Intimacy in the Public Realm:

The Case of Co-workers'

STEPHEN R MARKS, University of Maine

Abstract

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.

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.

* The data from the GSS and NCCS were obtained from the Inter-University Consortium for
Political and Social Research in Ann Arbor, Michigan. I owe special thanks to Steven F. Cohn
for guidance with methodological issues and for sensible and thoroughgoing advice. I am also
grateful to RobertMilardo, Alexis Wa lker, Anisa Zvonkovic, jinn Spates, Graham Allan, Dennis
Kaldenberg, William Halteman, Joan Marks, and two anonymous referees for thoughtful
commentary at various phases of this work. Direct all correspondence to Stephen R. Marks,
Department of Sociology, 5728 Fernald Hall, University of Maine, Orono ME 04469-5728.

© The University of North Carolina Press Social Forces, March 1994, 72(3):843-858
844 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

Intimacy as Counterculture
The dominant tendency in social science is to divide up this differentiated
society into private and public social ecologies, or sectors. Social scientists are
also prone to distinguishing personal from impersonal — and formal from
informal — relationships, and while we chart inexorable forces of rationaliza-
tion, we often join laypeople in "treat[ing] formal organizations like strange,
disliked, or feared cultures ... or as alien territories [we] would prefer not to
enter" (Gans 1988:65). When we then think about human intimacy, we conflate
these distinctions into an overarching polarity: On one side is the public sector
of impersonal organizations; on the other is the private sector of informal
relations — a set of personalistic countercultures (see Bellah et al.1985).
The most important such intimate counterculture is held to be the home
front — often seen as the polar opposite of the anonymous world of complex
organizations. In Berger and Kellner's [1964] (1974) well known article, they
maintain that public institutions "confront the individual as an immensely
powerful and alien world," thus creating the "need for the sort of world that
only marriage can produce in our society." And Lasch's (1977,1979) view is still
bleaker. The only "haven in a heartless world," the family is itself vulnerable to
invasion by sinister public institutions (for other examples of this thesis, see
Aries 1978; Berger & Berger 1983; Bott 1971; Demos 1970; Parsons 1949; Shorter
1975; for a socialist version, see Zaretsky 1976). Other approaches extend this
personalistic home world to neighborhood networks, which serve as shelters for
those routinely excluded from the organizational world's reward system (see
Gans 1962; Suttles 1968; MacLeod 1987).
Literature on leisure portrays another sheltered social ecology. For example,
Irwin's (1977) urban "scenes" (30) are defined as stimulating, activity-oriented
retreats from organizations. And Oldenburg (1989) finds two retreats: home, the
place for serious intimacy, and "third places," the public hangouts for enjoying
nonserious "affiliation" (16).
Still another literature finds intimacy in friendships, again seen as offering
an ideal counterworld to that of formal organizations (Paine 1969). Maines
(1989) sees mere "friendly relations" arising "at the sites of formal role
performance," while truly close friends "have few spatial limitations to their
relationship" (199). Rawlins (1992) likewise sees sociable, "agentic" friendships
to be "highly conducive to public and business life," while intimate, "com-
munal" friendships are "especially suited to private life" (274). Here too,
intimacy thrives at home or as free-floating friendship, while the constraints of
the organizational world transmute it into mere "friendly relations" at best
(Kurth 1970).
In the sociology of work, the idea that formal organizations harbor some
friendly relations is an old one. Homans (1950) reminded us that workers'
behavior at Hawthorne was filtered through their informal ties, and Roy (1952)
likewise found that workers curtailed production to engage in convivial co-
worker chatter, which he sees only as a defensive pastime to control the wage
rate. Even Gans (1988), who sees informal groups thriving both in the home and
family and "in the interstices of the organization" (64), reverts to the haven-in-a-
heartless-world notion that the family or household is "obviously of the highest
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 845

importance for virtually all people" (44, my emphasis). Co-worker ties become
mere "motors" that help drive the organization, or "havens" that supply shelter
from work's difficulties and breaks from boring routine (47 -48; see also Halle
1984; Roy 1960). Such approaches hardly acknowledge that these ties might
often generate intimacy, pursued for its own sake and often having nothing to
do with work.
To summarize: Social scientists seem to yearn for bonds that are untainted
by greedy organizations. We find intimacy in households, in families, and in
free-floating friendships, thereby saving a part of the self from the tough-
minded structural analysis of basic sociology (see Oldenburg 1989: "One of the
great pluses in friendship is that it exists outside the social structure" [63]). And
we see the bonds arising in both work and leisure to be rooted in sociability,
not intimacy.

