Concept Analysis · Multi-Disciplinary Synthesis
A bibliometric mapping of a popular-culture term that has matured into a cross-disciplinary analytic category, from molecular biology to international relations, and its untapped potential for Turkish health-management scholarship.
Dr. Mehmet Nurullah Kurutkan
Department of Health Management, Faculty of Business, Düzce University
Abstract
The term frenemy (Eng. friend + enemy), which describes a relationship in which one actor simultaneously holds elements of friendship and enmity toward another, has over the past fifteen years become a unit of academic analysis across a remarkably broad disciplinary range, from the social sciences to molecular biology and from international relations to supply chain management (Abetz et al., 2023; Mills et al., 2023). Drawing on a 48-publication dataset compiled from the Web of Science Core Collection, this study systematically maps the concept’s academic usage, identifies its dominant disciplinary clusters, and discusses research openings for Turkish scholarship. The findings show that frenemy is not merely a label for interpersonal relations but a theoretically productive analytic instrument representing a bivalent relational category, one that operates strategically at the macro level, organizationally at the meso level, and molecularly at the micro level. For Turkish academia, the contributions of Tahiroğlu and Ben Taleblu (2015), Hernandez-Martinez (2022), and Gürsoy and Baykan (2026) stand out as notable entry points, yet the concept remains largely unexploited in fields such as health management, public health, and organizational behavior.
Keywords: frenemy, friend-enemy, coopetition, relational aggression, bivalent relationship, multi-disciplinary concept analysis
Introduction
The traditional conceptualization of social relations through a binary friend-versus-enemy logic falls short of capturing the complexity of contemporary patterns of interaction. The term frenemy, one attempt to fill this gap, is a blend of the English words friend and enemy. It has entered the academic literature to denote a relationship that is outwardly amicable yet internally charged with competition, jealousy, and distrust (Abetz et al., 2023; Mills et al., 2023). The concept’s popular-culture currency long preceded its academic definition, a circumstance that has, in recent years, triggered a systematic research movement aimed at both defining the concept empirically and demonstrating its applicability across disciplines.
The academic breadth of the frenemy concept is a feature worth dwelling on. Within the dataset examined here, the concept appears in molecular contexts such as the dual role of toll-like receptor (TLR) agonists in cancer immunotherapy (Kaczanowska et al., 2013), the bidirectional effect of ferroptosis in radiotherapy (Kerkhove et al., 2024), and the paradoxical function of interleukin-32 in the tumor microenvironment (Han & Yang, 2019). It extends to macro-political contexts including the diplomatic activities of multinational corporations (Bucheli et al., 2024), the artificial-intelligence innovation systems of Big Tech firms (Rikap, 2024a), and Turkey-Iran and Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations (Hernandez-Martinez, 2022; Tahiroğlu & Ben Taleblu, 2015). This breadth signals that frenemy is not merely a metaphorical device but a theoretically productive concept capable of capturing a common structure across levels of analysis, namely a relational pattern in which the same entity simultaneously performs facilitating and obstructing functions.
The aim of this study is to introduce the academic breadth of the frenemy concept to the Turkish-reading audience on the basis of a 48-publication bibliometric dataset drawn from the Web of Science, to map the dominant disciplinary clusters, and to discuss theoretical and empirical openings for researchers in Turkish academia, particularly in health management, organizational behavior, public health, and international relations. The study begins with the concept’s etymological origin and empirical definition, then synthesizes the literature along the clusters of strategic management, international relations, biomedical sciences, public health, media studies, and interpersonal psychology, and closes by setting out research openings for Turkish scholarship.
Conceptual Definition and Etymological Frame
The most direct attempt to define the frenemy concept empirically is the study by Abetz, Romo, and Marr (2023) published in the Southern Communication Journal. Based on semi-structured interviews with twenty-nine participants, this research positions the frenemy relationship as a negatively valenced and relational category that rests on situational ties and shared social-network relations, appears outwardly amicable, yet is continually placed under tension by competition, jealousy, or distrust (Abetz et al., 2023). An important emphasis of the authors is that treating frenemy as synonymous with ambivalent (bivalent) relationships is a conceptual error; unlike ambivalent relationships, frenemy is shaped by structural distrust and latent rivalry.
