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This chapter considers Cecil's correspondence and his principal points of contact in the kingdom of Ireland, and questions the received interpretation both that Cecil was a major player in the politics of ‘faction’ at the court of Queen Elizabeth and that he operated a patronage network that stretched from Whitehall to Ireland. It argues that Cecil shied away from building a personal affinity in Ireland, and instead placed the interests of the queen and the state ahead of his own. This chapter divides Cecil's contacts in Ireland into confidants and clients and shows how his communication with them and others formed the basis for the minister's understanding of a kingdom which he never visited but which regularly occupied his thoughts.

This book concludes by discussing the impact of technology on how we communicate with our closest friends and family, and especially how we relate to our strong ties. The change in norms is most evident in young people, including the graduate students studied in this book, who now rely on smartphones and the Internet as their primary modes of communication—with their close friends, spouses, and even roommates. As a result of these dynamics, it should have been easier than ever for the students to retain their connections to close confidants in the midst of dramatic life changes. However, this book argues that in spite of what is possible online, the distinctly human elements of interpersonal relations, those that lie beyond the network structure, remain indispensable to understand network behavior.

All the neuroscience talk in psychiatry has fed a widespread assumption that people look to medication and speak of their suffering in terms of neurobiology because they have been schooled in scientific knowledge. The interviews show this way of conceiving the relationship between professional and popular understanding to be deeply mistaken. While people use medical concepts, they generally do not learn this language from their doctor. They variously encounter it in other parts of the healthscape, especially popular media, direct-to-consumer drug advertising, and everyday social interactions with confidants, whether family members or friends. Although people often find a diagnosis a persuasive explanation because it confers a reality on their experience and legitimates the use of medication, they also have their own view of what the diagnosis means, what a mental disorder is, what medication does and doesn’t do, and so on. What the biomedical ideas mean and what makes them compelling to (some) people is not predetermined. They are not like a template that is simply laid over personal experience. In the interpretive struggle of a predicament, these ideas are appropriated at an “impression point” under a meaning linked to the person’s specific experience and aspirations.

The relationship between slaves and their masters could, at one and the same time, be governed by exploitation and affiliation, submission under the master's authority and intimacy. It was characterised by what may be called a mutual dependency: the master was dependent on the slave's loyalty and the slave dependent on the master's maintenance and humane treatment of him. While slaves had to bow to their master's wishes under the constant threat of punishment, they could also become indispensable to them, function as their confidants, and be party to their secrets. One may assume that masters who had one or a few slaves only stood in a closer relationship to them than those who owned many. But even in large households some slaves will have been closer to their master than others, depending on their respective functions.

This book examines the varied and complex factors that affect an individual’s decision to confide in another person. It probes the experiences of a set of graduate students over the course of their first year in their programs and compares them with those of nationally representative populations. The findings show that decisions about whom to turn to when seeking confidants are influenced by the complicated nature of social relationships, as well as the contexts where those relationships take place. The book describes an alternative view of social support, one in which actors are mostly pragmatic in their decisions about expressing vulnerability, and one in which contexts—the institutional spaces where people spend their daily lives—are at least as important as network structure in shaping their decisions.

This chapter reviews the literature that probed people’s decisions about whom to turn to when they need a confidant and discusses reasons for considering an alternative. It first provides a historical overview of research on the subject before analyzing how the claim that people will turn to those they are close to when they have important matters to discuss is linked to the ideas about the differences between strong and weak ties. It also cites three reasons to doubt the notion that people will turn to strong ties when seeking confidants as consistently as they say they do. The chapter concludes by explaining the rationale for studying the experiences of graduate students who were forced to make decisions about whom to talk to when they needed someone to talk to.

This chapter examines the “core discussion networks” of graduate students in three departments and shows that, contrary to traditional expectations, many of the ties appear to be weak rather than strong. It considers how the students relate to those they have considered their confidants after six months, and more specifically whether they would as a whole report the same confidants. Three perspectives on the relative importance of network structure versus social interaction are discussed based on the students’ different experiences: the students will keep most confidants, they will drop many of their confidants, or they will drop many confidants but quickly replace them. In general, the students replaced their confidants often.

This chapter examines whether the graduate students, when talking about their serious personal worries, actually approached their newly named confidants or stuck, instead, to old ones. Three possible expectations about what the students did are discussed: the students will reserve their serious worries for old confidants, or strong ties; they will approach both old and new confidants, strong and weak ties, with their serious worries; or they will not necessarily reserve their serious worries for either old or new confidants, approaching even people they did not name as confidants. The chapter shows that, when faced with their own most serious worries, the students turned to old named confidants, to new ones, and even to people not named at all.