A Theory of Modem Intimacy

To be sure, some scholars aver that intimacy, not simply friendly relations, may
flourish in the world of organizations. In Japan, Ouchi (1981) claims, intimacy
does occur in the workplace, unlike in the United States. Siltanen and Stanworth
(1984) criticize the "equation of private life with family life" as "an illustration
of familistic and heterosexist assumptions underlying contemporary construc-
tions of the personal" (111). They add, "we live our personal relations in the
public world as well as in the private." For Peterson (1985), the "field of
reproduction," which includes "the social relations of dependence, nurturance,
and mutual aid" (343-45), is mobilized in workplaces, community organizations,
and other voluntary associations as well as in families. O'Leary (1987) notes that
female mentor/"mentee" ties may include "role modeling, acceptance and
confirmation, counseling and friendship." Hansen s (1987) realm of the "social"
is coterminous with neither the private sphere nor the public sphere. And
Rawlins (1992) qualifies his generalization that intimate, "communal" friend-
ships reside in "private" locations segregated from formal organizations. He
writes, "specific friendships can thoroughly transcend modal practices, blending
the attributes of communal and agentic friendships in various ways according
to the participants', stages in the life course and personal circumstances" (275).
Why have these more flexible views remained isolated and undeveloped,
with little currency in our discourse? Perhaps if we had a keener theory of how
intimacy arises within modern societies, we would be less prone to confine it to
locations outside of organizations or to pay scant attention when we do see it
arising within them.
My thesis is simple: structural differentiation indeed creates the home as a
specialized, private space. There, people can elaborate some intimacy and
further differentiate that space; individual members can subdivide and expand
their intimacy through pulling selected household members or "outsiders" into
their own little niche. But outside the home, this same process of differentiation
fashions each specialized setting that comprises the "public world" as a
segregated, private space as well. As activities become ecologically compartmen-
talized, people must move among different sectors, often many times daily.
846 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

Within any one of these sectors, their purposes may at first be limited to the
setting-specific activity itself, but in pursuing that activity regularly, they soon
grow familiar with unrelated others whose purposes have brought them there
for the same reasons. Then, ongoing contact coupled with mutual recognition
will often foster close, self-disclosing relationships (see Feld 1981; Homans 1950),
and they may construct some new private niches within the setting to facilitate
the expansion of their intimacy (see Lofland 1973).
The functionally specific activities that bring people together create a
potential for intimacy, but for the connection to be made, additional points of
contact are sometimes necessary, such as having children of the same age, or
similar ethnicity, or political, religious, or recreational interests. The multifaceted
nature of modern people thus affords more choosiness to the selection of
intimates. Dyads become the modal form, as three or more associates are far
less likely to share the same points of contact than two, to borrow from Simmel.
Few dyadic intimates share all of their points of contact and their physical
space, however, as their daily existence often pulls them into divergent locations
to pursue their functionally specific purposes (see Lopata 1990). The more
dyadic intimates are separated, the more their physical movements, where-
abouts, their use of time, and the qualities they bring to their activities become
mysterious. All modern dyadic intimates are strangers in some of their aspects,
enjoying some of that synthesis of nearness and distance of which Simmel
wrote. Who your spouse or partner is — or your friend, or close co-worker, or
recreational companion — is often hidden from view, and must be uncovered
by special effort. "Self-disclosure," both as ideology and as actuality, then arises
as necessary work to reveal that which has become enclosed through segrega-
tion. In this view, modern intimacy is not only possible despite segmentalized
roles (Lopata 1990); it is uniquely intense. Ongoing mutual discovery is more
explosive than gemeinschaft intimacy or than any situation in which people are
already "disclosed" to one another through their constant contact. Relational
intensity in a gesellschaft, then, may become greater because of the separating
gaps between people, not in spite of them (see Baker & Hertz's 1990 fine
treatment of intimacy in a kibbutz). In brief, institutional differentiation on the
macrolevel, and individuation, dyadic intimacy, "self-disclosure," and privatiza-
tion of space and time on the microlevel march together, and these processes
unfold in full force both inside and outside families and organizations.

