship, Recognition and Social Freedom: A Sociological Reconstruction
In Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional …
An Incomplete Dialectics? Rosa on the Good Life
Intimacy as freedom: Friendship, gender and everyday life
Friendship arguably offers itself as the freest of all human associations. A weakness of cultural prescription opens a terrain in which intimacy can be lived in a trust relationship that personifies equality, justice and respect. Friendship's 'relational freedom' enables the mutual development of selves; it is generative. Therein lies 'the beauty of friendship', as Agnes Heller has reminded us. But the freedom of intimacy is limited. Embedded in …
Odd Couples: Friendships at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation
Friendship's freedom and gendered limits
This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship's embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship's no…
Modern Privacy
Modern Privacies addresses emergent transformations of privacy in western societies from a multidisciplinary and international perspective. It examines social and cultural trends in new media, feminis
Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms
Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms
Friendship's Indecencies: Reflections On Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' and 'Decent and/or Civil Society
This essay brings together some lines of thought contained in Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' (2010) and 'Decent Society and/or Civil Society?' (2001), and, on that basis, explores possibilities for thinking about friendship in the context of contemporary social change. I begin by situating current problems concerning the semantics of friendship in their historical trajectory. I then go on to elaborate friendship's 'normative flexibility', th…
The Changing Semantics of Youth and Adulthood
This article analyses a contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults' personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of 'youth'. I begin by analysing the normative model 'standard adulthood' fr…
Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty: Redefining Contemporary Adulthood
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imaginati…
Adulthood: The Contemporary Redefinition of a Social Category
Social trends such as delayed or forfeited family formation, postponed home leaving and allegedly infantilising leisure practices are often marshalled in support of a long standing social scientific as well as popular assumption: successive generations take longer to reach adulthood. This article argues that this 'delayed adulthood thesis' is based on an anachronistic model of adulthood and goes on to suggest an alternative conception. Some origi…
Contemporary Adulthood: Reconceptualizing an Uncontested Category
Adulthood holds a paradoxical position in sociology. It is a central category insofar as it provides the unarticulated background to a majority of social enquiries, but it is largely defined by default as the taken-for-granted status of the social actor and the middle stage of life. Yet, the meaning of adulthood is rarely addressed directly. Those researchers who do, tend to note its transformation from a social to a psychological category. This …
Looking West: Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures
Contemporary Adulthood: Reconceptualizing an Uncontested Category
Adulthood holds a paradoxical position in sociology. It is a central category insofar as it provides the unarticulated background to a majority of social enquiries, but it is largely defined by default as the taken-for-granted status of the social actor and the middle stage of life. Yet, the meaning of adulthood is rarely addressed directly. Those researchers who do, tend to note its transformation from a social to a psychological category. This …
The Changing Semantics of Youth and Adulthood
This article analyses a contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults' personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of 'youth'. I begin by analysing the normative model 'standard adulthood' fr…
Adulthood: The Contemporary Redefinition of a Social Category
Social trends such as delayed or forfeited family formation, postponed home leaving and allegedly infantilising leisure practices are often marshalled in support of a long standing social scientific as well as popular assumption: successive generations take longer to reach adulthood. This article argues that this 'delayed adulthood thesis' is based on an anachronistic model of adulthood and goes on to suggest an alternative conception. Some origi…
Friendship and solidarity
This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. Th…
Friendship, Recognition and Social Freedom: A Sociological Reconstruction
In Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional …
Friendship's freedom and gendered limits
This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship's embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship's no…
Do political theorists have friends? Towards a redefinition of political friendship