Mills, Yu, and Mongeau (2023), in their study in the Western Journal of Communication, applied thematic analysis to 72 undergraduate students and defined frenemy as a relational type between individuals who display surface-level amicable interactions while at the same time appraising the other party as untrustworthy, cold, or even hostile. For these authors, frenemyship is an independent relationship type characterized by disguised disdain that cannot be reduced to a behavioral form such as relational aggression. This definition also answers the question of why a frenemy relationship is sustained, arguing that it persists insofar as relational gains, such as saving face, preserving the social network, and maintaining instrumental connections, outweigh the cost of ending it (Mills et al., 2023).
From a historical and philosophical standpoint, the concept’s roots are comparatively old. Patil (2017) analyzed the animal fables of the Sanskrit-derived Hitopadeśa (c. 800-950 CE) to show how friendship was positioned as an unstable value within political reasoning, demonstrating that the friend-enemy-frenemy triad functioned as an analytic category in medieval Indian political thought. Reid (2024), drawing on a textual analysis of Psalm 55, emphasizes that betrayal from one’s inner circle, the biblical “frenemy among us,” is a motif continually reproduced throughout history. Together, these two works make clear that the concept is not an invention of the twenty-first century but a contemporary renaming of a very old observation about human relations.
Frenemy in Strategic Management, Supply Chains, and Operations Research
The frenemy concept has settled into the strategic-management and operations-research literature as a natural extension of the debate on coopetition (the simultaneous practice of competition and cooperation). In an analytical model published in Production and Operations Management, Niu and colleagues (2019) examine a dual-sourcing structure in which an original equipment manufacturer (OEM) works with a frenemy firm that is at once a competitor and a supplier, showing that the OEM prefers supplier diversification even in the presence of an unreliable additional supplier. The study is notable for indicating that the frenemy relationship is not merely an emotional tension but a structural mechanism for strategic risk sharing in the supply chain.
Li and colleagues (2019), in Decision Support Systems, model performance-investment dynamics between frenemy platforms while analyzing one-way compatibility strategy and the choice of an agency-resale business model among competing platforms. Liu, Li, and Liu (2024) use a Hotelling model to evaluate, in a customer-to-manufacturer (C2M) supply chain, a manufacturer’s choice between cooperating with a frenemy to expand the market and building its own new brand, reporting that cooperation with a frenemy is profitable only when the brands are sufficiently differentiated. Likewise, Lim and Sawng (2019) show that, in the electric vehicle (EV) industry, frenemy relationships in the selection of strategic alliance partners can be mapped through patent-portfolio analysis.
One of the most developed uses of the frenemy concept at the level of international business is offered by Bucheli, Duran, and Kim (2024) in the Journal of International Business Studies. The authors argue that multinational corporations (MNCs) act as diplomatic brokers in relations between host and home countries and that this function should be conceptualized as corporate diplomatic activity. The relationship between U.S.-based Standard Oil of New Jersey and the Colombian government throughout the 1910s and 1920s is examined through a history-to-theory approach, concretely demonstrating the bivalent structure of the frenemy relationship that generates both opportunity and risk (Bucheli et al., 2024). Woo and Yoo (2024) analyze the frenemy effects created by cross-platform online reviews in the sharing economy, while Zhang and Wang (2026) address consumer variety-seeking at the sharing-economy/EV intersection in sustainable transportation, revealing the structurally frenemy character of digital platforms’ attitudes toward one another.
Frenemy in International Relations and Political Contexts
In the discipline of international relations, frenemy is used to conceptualize regional-power relationships that cannot be compressed into the friend-enemy binary. Tahiroğlu and Ben Taleblu (2015), in their study in Turkish Policy Quarterly, analyze Turkey-Iran relations within this frame, arguing that Ankara and Tehran maintain a leadership struggle in the Arab Middle East while retaining the capacity to expand economic cooperation, thus exhibiting a frenemy relationship as a category beyond the conventional ally-rival distinction. A further conceptual test of the same period is offered by Hernandez-Martinez (2022) along the Turkey-Saudi Arabia axis, modeling the relationship between these two regional powers through the frenemy analytic frame within the tension created by the 2017 Qatar blockade and the 2018 murder of Jamal Khashoggi.