Dyadic Intimacy in Public Places

Work settings may provide co-workers with frequent dyadic contact together.
In popular television series over the past decades, the drama often centers on
the intimate intrigues of professionals around their offices. In the working class,
too, co-workers may carve out private niches to intimately engage one another.
Secretaries in an office, mechanics working in nearby work stations, house
painters, factory workers, store clerks, and waiters in restaurants who have easy
access to each other and some periodic slack time — all may create oppor-
tunities for talk about a wide array of topics not restricted to work. In addition,
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 847

travelling, commuting, lunches, even work breaks with co-workers can foster
close relationships that go well beyond mere friendliness.
Other public places also afford the privacy within which individuals may
form close dyads. Children at school find ample ways to develop intimacy with
peers. Nurse/patient, doctor/patient, teacher/student, salesperson/customer
(Stone 1954) and many other service relationships may become emotionally
intense, if they are recurrent enough and their organization allows for some
uncluttered dyadic contact.

Empirical Studies of Workplace Intimacy

The remainder of this article focuses exclusively on relationships among co-

workers. The work sphere is the center of the organizational world and is thus
a strategic site to search for intimacy in the public realm. Yet, modem socio-
logists have paid scant attention to workplace intimacy. Simpson (1989) suggests
that after the 1950s, sociologists abandoned their focus on actual workers as part
of informal work groups. "Emphasis is on the position, not on the flesh and
blood person who holds it" (579). Only quite recently have scholars once again
studied real people working with co-workers, and social scientists have already
gone beyond Gabarro's (1987) claim that working relationships have most
everything to do with "task achievement" and hardly anything to do with self-
disclosure.
Hessing (1991) offers an innovative analysis of 51 Canadian office workers'
conversations with co-workers about their home lives. A Swedish study (Davies
& Esseveld 1989) links the elaboration of a woman-centered shop-floor culture
to a lack of supervision of these evening workers. Several studies focus on
conditions that foster (or defeat) an oppositional work culture among working-
class co-workers. Substitute "pool workers" in the Davies and Esseveld study
moved around too much to establish stable co-worker ties, and they also
negatively affected the group piece-rate. "Earlier feelings of solidarity and
collectivity were broken down," and this "made management's task of layoffs
easier" (225). Sugiman (1992) documents a reverse process, in which female
UAW leaders in Canada had some success in transforming the elaborate
"chumming and companionship [of female auto workers] into 'sisterhood' and
'solidarity," refocusing them on more collectivistic and less privatized interests
(although they had to rely on potluck suppers, bingo nights, and fudge tables
and auctions to begin to get their attention).
Vallas (1991) found that among telephone workers, linemen are the most apt
to school one another in a defiant stance toward management. Their beliefs
about the manliness of dangerous work, plus the opportunity to steal away
together on company time, result in a more autonomous work culture, in
contrast to service reps and clerical workers, who "typically take breaks and
meals.. . within sight of supervisors and managers" and are thus more likely
to direct their conversations to family matters and other "safe" topics (72). Note,
however, the arbitrary assumption that family topics could not be the stuff of
true autonomy among co-workers. Note also the relativity of what is "safe" for
conversation: the clerical workers in Hessing's (1991) study who are most
848 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

