Assessing Success in High-Turnover Communities: Communes as Temporary Sites of Learning and Transmission of Values

Although the average stay of four years may fall short of the founders' dreams and goals, this is no indication that the entire social experiment was or is a failure. Insofar as [Red River] is a school, it is a tremendous asset to the whole movement for social change.

Ingrid Komar, 1989¹

Introduction

An inspection of the annual group photos of community² members hanging in the communities' hallways indicates that turnover in intentional communities is high. The newsletters and community websites have "Comings and Goings" sections where newly arriving members are welcomed and leaving members are bid farewell. When asked, members tell me that most people only stay two years or less. This appears to be correct, as evidenced by my own ethnographic data collection done in 2006 and 2007, where only a small percentage of the members in the communities I visited remain members today. And yet, despite the frequent arrivals and departures, the communities are quite stable, with well-established, profitable businesses, formal government structures, and well cared for homes and gardens. One community in this study is 44 years old, the other 20 years old; these are not communities at risk of disbanding. Their stability arises in part from a group of permanent long-term members at each community who provide the structure and institutional memory the community needs to survive its ever-changing roster of members.

In this article, I analyze the processes whereby members of two intentional communities have worked to reframe their reaction to and understand their reasons for high member turnover, learning to view it as a positive and necessary part of spreading the message about communal life to the outside world while also benefiting from the labor and enthusiasm of short-term members. Specifically, I consider the historical shifts that have influenced the changes in community demographics and led to high turnover, as well as the ideological process members undergo to find meaning in their bifurcated membership roster. Using Pitzer's theory of Developmental Communalism,³ this research contributes to the literature on measuring the success of radical groups by revealing how members have adapted to changes in their environment by transforming themselves and their community to meet the changing needs of their members.

I begin by reviewing Kanter's⁴ theories on member commitment in nineteenth-century intentional communities to establish how historical communities ensured commitment. I then briefly review the critiques of her theories by other communal scholars, and present Pitzer's⁵ and Lockyer's⁶ theories on developmental communalism and transitional utopianism to show how they can be applied to high-turnover situations. In the analysis, I examine how historical shifts in the road to adulthood have impacted community membership and show how both short-term and long-term members have worked to make communal life fit their needs, thus ensuring that the community remains viable in the long term.

Kanter's Theories on Commitment

Kanter's work on commitment mechanisms in utopian communities is considered a foundational work in communal studies and is referred to with regularity within the communal studies literature. Kanter's research focused on 30 communal groups that were formed in the United States between 1780 and 1860 and left written documents. She divided the communities into two groups: the 9 "successful" groups were defined as having lasted 25 years or longer, and the 21 "unsuccessful" groups were defined as having lasted 15 years or less.⁷

According to Kanter, it was the commitment of the members that kept communal groups together, and commitment in her work is defined broadly as "the willingness of people to do what will help maintain the group because it provides what they need."⁸ Since building and maintaining a community depends on the tenuous relationship between an individual and a group, the members must actively work to keep the community alive, and in return the community must satisfy its members over a long period of time.

In the successful nineteenth-century utopias, there were a number of ways of dealing with group...