“We Are All Friends Here”

Abstract

This article explores normative control in a culture of friendship. In-depth qualitative data gathered at a management consultancy firm reveal how management seeks to foster informal, intimate, and apparently egalitarian relations with employees. This is conceptualized as a culture of friendship, indicative of broader trends toward individuality, choice, and antiauthoritarianism. Through a comparison with family culture, the paper develops how in a culture of friendship, despite the emphasis on freedom, openness, and spontaneity, normative control is accentuated and extended, involving certain paradoxes and reinforcing control circles.