In a study published in Democratization that carries the character of a conceptual milestone, especially for Turkish academia, Gürsoy and Baykan (2026) propose positioning populism as the “frenemy within” with respect to democracy. For these authors, populist parties and leaders can contribute to democratization by incorporating excluded classes into the political system in authoritarian settings, yet when they remain in power for long periods they erode liberal institutions and thereby work against the very dynamic of democratization. This dual function is a concrete illustration of how productive the frenemy concept can be as an analytic category for macro-political theory (Gürsoy & Baykan, 2026). A similar theoretical sensibility appears in Lefebvre’s (2026) reading of Stanley Cavell and John Rawls from the perspective of moral perfectionism in liberal democracy, in the European Journal of Political Theory.
The frenemy frame is also applied to state-corporate relations. Rikap (2024a), in Review of International Political Economy, analyzes Microsoft’s corporate AI innovation system and conceptualizes the integration of many Chinese organizations, and even direct competitors, into that system as a frenemy strategy. In another study, in the Review of Keynesian Economics, the same author (Rikap, 2024b) frames the tension and asymmetric strategic alliance between the U.S. National Security State and Big Tech firms as a frenemy relationship. In a more recent work, Chen and Ma (2026), in Economics Letters, examine the effect of generative artificial intelligence on investor behavior through a noisy rational-expectations model and show that AI producing hallucinated information is a frenemy for investors. Warren and Hillas (2020) discuss the military and political consequences of directing trust toward a frenemy actor in the context of human-machine teaming and lethal autonomous weapons systems (LAWS).
Molecular Frenemy in Biomedical and Clinical Sciences
Within the disciplinary composition of the dataset, biomedical publications form the largest cluster. The most frequently cited use of the concept in this field is the review by Kaczanowska, Joseph, and Davila (2013) in the Journal of Leukocyte Biology. The authors show that, in cancer immunotherapy, TLR agonists simultaneously carry the potential to mobilize antitumor immunity by stimulating antigen-presenting cells and the risk of facilitating tumor growth, reading this paradoxical bidirectionality explicitly through the frenemy concept. The same immunological logic appears in Han and Yang’s (2019) review of interleukin-32 (IL-32): IL-32 supports tumor progression in some cancer types while inducing tumor-cell apoptosis and enhancing NK-cell sensitivity in others (Han & Yang, 2019).
Kerkhove and colleagues (2024), in the International Journal of Molecular Sciences, position ferroptosis as a frenemy for radiotherapy, emphasizing that iron-dependent regulated cell death can function as a radio-synergistic mechanism but that the hypoxic tumor microenvironment can suppress it. Tang and colleagues (2023) analyze the paradoxical role of the NRF2 transcription factor between cancer chemoprevention and cancer progression through the frenemy frame, while Bajaj and Han (2019) evaluate the bidirectional effect of venom-derived peptide modulators on cation-selective ion channels within the same analytic framework.
Frenemy readings at the cellular and organ level also occupy a prominent place in the literature. Mongin (2016), in Pflügers Archiv – European Journal of Physiology, defines the volume-regulated anion channel (VRAC) as a frenemy within the brain, showing that the channel both undertakes an essential role in cell-volume regulation and signal transduction and contributes to the excitotoxic death of neurons in stroke and traumatic brain injury. Draznin (2010), in Diabetologia, argues that the mitogenic action of insulin can be read as friend, foe, or frenemy, drawing attention to the role of hyperinsulinemia in the progression of cancer and atherosclerosis. Fada, Reward, and Gu (2021) analyze the frenemy character of ND10 nuclear bodies, which can both support antiviral defense and facilitate viral gene expression in herpesvirus infection.
At the clinical level, Joyce (2018) frames the venoarterial extracorporeal membrane oxygenation (VA-ECMO) circuit as a frenemy that is as life-saving as it is capable of producing complications, while Kolodziej and colleagues (2024), in Cancers, read through the same concept the balance between the clinical benefit and the endocrinological tension created by TSH stimulation prior to PET/CT in detecting thyroid-cancer metastases. In microbiology, Liu and colleagues (2025), in Microbiology Spectrum, document at the molecular level the frenemy character of the SAP_1432 phage that contributes to the survival of Staphylococcus aureus under temperature changes. The comprehensive historical review by Dawlaty and colleagues (2026) in Biology-Basel maps, over a five-decade perspective, the context-dependent friend, foe, or frenemy roles of vasoactive intestinal peptide (VIP) and pituitary adenylate cyclase-activating polypeptide (PACAP) in sepsis. Paoli and colleagues (2019) discuss the dual effect of the ketogenic diet on skeletal-muscle hypertrophy, and Palmer and colleagues (2021) the ecological frenemy function of invasive Pheidole megacephala ants, within similar conceptual frameworks.
