This article is concerned with the impact of late modernity on patterns of solidarity in friend and family relationships. It takes as its starting point the transformations in partnership, family, and household formation and dissolution that have been occurring in Western societies since the 1970s. Accepting these shifts as indicative of the greater freedoms people now have over the construction of their personal relationships and social networks, the article examines the degree to which the domains of family and friendship are merging. Its principal argument is that despite increased flexibility in the construction of personal life, including diversity in the prioritization of different relationships, at a cultural level clear boundaries exist between family and friendship ties.

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The conventional wisdom is that improving energy efficiency will lower energy use. However, there is an extensive debate in the energy economics/policy literature concerning "rebound" effects. These occur because an improvement in energy efficiency produces a fall in the effective price of energy services. The response of the economic system to this price fall at least partially offsets the expected beneficial impact of the energy efficiency gain. In this paper we use of an economyenergy-environment Computable General Equilibrium (CGE) model for the UK to measure the impact of a 5% across the board improvement in the efficiency of energy use in all production sectors. We identify rebound effects of the order of 30% -50%, but no backfire (no increase in energy use). However, these results are sensitive to the assumed structure of the labour market, key production elasticities, the time-period under consideration and the mechanism through which increased government revenues are recycled back to the economy. 3Section 1:

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