This article suggests a sensitising definition of political friendship with the view of using the concept in empirical research. I begin by identifying three tendencies in the recent literature on political friendship: (1) the tendency to ignore historical developments that rendered modern friendship an intimate relationship; (2) the construction of modern friendship as hermetically sealed in the private sphere; and (3) the conceptual conflation …
Intimacy as freedom: Friendship, gender and everyday life
Friendship arguably offers itself as the freest of all human associations. A weakness of cultural prescription opens a terrain in which intimacy can be lived in a trust relationship that personifies equality, justice and respect. Friendship's 'relational freedom' enables the mutual development of selves; it is generative. Therein lies 'the beauty of friendship', as Agnes Heller has reminded us. But the freedom of intimacy is limited. Embedded in …
Friendship's Indecencies: Reflections On Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' and 'Decent and/or Civil Society
This essay brings together some lines of thought contained in Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' (2010) and 'Decent Society and/or Civil Society?' (2001), and, on that basis, explores possibilities for thinking about friendship in the context of contemporary social change. I begin by situating current problems concerning the semantics of friendship in their historical trajectory. I then go on to elaborate friendship's 'normative flexibility', th…
Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship
Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft ('On Friendship') and Gedanken über Freundschaft ('Thoughts on Friendship') exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in…
Odd Couples: Friendships at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation
Looking West: Cultural Globalization and Russian Youth Cultures
Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty: Redefining Contemporary Adulthood
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the “storm and stress” period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey’s end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imaginati…
Adulthood: The Contemporary Redefinition of a Social Category
Social trends such as delayed or forfeited family formation, postponed home leaving and allegedly infantilising leisure practices are often marshalled in support of a long standing social scientific as well as popular assumption: successive generations take longer to reach adulthood. This article argues that this 'delayed adulthood thesis' is based on an anachronistic model of adulthood and goes on to suggest an alternative conception. Some origi…
Contemporary Adulthood: Reconceptualizing an Uncontested Category
Adulthood holds a paradoxical position in sociology. It is a central category insofar as it provides the unarticulated background to a majority of social enquiries, but it is largely defined by default as the taken-for-granted status of the social actor and the middle stage of life. Yet, the meaning of adulthood is rarely addressed directly. Those researchers who do, tend to note its transformation from a social to a psychological category. This …
Modern Privacy
Modern Privacies addresses emergent transformations of privacy in western societies from a multidisciplinary and international perspective. It examines social and cultural trends in new media, feminis
Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms
Modern Privacy: Shifting Boundaries, New Forms
Friendship's Indecencies: Reflections On Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' and 'Decent and/or Civil Society
This essay brings together some lines of thought contained in Maria Markus's 'Lovers and Friends' (2010) and 'Decent Society and/or Civil Society?' (2001), and, on that basis, explores possibilities for thinking about friendship in the context of contemporary social change. I begin by situating current problems concerning the semantics of friendship in their historical trajectory. I then go on to elaborate friendship's 'normative flexibility', th…
The Changing Semantics of Youth and Adulthood
This article analyses a contradiction: while living up to a selective image of youth has become imperative for the maximization of life chances, doing so attracts the discursive misrecognition of young adults' personhoods. This cultural evaluation evinces a misapprehension of the meaning of adulthood whose increasing ambiguity is inseparable from changes in the semantics of 'youth'. I begin by analysing the normative model 'standard adulthood' fr…
Odd Couples: Friendships at the Intersection of Gender and Sexual Orientation
Friendship's freedom and gendered limits
This article elaborates the interactional freedom of friendship and its limits. It shows that friendship is marked by a normative freedom that makes it relatively resistant to reification, especially when compared to erotic love. It argues further, however, that due to friendship's embeddedness in the contemporary gender order, this freedom is limited. Having first outlined the freedom hypothesis, the article goes on to argue that friendship's no…
Intimacy as freedom: Friendship, gender and everyday life