Frenemy in Public Health, Health Behavior, and Health Services
From a health-management standpoint, the analytic potential of the frenemy concept is especially evident in its public-health applications. Bass and colleagues (2022), in a qualitative study in Frontiers in Public Health, examine the fentanyl experience of substance users attending a syringe-services program in Philadelphia under the title “It’s my frenemy.” Most participants describe fentanyl as a lethal substance yet continue to use it; this paradox combines with the low uptake of harm-reduction strategies (for example, fentanyl test strips) in the context created by the COVID-19 pandemic (Bass et al., 2022). The findings show that the frenemy concept is a productive instrument for conceptualizing the inconsistency between perceived risk and protective behavior in substance use.
In an examination of academic career transitions in a health-education context, Grace (2018), in a longitudinal egocentric network analysis published in Social Science & Medicine, reports that, in a sample of 268 premedical students, those with high experiential homophily are less likely to leave the premedical track. The author shows that peer support is frenemy in character, harboring within the same network structure both positive functions, such as concrete task help, empathic support, and advice from more senior peers, and the risk of comparison-based stress and competition-driven attrition. This finding conveys an important message: peer support cannot be regarded as a unidirectionally positive resource in the training of health professionals (Grace, 2018).
Within the frame of lifestyle and technology use, Hughes and Burke (2018), in an experimental study published in Computers in Human Behavior under the title “Sleeping with the Frenemy,” test the effects of removing the smartphone from the bedroom for one week on subjective well-being and quality of life. The findings show significant improvement on three of the four measures used, and most participants maintained the behavior even after the intervention ended. The study is notable for the analytic nuance that the frenemy frame can offer in place of the classic benefit-harm binary when evaluating the effects of digital technology on health.
Media, Journalism, and Digital Ecology
The relationship of the traditional journalism profession with digital actors is the principal thematic cluster through which the frenemy concept has settled into media studies. Chua and Duffy (2019), in a three-year ethnographic study published in Media and Communication, show that journalists at a digital-first legacy news organization held attitudes toward peripheral players that fluctuated over time between friend, foe, and frenemy, arguing that these attitudes were structurally determined along axes of physical, temporal, occupational, and control proximity. This conceptual frame is continued by Cheng and Chew (2024) through Singaporean lifestyle journalists in Journalism, where influencer figures are positioned as functional interlopers and journalists are reported to apply strategies of expansion, exclusion, and autonomy protection toward them.
Cheng and Avieson (2025), in a follow-up study in Social Media + Society, document that, under the pressure created by the digital reputation economy, lifestyle journalists’ boundary-protection strategies show a marked shift toward expansion. These findings are important in showing that the relationship professional occupations establish with digital-platform actors has acquired a durable frenemy character. Jones (2016), in Engaging Science, Technology, and Society, uses the example of Hello Barbie to discuss how the screenless Internet of Things (IoT) may become a “new best frenemy” for children, while Schwartz and Omori (2024) report that the ways international students manage homesickness through social-media use are frenemy in character.
Frenemy at the Interpersonal Level: Peer Violence and Academic Relations
One of the studies in which frenemy is treated most systematically within the frame of interpersonal psychology belongs to Wojcik and Flak (2021). In a study published in the Journal of Interpersonal Violence, the authors add a new participant role to the bullying circle, called the frenemy, based on a thematic analysis conducted with 20 adults who had been exposed to long-term peer bullying. This role is defined as a bidirectional actor who is supportive of the victim when alone but neutral or perpetrator-aligned in the group setting, and who therefore changes position according to context. The finding indicates that designing anti-bullying programs solely around overt perpetrator and victim roles is inadequate and that hidden frenemy actors must be included in the intervention map (Wojcik & Flak, 2021).
