A taste for decency: A systems exploration of the dynamics of ethical change in small community organizations

The experience of living in a cohousing community has been studied with increasing frequency; but few if any of those studies has examined the dynamics of ethical change in those communities. This dissertation is a mixed-methods study of ethical change in cohousing communities.;The participants in this study were members of three different cohousing communities located in California. The participants were engaged in semi-structured interviews designed to explore the values, ethical background, ethical training, and use of consensus process and experience of ethical change within their respective communities. The data gathered from these semi-structured interviews together with personal observations of the researcher and review of the published websites of the communities showed that while the process of ethical change was a gradual one the decision to make an ethical change occurred rapidly as a consequence of the community values in conflict with environmental stimulus resulting in community stress and emotional reaction. The participants in the study uniformly recounted that at some points during the process of community values coming into conflict with an environmental stimulus the emotional reaction was so compelling that building consensus, the agreed method of community decision making process was discarded in favor of immediate action. The participants also described that the experience of ethical change as involving a transformation of the community itself in subtle or not so subtle ways. The pivotal moments of ethical change were analyzed and themes and common elements were identified.;The study revealed that that the decision making process of ethical change occurred rapidly and can be modeled as a strange attractor using complex dynamic systems theory; that the community system itself can be understood as a social system using the theory of Luhmann and that there are identifiable leverage points at which the system can be changed consistent with the points identified by Meadows. Accordingly the process of ethical change in cohousing communities can be understood and perhaps managed through an understanding of it as a dynamic system.