Patrons, Clients and Friends

Preface; 1. Personal relations, trust and ambivalence in relations to the institutional order; 2. The construction of trust in the social order and its ambivalences: viewed from the development of sociological theory; 3. The structuring of trust in society: Unconditionalities, generalised exchange and the developement of interpersonal relations; 4. The basic characteristics and variety of patron-client relations; 5 The clientelistic mode of generalised exchange and patron-client relations as addenda to the central relations; 6. The social conditions generating patron-client relations; 7. Variations in patron-client relations; 8. Ritualised interpersonal relations; privacy; 9. Concluding remarks: The dialectics of trust and the social order; Notes; Index.

Luis Roniger is a comparative political sociologist, Reynolds Professor of Latin American Studies at Wake Forest University, USA. He has been Research Fellow and has served in the Academic Board of various research institutes. His publications include ten books and numerous articles published in peer-reviewed, academic journals and chapters in collective books in English. Some of his publications have also been published in Spanish, Italian, Portuguese, Russian, Hebrew and German. He is known for his work on clientelism and patron-client relations, which covers three books and numerous articles, including Patrons, Clients and Friends (with SN Eisenstadt, CUP) and Clientelism, Democracy and Civil Society (with A. Gunes-Ayata, Lynne Rienner). He is also recognized for his contributions to the field of human rights in transitions to democracy, with a focus on the Southern Cone of the Americas, among them the book The Legacy of Human-Rights Violations in the Southern Cone (with M. Sznajder, OUP), published also in Spanish and Portuguese. A third area is the study of collective identities and public spheres in Latin America, which led to the publication of three collective volumes (by Sussex Academic Press), with contributions from leading scholars in the social sciences, history and the humanities.