Friendship arguably offers itself as the freest of all human associations. A weakness of cultural prescription opens a terrain in which intimacy can be lived in a trust relationship that personifies equality, justice and respect. Friendship's 'relational freedom' enables the mutual development of selves; it is generative. Therein lies 'the beauty of friendship', as Agnes Heller has reminded us. But the freedom of intimacy is limited. Embedded in …
“This is Our Family. We do not Hide Who we are”: Stigma and Disclosure Decisions of Lesbian Parents in Australian Early Childhood Settings
This article discusses findings from a study that examined how lesbian parents make disclosure decisions in early childhood (EC) settings. Using an online survey, 62 lesbian parents in Australia shared their experiences of EC settings. Follow-up interviews with 13 parents enabled an in-depth exploration of their decisions. Disclosure in EC settings featured 3 themes: appraisal, resistance, and provocation. These parents used disclosure as a litmu…
Friendship, Recognition and Social Freedom: A Sociological Reconstruction
In Freedom’s Right, Axel Honneth articulates the social freedom of friendship with reference to its institutionalised norms. These action norms, however, are not specific to friendship; they apply to modern intimacy per se. Such non-specificity cannot adequately account for the experience of social freedom in friendship. Addressing this issue, I evaluate friendship as a form of recognition and identify a generative recognition deficit functional …
An Incomplete Dialectics? Rosa on the Good Life
Do political theorists have friends? Towards a redefinition of political friendship
This article suggests a sensitising definition of political friendship with the view of using the concept in empirical research. I begin by identifying three tendencies in the recent literature on political friendship: (1) the tendency to ignore historical developments that rendered modern friendship an intimate relationship; (2) the construction of modern friendship as hermetically sealed in the private sphere; and (3) the conceptual conflation …
Siegfried Kracauer's Differentiating Approach to Friendship
Siegfried Kracauer's essays Über die Freundschaft ('On Friendship') and Gedanken über Freundschaft ('Thoughts on Friendship') exemplify a conceptually differentiating approach to friendship. This article aims at highlighting the explanatory yield of such an approach in contrast to a prevalent conflation of personal relationship types in research today. Kracauer's work is a call from the past to take seriously the semantic nuances of friendship in…
Coming of Age in Times of Uncertainty
Adulthood is taken for granted. It connotes the end of childhood, the resolution to the "storm and stress" period of adolescence. This conception is strongly entrenched in the sociology of youth and the sociology of the life course as well as in the policy arena. At the same time, adulthood itself remains unarticulated; journey's end remains conceptually fixed and theoretically uncontested. Adulthood, then, is both central to the social imaginati…
Friendship and solidarity
This article explores a particular connection between friendship and social solidarity and seeks to contribute to understanding the societal significance of non-institutionalised relationships. Commonly the benefits of friendship are assumed to accrue to friends only. But this is only part of the story. Friendship, as instantiation of intimacy and site of moral learning, is conducive to solidarity understood as felt concern for unknown others. Th…
Interpreter of culture, conveyor of feel: Peter Beilharz's musicality
From systems to forms: Reconstructing Niklas Luhmann's approach to relationships
Niklas Luhmann's approach to relationships was ambivalent. While references to the word abound in his work, his systems theory renders 'relationship' redundant as key concept. This has made it difficult for Luhmannian theorists to describe social forms that endure beyond serial interactions. Attempts have been made to overcome this 'latency problem' by conceptualising relationships as social systems. Contending that by focusing on communication t…
Critical Friendship in the Modern World
Friendship is a critically important aspect of our lives, but is it always an unassailably 'good thing'? This book begins with the innovative premise that friendship is inherently complex and characterized by opposing qualities: it is both pleasurable and fraught, private and public, and inclusive and exclusionary. Rather than simply celebrating friendship as universally beneficial or worrying about its decline amid rising social disconnection, L…
Reflections on Zygmunt Bauman: Visibility, privacy and prepositional sociology
This paper offers a critical reflection on Zygmunt Bauman's diagnosis of digital modernity, particularly his concern with the erosion of privacy in an era of confessional culture and performative self-disclosure. Engaging Bauman's work alongside thinkers such as Blumenberg, Honneth, Arendt and Thompson, it explores visibility as an anthropological and political condition. The paper fields the notion of ‘prepositional sociology’, inspired by Maria…
Sociology (16 works) · Epistemology (11 works) · Psychology (11 works) · Social science (11 works) · Social Psychology (10 works) · Friendship (9 works) · Law (9 works) · Political science (9 works) · Philosophy (8 works) · Computer Science (6 works)