Sustainability of Communities

Emotional expression is the lifeblood of any organisation or community. This paper reviews recent approaches, research issues and trends in emotion research and then applies insights from this body of research to the area of community sustainability. A particular focus is the gendered nature of emotion and how emotion facilitates connections within communities. Utilising examples from the author’s case study research in a women’s community organisation in Melbourne, Australia, it contrasts the barren emotional landscape of many organisations with the vibrance and warmth of a feminist community organisation, and considers how ICTs may either facilitate or constrain this emotional expression. It draws implications on the vital role of emotion in sustaining communities. Background to the research The research reported here is part of a PhD study where a literature-based conceptual framework for organisational knowledge management was developed and tested in the e framework of selected organisational contexts. One of these is a case study of WIRE, a community organisation that provides a free information, support and referral service for women. Central concepts in my conceptual framework are human capital, knowledge ecology and the role of information and communication technologies (ICTs). The conception here of human capital is as a composite of intellectual capital, social capital and emotional capital. To date there has been relatively little understanding of the emotional capital dimension in organisational knowledge management. For the WIRE study, a case study protocol was devised and interviews were conducted with the WIRE manager, all of the paid staff, a board member, and several volunteers who staffed the phone service. Definitions of key concepts Community is used here in the sense of a social group with a defined identity, where people are linked by a common purpose, interest or commitment to a cause. Human connection is a key dimension of community and socio-emotional factors underpin these connections. The concept of community assumes interaction between people who, at some time, are collocated physically, or who may be collocated virtually through electronic links. My focus on sustainability is primarily social sustainability, i.e. the nurturing and ongoing maintenance of healthy human connections that support the continuation of a community, but it does not exclude environmental sustainability as communities are embedded within a wider ecosystem upon which their continued existence depends. 122 The Journal of Community Informatics Emotion refers to a human inner feeling state; emotions are particular affective states, such as joy, sorrow, anger, fear, love, hate, trust. My emphasis is on how emotion affects social interaction within a community, and in particular the impact of status and gender on emotional expression within that community. Emotion Research: Approaches and Research Issues For millennia, philosophers have pondered human reason and emotion. In more recent times, emotion has been considered from several very different disciplinary perspectives: biology, psychoanalysis, psychology (cognitive psychology, social psychology), sociology, organisational theory, management and community studies. Biological researchers’ focus on emotion is via observation of physiological responses to particular situations or stimuli (Ashkanasy, Härtel and Zerbe 2000, Ch.1; King, 2001; Stanley & Burrows, 2001). Psychoanalysts explore the deeply embedded nature of human emotions such as anxiety within the context of the individual’s life experience (Meyerson, 2000; Weiss & Brief, 2001). Psychology for over a century has differentiated the three realms of thinking (or cognition), feeling (or affect or emotion) and acting (or behaviour), but until recently has focused much more on cognition and behaviour than on emotion (Fineman, 2001; Zerbe & Härtel, 2000). Cognitive psychologists (eg Lazarus) typically subordinate emotion to cognition, whilst social psychologists consider emotion from a behavioural perspective, within the context of interpersonal interaction and social relationships (Stanley & Burrows, 2001; Weiss & Brief, 2001). Sociology, organisational theory, management and community studies also tend towards the relational view of emotion. Levels of analysis in emotion research vary according to perspective, with emotion considered at individual, group, organisational or community levels (Waldron, 2000). Problems in researching emotion are widely noted—the difficulty in accessing what is a subjective experience; the limits of both selfdescription and observation of emotion; the overlapping nature of scales devised to measure emotion; and the complex interactions between emotion constructs that make it difficult to isolate particular effects (eg Davies, Stankov & Roberts, 1998; Meyerson, 2000; Stanley & Burrows, 2001; Zerbe & Härtel, 2000). Over the past fifteen years or so there has been a great resurgence in interest in the nature and role of emotion in work and community contexts, and a growing recognition of the centrality of emotion, and of particular emotions like trust, in making connections between people. Increasingly theorists are attempting to integrate insights from divergent perspectives, and are using the emotion lens to re-examine many aspects of organisational and community life (Stanley & Burrows 2001). Researchers are experimenting with alternative ways to access emotion—for instance, narrative techniques such as storytelling and metaphor are becoming established as valuable adjuncts to more traditional research approaches (Ashkanasy & Tse, 2000; Meyerson, 2000). This is particularly important with communities and disenfranchised groups. Our interest here is research on the social and relational aspects of emotion within organisational and community settings, i.e. the socio-emotional aspects of community life. Much of this research is qualitative, within an interpretivist research paradigm. In the social constructionist approach, researchers focus on the role of emotion in how particular communities negotiate meaning through social processes, communication and discourse (Meyerson, 2000). The phenomenological approach explores emotion from the perspective of the individual embedded within a particular social context, and seeks to create a holistic picture of a situation through examining multiple perspectives and distilling those perspectives to derive meaning and understanding of a complex reality (eg historical and biographical narrative accounts) (Fineman, 2001). Emotion, Gender and the Sustainability of Communities 123 The Major Themes and Debates in Recent Emotion Research Cognition/ Rationality and Emotion/ Irrationality There has been a strong emphasis in Western philosophy to uphold reason and rationality over emotion–to view emotion as interfering with reason, and needing to be controlled or subdued. For most of the 20 Century, Western management, organisational and sociological theories reflected this embedded assumption, with organisations in the Taylorist and Weberian traditions considered ‘rational enterprises’, where formal rules, processes, strategies and goals constrained the individual’s emotionality/ ‘irrationality’ (Beyer & Nino, 2001; Fineman, 2001; Meyerson, 2000). However, over time the concept of the rational enterprise was increasingly recognised as an incomplete or naïve view of organisations and organisational life. Herbert Simon (1955) introduced the notion of ‘bounded rationality’ in human decision-making in organisations and wrote extensively on this over several decades. Simon saw organisations as intentionally rational but ‘bounded’ by the constraints of human behaviour and organisational practices. Karl Weick (1979) and others continually emphasised the limitations of the rational model of enterprise, and the significance of social and emotional factors in organisational life. Mumby and Putnam (1992; Putnam & Mumby, 1993) presented an alternative construct to Simon’s ‘bounded rationality’—that of ‘bounded emotionality’ where ‘nurturance, caring, community, supportiveness, and interrelatedness are fused with individual responsibility to shape organizational experiences.’ (Mumby & Putnam, 1992, p. 465). Unlike Western philosophy, Eastern thinking (eg the Chinese Yin and Yang) sees reason and emotion as inextricably intertwined and acknowledges the unity of opposites (Krone & Morgan, 2000). The recent burgeoning interest in the emotional side of organisational and social life takes up similar themes—the fundamental importance of socio-emotional factors in organisations and communities; the interconnectedness in communities of feelings and cognition. Important research insights have been gained from qualitative research in non-Western and non-mainstream contexts.