oriented to promotion are most wary "of being typecast as a female-worker-

with-primary-domestic-affiliation' (41). They avoid domestic topics and uphold
males' devaluation of household matters, thus inhibiting public recognition of
their dual workloads and maintaining their domestic work as "private,
individual, and feminine" (45). But many others in this organization believe that
women should discuss their "hidden" lives; they may even share closely guarded
family secrets, usually on a dyadic basis (39).
Most of the recent literature on co-workers has come from feminist anthro-
pologists and social historians (an exception is the fine study by Baum 1991).
Westwood's [1984] (1985) British study of hosiery workers uncovers a work
culture in which women build sisterly intimacy, create countless forms of
mutual enjoyment and celebration, counsel one another in the crafting of
personal power, and yet wind up reproducing many of the structural con-
straints of their subordination. In the U.S., studies of textile workers (Lamphere
1987), Chicana cannery workers (Zavella 1987), department store saleswomen
(Benson 1983), and cigar makers (Cooper 1987) document similarly vibrant work
cultures. These researchers bring keen political sensibilities to their work,
spotlighting the sometimes divisive impact of ethnic differences on friendship
patterns and on unified cultures of resistance to management, but also showing
how these divisions are sometimes bridged (Lamphere).
As yet, there has been no firm basis for making generalizations about just
how widespread co-worker intimacy is. Haavio-Mannila (1987) asked 1,359
workers from eleven different occupational groupings in Finland to rank each
of five categories of relationships on a scale from "very important, close" to "not
important, distant." For men, 23% rank their "best" same-sex co-worker as close
and very important, as do 27% of the women (rankings of cross-sex co-workers
are lower). Unfortunately, respondents may have been guided by an implicit
norm of feeling closer to a spouse or partner than a co-worker. Moreover,
Haavio-Mannila has ruled out "best coworkers" being the same people as "best
friends" by asking respondents to rate them as different categories of people.
THE GSS 1986 FRIENDSHIP ITEM

Fortunately, the 1986 General Social Survey (GSS) explores the extent to which
close friends in the U.S. are one's co-workers, and it disallows spouses and
family members from confounding the analysis. A question referring to "people
you feel fairly close to" asks, "How many close friends would you say you
have?" The next item queries, "How many of these close friends are people you
work with now?" My subsample is the 669 full-time workers who report having
at least one close friend. Here and elsewhere, I assume that a workplace harbors
some intimacy if the worker exchanges friendship, emotional support, and/or
companionship with at least one co-worker. Even if one hates the job, the boss,
and the employing organization, finding just one nurturing co-worker can create
a haven in an otherwise unsympathetic environment, much as one nurturing
family member can provide a haven where other family members are neglectful
or abusive.
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 849

Results
Overall, 49.6% of the respondents report having at least one close friend who is
a co-worker, and 29% report at least two (see Hess 1972 for similar findings).
Computing a ratio of friends who are co-workers to the total number of friends
mentioned, I find that for 5.4% of workers who have any close friends, all these
friends are co-workers, and 19.6% count co-workers among at least half of all
their close friends.
There is no significant difference by sex in the tendency to have at least one
co-working friend (see also Moore 1990), nor by age, marital status, family
income, or highest educational degree 1 .

THE 1985 GSS ITEM ON "DISCUSSION PARTNERS"

The 1985 GSS provides a better opportunity to explore workplace intimacy.

Respondents were asked: "Looking back over the last six months — who are the
people with whom you discussed matters important to you?" (The nature of
"important matters" was not defined.) Probes were made up to five names, and
respondents were asked a series of questions about each named person. In
addition, they were instructed to list all the ways in which they were connected
to each name on their list ("co-worker" was one of eleven possibilities).
Marsden (1987) suggests that "discussing important matters' is a moderately
intense content ... [that] is less ambiguous in its meaning than friendship."

Results
The following findings are based on a subsample of 701 full time workers who
name at least one person with whom they discuss important matters. Fully
48.2% of these respondents discuss important matters with at least one co-
worker, and 24.7% name two or more such discussion partners. (There are also
39 people — 5.3% of all full time workers — who say they do not discuss
important matters with anyone.)
Computing a ratio of the number of co-workers to the total number of up
to five names mentioned, I find that for 6.6% of these respondents, all of their
"discussion partners" are co-workers, and for 25.3%, at least half of the names
mentioned are co-workers. We may presume that these are all people for whom
the workplace is an especially intimate setting, and for the 6.6% it is perhaps
their only intimate world.

Where the Haven Is

To further explore the issue of where people are finding their intimacy, I select
the 434 full-time married workers who "discuss important matters" with at least
one person. For this analysis, I count those co-workers who were also spouses
to the respondent as spouses only. Frequencies were generated of how many
respondents name: (1) neither their spouse nor a co-worker (15%); (2) at least
one co-worker but not their spouse (10%); (3) their spouse but no co-workers
(41%); (4) their spouse and one co-worker (17%); and (5) their spouse and two
or more co-workers (17%). Assuming that discussing important matters means
something about intimacy, we have here a partial test of the haven-in-a-
850 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

heartless-world notion of marriage and family proposed by Berger and Kellner,

Lasch and others. The findings here reveal far more variation in the realm of
"heart" than these authors would suggest. To be sure, a large number of
married workers do fit the haven-at-home pattern, but 10% reverse the assumed
pattern, while another 34% have at least dual if not multiple spheres of
intimacy; they find it both at home and at work.