This chapter suggests that the graduate students approached weak ties because of a desire to confide in someone who would understand their predicament as they themselves saw it. In other words, they sought people from whom they could expect what psychologists have termed cognitive empathy. Talking to those confidants, even if weakly tied, was often worth the risk. The chapter considers the relation between risk and expectations before discussing how students often justified their motivation to talk to an acquaintance as a function of the topic at hand; this form of trust is what Russell Hardin has described as a “three-part relation,” and philosopher Annette Baier, as a “three-part predicate”: “A trusts B with valued thing C.” It shows that the students commonly found empathy in one of several different forms of similarity, suggesting a mechanism through which homophily operates.

This chapter examines how much the graduate students’ decisions about approaching confidants were deliberative as opposed to spontaneous—whether they assessed pros and cons before deciding whom to ask or instead spontaneously spilled their emotions on the spot. It first considers the standard assumption in theories of purposive action across the social sciences that deliberation precedes action. It then discusses three decisions that a person inherently makes when he or she mobilizes his or her network: to seek help, to select a confidant, and to activate the tie. The chapter suggests that the extent to which their activation decisions were incidental or spontaneous, rather than reflective, depended in part on the context of students’ interactions with others. It argues that students often found themselves confiding in someone not because they had planned it, but simply because the confidant was present and available when needed.

This chapter presents each of the book’s core empirical propositions about how much graduate students change, retain, develop, avoid, and make use of confidants and compares them with nationally representative data. Drawing on original surveys and recent findings from other national studies, it examines whether other populations make decisions about whom to talk to as the graduate students did. Among the most significant findings: the core discussion networks of people at all ages change most often as they experience transitions that alter those with whom they interact on a regular basis; people actually confide often in individuals they are not close to; people often avoid those they are close to; people are willing to forgo closeness for empathy; people will often confide in whomever is around. In general, while graduate students are unique, their decisions with respect to confiding in others are largely not.

This chapter examines the extent to which theories that the book has proposed to explain the graduate students’ behavior can be applied to other situations. It first considers the structural theory on which the rule of thumb about the separate benefits of strong and weak ties is based. It then highlights the theory’s limitations and offers an alternative. It shows that most of the book’s propositions can be organized around three core principles, none of which is reducible to the characteristics of the network structure. It also relates these principles to three key findings: the avoidance of strong ties, or people who might otherwise seem to be good confidants; the pursuit of cognitive empathy from weak ties; and the prevalence of incidental and spontaneous decisions about whom to confide in. Finally, it looks at other contexts where similar principles are at play.

Johnston was very satisfied with the remuneration offered by the court, especially when compared with what he previous was offered by the Colonial Office. Also, Johnston gained respect from the Chinese for that Puyi's admiration to Scot and his teacher set important footing of Johnston. Johnston never stopped to plan for a trip for Puyi and the young emperor was so desperate to see the outside world with his teacher accompanied. However, the court disagreed. Puyi appreciated Johnston's effort on the trip as well as his true care about Puyi's health and well-beings. The relationship between this student and his tutor was very close and good. When it was the time Johnston ended his useful life in Beijing, he had a good income, a wide circle of friends, and was the confidant of the emperor.

In science and scholarship, modelling is often used to purposefully simplify complex processes. In the case of genetic criticism, these processes are of a creative nature. They either have resulted in a work of art or at least have left traces. By means of these traces, genetic criticism tries to reverse-engineer the complex process, resulting in various models. One of these models is the ‘ecology’. This chapter discusses writers’ libraries as creative ecologies. A single document can be an ecology in its own right, for instance when a notebook fills up with notes and becomes such a stimulating creative space that a writer only reluctantly leaves it when it is full. Another ecology is the interactions with confidants, editors, censor, critics, and translators that constitute the sociology of writing, involving collaborative revision, editorial collaboration, censorship and self-censorship, collaborative translation, adaptations, collaborations for performance, or writing on commission. The author’s own writings can become an ecology as well, as concurrent projects often influence each other. The chapter ends with a discussion of this creative concurrence.

‘Intimates’ treats correspondents who were close to Scott, classed as mentors (but not patrons) or confidants. These correspondents include two Dukes of Buccleuch, Lady Louisa Stuart, J. B. S. Morritt, George Ellis, and Lady Abercorn as well Anna Seward, an eighteenth-century poet of some importance who lived until 1809. This chapter demonstrates that even with his mentors, Scott shaped the relationship and essentially ceded to them a set of roles that he found useful. In the letters of Scott’s confidants (Morritt, Stuart, Ellis), we find the best sustained reading of his work by any of his correspondents, including important insights about his practice as a writer and even about theoretical concepts related to his poetry and fiction.

This chapter explores the interactions of sacred power and human agency, and specifically how miraculous images perform their miracles through secondary causes. Surgeons, for example, are often agents of medical miracles. The chapter then pursues these ideas into a continuum of collaborative and deferred control. At the one end is an independent agent petitioning miraculous reinforcements, and at the other a dependent, surrendering agent who is imploring a miraculous image to take control. The chapter also discusses the disclosure to miraculous images as confidants, the transfer of sacred power through proximity and tactile contact, and the vows known as juramentos.