What can we learn about the cultural meanings of friendship and personal bonds by turning to popular business success literature? Can it help to make sense of the new social spirit of capitalism? Social theory still takes as its object of criticism the bounded, autonomous, liberal subject, yet in the new business success literature, one finds instead a social conception of the person and a celebration of values like community, trust and reciprocity. Critical assessments of homo economicus are being incorporated into the success literature, often by cribbing from scholarly critique that has long invoked friendship as a counterpoint to instrumental relations of capitalism. We argue that in spite of these broad cultural shifts in ideas around what makes for successful business people, the view of friendship and selfhood advanced in the success literature gets caught in its own contradictions. The incorporation of friendship and social conceptions of the self into business success literature raises questions about how best to develop a relevant and critical concept of friendship in contemporary cultural and social theory.
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