Some Bivariate Analyses

As with close co-working friends, the tendency to discuss "important matters"
with at least one co-worker is nearly identical for males and females, and it is
not affected by marital status (cf. Hurlbert & Acock 1990) or by age, although
there is a greater tendency for those who have any such partners to have more
than one of them as they age (r = .11, p <.04). Unlike the 1986 co-working friends
item, however, having co-working discussion partners is clearly affected by
social class variables — highest educational degree (r = .19, p < .000), family
income (r = .13, p <.001), and occupational prestige (r = .20, p <.000) [r values are
Spearman]. The higher the values of these SES indicators, the greater the
tendency of working respondents to name at least one co-working discussion
partner (e.g., the percent is 30.9 for workers with less than a high school
education, and it rises to a high of 67.6% for those with any graduate training
beyond a college degree). Moreover, the number of co-working discussion
partners is positively related to these SES indicators (highest degree: r = .10,
p < .06; family income: r = .12, p < .04; occupational prestige: r = .11, p < .04).
Finally, people who are more job-satisfied are more likely to name at least one
discussion partner at work (p <.01), and the more such partners they name, the
greater their job satisfaction (Spearman r = .15, p <. 006) [see also Hurlbert 1991].
Of course we do not know the direction of causality. Do people confide in
co-workers because they are happier with their jobs, or does discussing
important matters make them happier?
IMPLICATIONS

These GSS findings point to some important empirical generalizations: For

millions of American workers — approximately half — close friendships are
formed among co-workers, "important matters" are discussed with them, and
such discussions are associated with greater job satisfaction. And, while social
class does not affect the likelihood of having co-workers whom one calls close
friends, it does influence whether "important matters" are discussed with them.
Perhaps the "hidden injuries of class" lead some working and poverty-class
workers to discount their own discussions with co-workers as not "important
matters." Or perhaps some adhere to an implicit code of secrecy that ad-
monishes against opening "important matters" to people outside the family.
THE NCCS

The GSS does not tell us what these co-working friends and confidants talk
about, or whether the "important matters" that male co-workers discuss are the
same ones that females discuss. Fischer's (1982) Northern California Community
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 851

Study (NCCS) of the social networks of 1,050 persons brings us a bit closer to
some answers. He elicited the names of 19,417 network members "by asking
respondents to name the people who did, would, or could provide them with
various kinds of support" (36), as measured by nine different items. Respon-
dents were then asked questions about each person they name. While Fischer
does identify whether or not a named person is a co-worker, he does not do
much with these data. We learn that only 10% of all named people are
co-workers, and working respondents average two co-workers in their personal
networks. Since the average respondent's network size is 18.5 people, we might
easily conclude that co-workers constitute an insignificant element of most
people's social and emotional support. A similar conclusion might be drawn
from Fischer's (1982) measure of "co-worker-centered networks." Defined as
"those in which co-workers formed over 40% of the nonkin" (378), the number
of workers who had such networks is 19%. I believe it is misleading to look at
any category of relationship as a percentage of the total number of people in the
network, because the results are an artifact of how extensively the network is
defined.
My own strategy is to select only the three items from the NCCS that seem
the best indicators of intimacy, as distinct from other kinds of support. The first
is with whom respondents talk about personal matters or worries, and the
second is on whose judgment they rely in making important decisions about
their lives. Either of these items seems to be a more intense specification of the
"discussing important matters" item of the GSS. The third item is a measure of
companionship, and asks with whom respondents get together and/or visit
socially.
The findings that follow are based on a subsample of 484 full time working
respondents who have been at their present job for at least six months, and
who, within their total network, discuss personal matters or worries with at least
one person, rely on at least one persons judgment in making important life
decisions, or get together socially with at least one person. The condition of
having been at the workplace for six months assumes that it takes awhile for
most people to begin to confide in (or get together socially with) a new co-
worker.
Results: The Self-Disclosure Items
I first applied Fischer's measure of "counseling support" by computing
frequencies of co-workers named on either the item on "talking with someone
about personal matters" or the item on "relying on someone's judgment."
Results show that 41.2% of the 473 working respondents who name at least one
person on either of these two items have this self-disclosing relationship with
one or more of their co-workers. This tendency is not significantly affected by
sex, marital status, age, or by family income of the respondent. As with the 1985
GSS item, higher education does increase the tendency to name at least one co-
working confidant (r = .15, p < .001). Of those with some graduate training
beyond college, 53% name one or more co-workers, compared to 33% for those
with only a high school diploma (for complementary findings, see Campbell,
Marsden & Hurlbert 1986).
852 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