Williams and Packer-Williams (2019), in an autoethnographic qualitative study published in The Qualitative Report, address relational aggression among Black women faculty in the academy within the frame of critical race feminism, analyzing patterns of coping with frenemy dynamics at the individual, institutional, and structural levels. The authors argue that academic institutions are shaped by structural scarcity (for example, scarcity of positions, resources, and recognition) and that this scarcity strengthens frenemy dynamics among women who share the same identity position. This analytic frame is a theoretically productive resource for researchers of institutional behavior, including in academic health-management disciplines.
Relevance and Research Openings for Turkish Academia
The dataset survey shows that, within Turkish academia, the frenemy concept is represented by three principal entry points. The first is Tahiroğlu and Ben Taleblu’s (2015) analysis of Turkey-Iran relations. The second is Hernandez-Martinez’s (2022) treatment of Turkey-Saudi Arabia relations within the frenemy frame. The third, and the strongest in terms of conceptual command, is Gürsoy and Baykan’s (2026) study in Democratization, which theorizes populism’s “frenemy within” role with respect to democracy. These three works show that Turkish academia’s interest in the frenemy concept has concentrated mainly in international relations and political science.
By contrast, the frenemy concept remains largely unexploited by Turkish researchers in fields such as health management, public health, nursing science, organizational behavior, health communication, and supply chain management. Yet the studies in the dataset prove that a mature theoretical infrastructure already exists to fill this gap. For example, the frenemy paradox between perceived risk and protective behavior in fentanyl use identified by Bass and colleagues (2022) offers an applicable analytic frame for the epidemiology of opioids and synthetic drugs in Turkey. Likewise, Grace’s (2018) findings on experiential homophily among premedical students are directly adaptable to research on peer support and academic retention in Turkey’s medical and health-sciences faculties.
In strategic management, the models of Niu and colleagues (2019), Liu and colleagues (2024), and Bucheli, Duran, and Kim (2024) constitute a productive theoretical frame for mapping coopetition dynamics, particularly in Turkey’s high-technology supply chains. Hospital operations, health supply chains, and alliances between health institutions, for example referral chains between public and private hospitals or human-resource sharing between university hospitals and city hospitals, offer a theoretically productive testing ground for bringing this frame into the Turkish health-management literature. Similarly, Williams and Packer-Williams’s (2019) frame of academic frenemy dynamics is directly adaptable to qualitative research on relational interactions among academics in Turkish higher education, particularly among women.
From the standpoint of the biomedical literature, the studies of Kaczanowska and colleagues (2013), Kerkhove and colleagues (2024), Han and Yang (2019), and Dawlaty and colleagues (2026) should be regarded as conceptual reading guides for Turkish scientists working on cancer treatment, sepsis management, and immunomodulation. The frenemy concept is an analytic instrument that enables a shift from unidirectional harmful or beneficial framings of disease-agent relationships to a context-dependent bidirectional reading, and it exhibits a structural fit with the precision-medicine perspective in particular.
Conclusion
The frenemy concept is a productive case exemplifying the fifteen-year trajectory by which a popular-culture expression has been transformed into a unit of academic analysis spanning the social sciences to molecular biology. The disciplinary heterogeneity displayed by the dataset shows that the concept is not a superficial metaphor but, on the contrary, an analytic category that can coherently capture, across micro, meso, and macro levels, the bivalent relational pattern in which an entity can simultaneously carry facilitating and obstructing functions in the same context (Abetz et al., 2023; Mills et al., 2023; Bucheli et al., 2024; Kaczanowska et al., 2013). The theoretical productivity of the concept stems from the fact that the same basic logic is preserved across scale transitions extending from intracellular signaling pathways to interstate diplomatic relations.
For Turkish academia, the principal opening offered by the frenemy concept is to move beyond the three existing entry studies and systematically test the concept in fields such as health management, public health, nursing science, organizational behavior, academic-career studies, and health supply chain management. In particular, alliance structures among health institutions, peer relations among health professionals, the bidirectional role played by digital-platform actors in health communication, and the classification of context-dependent molecular agents along the disease-treatment axis are prominent openings for the theoretical nuance the frenemy frame would bring to the Turkish health-sciences literature. The core proposal of this study is that the frenemy concept must not merely be translated but reproduced through empirical research questions specific to the Turkish academic context.
References
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