Diss. Univ. Köln, 1997. / Communitarian groups or simply communes - groups of men and women who live together and share all their property for some higher goal - have been a marginal but persistent phenomenon during the last two millenia and have particularly flourished within the last two centuries. For the social sciences, the intense cultural experimentation in which many of these groups engage make them an attractive object of study. Given their extreme degree of sharing, many communes have perished rather quickly. Some, however, have persisted for decades or even centuries. This study attempts to identify the conditions that have to be fulfilled for the long-term survival of communes. For this purpose, a sample of 43 well-described cases out of the last three centuries - mostly North American, European, and Japanese - is introduced and compared. Besides, categories for longevity are devised that do not only refer to absolute duration but also to the relative condition of a specific case at a given point in time. It turns out that there are five decisive areas in which there are conditions that either are beneficial or detrimental to longevity. One of these is size: a membership of between 75 and 500 members per settlements promotes long durations while smaller and larger communes reach less impressive results. Secondly, a federative branch structure with semi-independent settlements of roughly equal size and weight supports survival while a dependent branch structure or a concentration in just one settlement do not. Thirdly, monogamous marriage and family structures are more successful than celibacy or groups marriage, especially when healthy, active survival is emphasized. Fourthly, charismatic leaders are beneficial only if they do not become too dominant, and even then the groups that have no such leader do not stand back. Fifthly, there are two types of belief systems that can support long-term survival: one is a religious ideology that strongly separates between ritual and everyday life and between sacred and profane, often with a marked ascetic orientation; and the other is a secular, tolerant-egalitarian ideology that, by contrast, is rather characterized by the loss of consensus on basic beliefs at a relatively early point in the commune's history. Several other areas are also explored as to their relative contribution to the commune's survival, notably social control, decision-making, and relationships with the outside society. Here, however, features of specific groups seem to be determined by their basic orientations in terms of charismatic leadership and ideology, failing to make independent contributions to survival. Finally, the most important results are summarized, also in the innovative forms of formal Boolean implications and in implicational diagrammes. Three integrated models are sketched, one of them with a rather limited survival perspective - the commune completely dominated by a strong charismatic leader -, the other two enabling a great range of results from short-term to permanent survival - the commune with a dualistic religious orientation and the commune with a secular, tolerant-egalitarian orientation. In conclusion, perspectives for further research on the cooperation among equals are outlined. It is argued that the comparison of empirically observed real-life cases is a fruitful perspective for identifying design principles of successful cooperative institutions. Bibliogr.: p. 335-354.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:OCLC/oai:xtcat.oclc.org:OCLCNo/611231714 |
| Date | January 1998 |
| Creators | Brumann, Christoph. |
| Publisher | Hamburg : LIT, |
| Source Sets | OCLC |
| Language | German |
| Detected Language | English |
| Source | Texte intégral en ligne (libre-accès) |
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