The Companionship Item

Companionship is a different form of intimacy than self-disclosure, and to
measure it I use an NCCS composite item: visiting someone's home or being
visited, having someone to dinner or dining at their home, going out with
someone (e.g., to a bar, restaurant, park, club, etc.) or meeting them there. The
results reveal that of the 484 full time workers who name at least one person
with whom they get together, 49.5% get together with co-workers: 24% get
together with one, and 25.5% get together with at least two. Again there are no
differences in this tendency by sex or family income. Married workers get
together with co-workers significantly less than the nonmarried (collapsing the
widowed, separated, divorced, and never-married [p <.03]). And higher
education again increases the tendency to name one or more co-workers (r = .11,
p <.02), as does being younger (r = -.13, p <.005).
Notice that the NCCS measure of getting together socially rules out the
workplace itself as an important locale for such activity. Despite decades of
evidence that many workplaces teem with non-work-related social activity, it is
as if we cannot count it as companionship because it is a "mere" artifact of the
job. We acknowledge that in countries practicing arranged marriage, couples
who are thrown together by their elders might eventually fall in love, but we
have difficulty recognizing that workers thrown together by the job might then
become companionable at the job? The assumption is that companionable
activity must occur in "leisure time," which by definition can occur only after
work time (Wellman seems to share this assumption in his Toronto study, e.g.,
Wellman & Wortley 1990). The fact is, however, that work life is work time plus
leisure time, just as home life is. Presumably, there are people whose job lives
are so replete with companionable activity that in their "leisure time" they
prefer to be alone. Yet these are precisely the people who would be reckoned by
the NCCS procedure as having no social activity. 3
However we locate social activity with co-workers, it is clearly a different
form of intimacy than self-disclosure. Which form is "truly" close — self-
disclosure, or companionship? The NCCS offers an opportunity to find out by
asking respondents to name the people on their total list to whom they "feel
especially close." Of the 328 full time workers who both self-disclose and get
together socially with anyone on their total list, 34.5 % do so with at least one
co-worker, an impressive empirical fact. Predictably, this duplex form of
intimacy correlates very highly (r = .78, p <.000) with feeling "especially close"
to these co-workers.
A quantitative attempt to disentangle the respective contributions of some
components of closeness, done for me by William Halteman, reveals a complex
pattern of interrelationships. We analyzed the NCCS "names" file to see how
five different variables affected the likelihood of a respondent feeling "especially
close" to a given named individual: talking about personal matters [P], relying
on someone's judgment in making important life decisions [I], talking about
work issues [T], getting together socially [S], and being a co-worker [W].
Through logistic regression, we arrive at a model in which closeness =
SIT + WS + SP + PT. This model offers only mixed support for Rook's (1987)
claim that researchers have put too much emphasis on the emotional support
functions and too little on the companionship functions of social relationships.
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 853

In our model, companionship [S] — measured by getting together socially —

does increase the likelihood of feeling especially close, in interaction with land
T, and in separate interactions with W and with P. The interaction of S with W
indicates that this effect of S is particularly dramatic for co-workers as against
non-co-workers. Apparently, people who already see one another at work find
the choice to give still more time to each other a particularly significant one.
However, separate analyses not shown here reveal that when S occurs by itself,
it is not as powerful a predictor of closeness as either P alone or j alone.

A Combined Measure
The broadest measure of workplace intimacy from the NCCS is the percent of
working respondents who either talk to co-workers about personal matters or
about important life decisions, or get together with them socially. On this broad
measure, fully 60.1% of 484 full time workers name co-workers: 25.8% name
one, and 34.3% name two or more. Of the subsample of 75 part-time workers
who have been at their present workplace for six months or longer, fully 44%
name one or more co-workers on at least one of the three items we have been
considering here.

