Communes: Creating and Managing the Collective Life

by Rosabeth Moss Kanter

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• Format: Hardcover
• Language: English
• ISBN: 0060434767
• ISBN13: 9780060434762
• Release Date: January 1973
• Publisher: HarperCollins Publishers
• Length: 544 Pages
• Weight: 1.50 lbs.

Customer Reviews

AN EXCELLENT STUDY OF "UTOPIAN" COMMUNITIES

Rosabeth Moss Kanter (b. 1943) is currently a professor in business at Harvard Business School; however, earlier in her career, she was quite an authority on communes and intentional communities (see her other book, Commitment and Community: Communes and Utopias in Sociological Perspective. This book collects essays (including several that Kanter herself wrote) from a wide range of contributors, over a broad range of topics, such as, "Origins of an Israeli Kibbutz," "The Early Years of the Bruderhof," "Shaker Spiritualism," "Problems of Anarchism on Hippie Communes," "Supporting the Communal Family," her own essay on "Family Organization and Sex Roles in American Communes," "Child-Rearing Practices of the Communal Family," "Irritations and Jealousies," "Oneida Mutual Criticism," "Inquest on New Harmony" (by John Humphrey Noyes), "The Transiency of Urban Communes," "The Hutterite Accommodation to Social Change," etc. Kanter provides a helpful Introduction to each section of the book. Her comments are often incisive; e.g., "Garbage pile-ups have unfortunately occurred throughout communal history." "Communes, like other groups, start with certain goals or ideas, sometimes well-defined, sometimes vague. Their social structure comes about through the process of coping with several important group issues, in the context of their ideals. These issues revolve around how the commune becomes a group and comes to define itself with respect to its environment." "Some communes work well, but of all those begun, only a few survive more than a few years." This book is HIGHLY RECOMMENDED to anyone interested in "Utopias," or intentional communities in general.