Graduate Thesis Or Dissertation
 

Turnover, Memory, Persistence: Four Decades of Ecological Community at Lost Valley

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https://ir.library.oregonstate.edu/concern/graduate_thesis_or_dissertations/1g05fm140

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  • This study is an ethnographic investigation of residential turnover, organizational memory, and the persistence of Lost Valley, an Oregon ecovillage founded in 1989. Literature on organizational turnover, memory, and persistence is reviewed and integrated with scholarship on intentional communities and ecovillages, generating a theoretical framework for data collection and analysis. Data collection methods include participant observation, semi-structured interviews, and document analysis. Data was subjected to iterative analysis combining inductive and deductive methods. Antecedents and consequences of turnover most commonly reported among current and former members are presented. Findings suggest that turnover is linked to diverse phenomena including access to suitable housing, incoming resident qualities, economic factors, overwork and burnout, access to social capital, organizational memory and information sharing, group cohesion and conflict, and processes of recruitment and socialization. Organizational memory retention facilities are surveyed at the field site, leading to the conclusion that a high-turnover environment results in heavy reliance on individuals for this function. A stable core membership group, currently comprising over 40% of the population, has played a vital role in the community's successful rebuilding after the crisis period of 2008-2010 by supplying vital organizational functions in the context of high turnover. Lost Valley’s persistence is analyzed by considering the community as a complex adaptive social system that has traversed three distinct organizational regimes interspersed with periods of crisis. High turnover is theorized to be an adaptive mechanism in response to organizational rigidity. The results of the study are discussed in relation to the emerging recognition of high-turnover intentional communities within communal studies. The study concludes with considerations of practical implications and suggestions for future research. These include the urgency of developing legal frameworks that legitimize the practices of ecovillages and developing better understandings of high-turnover intentional communities and their contributions to the search for sustainable societal alternatives.
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