Which Sex Gets Named?

Concerning the sex of the co-workers named by these workers as their com-
panions and confidants, the pattern is symmetrical, tidy, and clear. Whenever
co-worker socializing occurs outside of work, regardless of whether self-
disclosing is also part of the relationship, most workers choose a same-sex co-
worker. Males choose other males more than twice as often as they choose
females; and female workers choose other females almost three times more often
than they choose males. But in those instances in which workers self-disclose to
a co-worker with whom they do not get together socially (which means that the
self-disclosure probably happens at work), both male and female workers
choose to talk to an opposite-sex person — each by better than a three-to-two
margin (see also Booth & Hess 1974) — and the result is sustained when we
control for marital status. Evidently, if getting together with someone signals a
special regard for them (Rook 1987), both the married and the nonmarried may
want to avoid the impression that their interest in an opposite-sex person goes
beyond friendship.

Conclusions

The analyses culled from the GSS and the NCCS suggest that there is much
variation in where people construct and expand their intimacy. At workplaces,
intimacy appears to be a rather pervasive phenomenon, and millions of people
probably find in co-workers some support, nurturance, companionship, and
approbation not available to them at home, either because they have no spouse
or spouse-like partner, or because they get little or no such rewards if they have
one. Millions of other people apparently supplement some meaningful intimacy
they do find at home with some important intimacy with one or more co-
workers.
854 / Social Forces 72:3, March 1994

To be sure, people often dispose of co-working intimates, but they also

dispose of spouses, even with a spirit of alacrity. On the other hand, many co-
worker relationships persist as "mere" friendships long after one or the other
partner leaves the workplace that brought them together. Selecting the NCCS
working respondents who name at least one friend (and not currently a co-
worker) as the first name mentioned on any of the name eliciting questions, and
also restricting this subsample to friends to whom the respondent feels
"especially close," I find that 35% first met at least one of these very important
friends at work. Kahn's (1979) "convoy of social support," which sees people as
"moving through life surrounded by a set of significant other people" (84), is
suggestive, and we need to recognize relationships forged among co-workers as
central components of these convoys.
To say that co-worker ties are sometimes purely expressive is to say that
they are often driven by the needs of the bond alone. Relationships are
themselves a kind of work, particularly the conversations that are so important
to their "production" and maintenance (Fishman 1978). Once established, they
have their own nonvoluntary requirements, replete with obligations about
getting together, talking, self-disclosing, and so on. In this sense co-worker
relational "work" may be seen as an expressive subworld that runs parallel to
the instrumentalities of the job for which one is paid, often using and playing
off of those instrumentalities to elaborate itself, but not restricted to job concerns
for its further development. And the privacy that is found or created in the
interstices of the employing organization is a central precondition for the
expansion of this world.

From Private Ecology to Private World

How, then, should we conceptualize privacy and its relationship both to
intimacy and to various social ecologies? I suggest that we abandon the
dichotomy between some cold world of organizations and a potentially warm
private sector. Private life should be linked not to any particular social ecology
but to the modern individual's constructive inclinations and opportunities.
People create and then occupy a unique "private world," which is typically
complex and multifaceted. A private world is the sum total of interests and
activities of anyone living in an institutionally differentiated and person-
individuated society. A particular private world might include an occupation,
a marriage or other domestic partnership, various relationships with children,
kin and friends, a secret affair, a spiritual/religious interest, recreational
involvements (hunting, running, reading, film going, gardening, etc.), an abiding
life-style commitment (e.g., gay and lesbian networks), voluntary associations,
and so on.
With this formulation, individual private worlds, institutional locations, and
intimacy become analytically distinct. Just because much modern intimacy is no
longer tied to a gemeinschaft does not mean it must shift to the home world of
marriage and family, or to a rarefied world of friendship away from formal
organizations. Rather, the multiplicity of institutional locales offers enormous
choice as to where and with whom (if anyone) people will open some of their
private world through self-disclosure. Marriage becomes an intersection (and
sometimes a collision) of two private worlds, and while one person may
 Intimacy in the Public Realm / 855

