Introduction

Having friends at work, or friendly colleagues, may seem like a condition for a good working environment. It may contribute to a supportive atmosphere and a sense of wellbeing for the individual (see Bach Pedersen and Lewis, 2012). In certain types of work, friendship is not only supportive in an emotional sense but could also be strategic, particularly in work where the boundaries between the private self and the professional are blurred. Such boundary blurring often arises in academia, where the difference between friends, friendly colleagues and networks is not clear, if it exists at all.

For many academics, their research networks and friendships are intertwined. Participating in conferences may be a way to sustain or widen a research network, as can socialising with colleagues who also are friends. Furthermore, academic labour is not confined to the actual workplace, such as a specific department or university, but flows into international connections and networks. Such networking can be experienced as a way of cultivating friendly as well as interesting and useful relationships – as part of academic and creative freedom – and may add value to the academic’s professional work. But this networking could also be regarded as a means to strategically accumulate social capital outside the actual workplace. In this mode, networking can be perceived as a combination of economic and moral imperatives, as an instrumental performance or working skill that could be measured and quantified as capital.

Friendship in academic work seems to span different value spheres, from the realm of emotional bonding and collegial exchange to an economised or even marketised realm of quantifying network performance and social capital (see the notion of ‘quantified academia’ by Juhana Venäläinen in Chapter 10, this book). Relationships can be emotional as well as instrumental, and moral obligations intertwine with a calculable ‘what’s in it for me?’ In this complex and boundary-less work environment, the value and character of work relationships are seldom openly defined or articulated. Instead, boundaries between different types of relationships are negotiated in situated social interactions, such as in the way we expect a colleague to reciprocate a favour to indicate friendship or the way we negotiate work hours with a head of department and hence enact our professional roles.