privilege the home world and the marriage bond, another may privilege the
workplace, or club, church, sister's home, cousin's home, boat yard, gym, or
some combination. We moderns are flooded with locations in which we can
carve out a private niche and create intimacy with anyone we regularly
encounter there. Not too few intimate chances, perhaps, but too many. Surely
one of the joys and burdens of individual life is the task of integrating this
wealth of potential intimacies in a way that makes personal sense.
Those who see authentic personal meaning to be found primarily in the
field of collective and political action will find little to gladden them in these
empirical generalizations. There is a longstanding critique of privatized life that
deplores the tendency of modern people to withdraw into familistic domesticity
and thereby leave the shaping of the public realm to a power elite (see Barrett
& McIntosh 1982). From this point of view, to extend private life to the
interstices of the public realm is simply to widen the scope of privatization.
Likewise, when Durkheim sought to combat the twin modern dangers of
egoism and anomie in his call for the establishment of guild-like occupational
communities, he surely envisioned a far broader bonding than dyadic intimacy
among co-workers.
Historically, social integration recedes from the public, communal sphere
and reappears as interpersonal "intimacy." While this privatization of social
solidarity may not seem well suited to the collective actions that can shape
organizations, sometimes dyads and other little groups are the starting point of
such actions — especially at work, where different groups of friends may
become aware of each other with the help of unions, ad hoc groups, or simply
the rumor mill (see Lamphere 1987; Sugiman 1992; Westwood 1985; Zavella
1987). Just how conservative an impact co-worker relationships typically have on
organizational culture remains an empirical issue. We need more studies like
Hessing's (1991) to see how aspirations for job mobility affect the focus of co-
worker relationships. And we need studies of co-workers within the full range
of social class, gender, race, and ethnicity.
It would be unwise to restrict our interest in co-workers to political actions,
as the recent literature on female workers is clear that the scope of their
relationships with one another is manifold. Intimate co-workers are fully aware
of each other's multiple roles, and I presume that they conversationally attend
to whichever role (or roles) is generating the most concern at a given time, now
celebrating it, now giving instruction in repairing some damage within it, or just
monitoring it, counseling the challenge of this or that role partner, simply
offering useful consumer information, and so on. With the help of co-workers,
ethnic statuses may get reaffirmed and enlivened (see Westwood 1985; Zavella
1987), and age and gender identities may be consolidated, celebrated,
reorganized, and even transformed. The same is true, of course, of worker
identities.
The important point is that the differentiated institutional structures of
modernity bring together people who already have some very similar interests.
Of course they may ignore one another, but they may also become very
intimate, carving out private spaces for the expansion of their relationship. What
they then attend to together is limited mainly by their interest, their vision, their
constructive inclinations, and the impact of the other people they encounter.
856 / Social Forces 72.3, March 1994

Their joint interests may range from the intricacies of family secrets to broad-
scale collective identifications, but the expansive potential of modern intimacy
is there in either case. Never have people had so much opportunity to elaborate
such self-conscious, personal knowing of themselves and specific others, and at
the same time, if they like, to train their vision to a global reach.

Notes
1. In the same year (1986), the GSS also asked respondents to whom they would turn for
"help" — for example, with a problem with one's spouse, or with feeling "just a bit down or
depressed," or with "an important change in your life." Although co-workers were listed as
potential helpers, and thus the GSS designers could have provided leads concerning the nature
of co-worker relationships, they apparently forgot that close friends can be the same people as
one's co-workers. For most respondents, on most of the items, "closest friend" was either the
first or second choice (along with "husband, wife, partner"), while "co-worker" was rarely
mentioned. To what extent these closest friends were the same people as the co-workers of the
respondent cannot be determined.
2. I owe this analogy to Dennis Kaldenberg.
3. Concerning the two self-disclosure items, note that we cannot fully know where these talks
occur — at the workplace, or elsewhere (and this is true of the 1985 GSS item as well). To be
sure, one-fourth of working respondents name at least one co-worker with whom they self-
disclose but do not get together socially. Perhaps we may assume that with these co-workers,
the confidences are exchanged at work, although some might occur on the phone. Of those
workers who do get together with co-workers, the ones who also confide in them may be doing
so either at the workplace, away from it (while socializing together), or both. We have no way
of knowing. While the issue remains an empirical one, my hunch is that most co-workers find
ways and means to express their relationship, wherever they are (see Fine 1986).

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