Plural Logics in Marketing Systems: Managing Tensions Within the Social Matrix in an Ecovillage

Research Site

An urban ecovillage, which we gave the pseudonym UREV for URban EcoVillage, on the west coast of the USA was founded in the early 1990s with the purpose of establishing an urban “demonstration project.” One of the co-founders interviewed stated that “our vision was to reinvent how we live in the city by demonstrating the processes of living more ecologically and more cooperatively, thereby creating a higher quality of life at a much lower environmental impact.”

The ecovillage is situated in one of the most densely populated downtown neighborhoods of a metropolis. The village comprises two adjacent apartment buildings surrounded by garden plots, outdoor patios, a collective room, a bike room, and garages converted for other uses like a shared tool shed and an art studio.

Data Collection

Interviews

Twenty residents (57% of the population) were interviewed. Our informants (see Table 1 for informant characteristics) included 12 females and eight males between the ages of 22 and 72 who have lived in the village for two months and up to 16 years. The informants were recruited using the snowballing technique. Eighteen informants are members. One person was in the membership process (eventually successful), and the other was a member's spouse. Phenomenological interviews (Thompson, Pollio, and Locander 1994) lasted thirty minutes to two hours. They were conducted in situ either at the informant's home or in the collective room of the ecovillage complex. The long interview format allowed the informants to talk freely about their experiences and share their opinions without interruptions from the interviewer. Each interview was audio-recorded digitally and transcribed verbatim. Emic data from interviews were supported with etic views derived from participant observations and other data sources.

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Table 1.

Informant Characteristics.

Pseudonym	Age	Gender/Ethnicity	Education	Occupation	Time at the Ecovillage
Ruth	63	Female/Caucasian	Grad. school	Unemployed	16 yrs.
Thelma	35	Female/Caucasian	Grad. school	Film maker/barista	5 yrs.
Pamela	38	Female/Caucasian	College	Greywater expert & consultant	1 yr.
Paul (Pamela's husband)	36	Male/Caucasian	Grad. school	University professor	1 yr.
Annie	41	Female/Caucasian	Grad. school	Psychotherapist intern	9 yrs.
Simon (Annie's husband)	36	Male/Caucasian	High school	Electrician	10 yrs.
Rod	39	Male/Hispanic	High school	Bike messenger	15 yrs.
Monica	30	Female/Asian/Hispanic	Grad. school	Immigration lawyer	1 yr.
Heather	41	Female/Caucasian	Grad. school	Lawyer at a local non-profit org.	6 yrs.
Andrew	22	Male/African American	College	Administrative assistant at a local non-profit	2 mos.
Karin	71	Female/Caucasian	College	Pensioner nurse Massage therapist	2 yrs.
Irene	72	Female/Caucasian	College	Pensioner artist	3 ½ yrs.
Lorraine	34	Female/Caucasian	College	Elementary school music teacher	2 yrs.
Bill	50	Male/Caucasian	College	Blog writer	18 yrs.
Karla (Bill's wife)	44	Female/Caucasian	College	Stay-at-home mom	7 mos. (not member yet)
Antonio	37	Male/Hispanic	College	Musician	11 yrs.
May	44	Female/Asian	Grad. school	Works at a non-profit organization	14 yrs.
Nate	25	Male/Caucasian	College	Teaches English	In the process of becoming a member
Kevin	52	Male/Caucasian	High school	Unemployed	16 yrs.
Veronica	36	Female/Hispanic	Grad. school	Interpreter at a non-profit organization	3 yrs.

Data Analysis

Data analysis followed an iterative process (Spiggle 1994) of familiarizing ourselves with existing theories related to our field of inquiry, data collection, data analysis, and further immersion in extant literature. Three hundred eighty pages of interview transcripts, field notes, and over 1400 web page entries were analyzed. Atlas.ti software was used to code and analyze interview data. The iterative process helped in aiding inductive and deductive categorizations (Kvale 1994; Spiggle 1994). Through the initial readings of the interviews, we identified the emergent concepts and organized the interview transcript excerpts under these categories (Miles and Huberman 1994). The analysis helped us determine the community's common issues, concerns, and challenges and gave us important clues about the relationships between the members and their lifestyle projects. It also shaped the focus of the succeeding interviews. Subsequently, utilizing deductive coding techniques, we searched for excerpts to fit Layton's social matrix constructs and the concepts in Figure 1. We used his concepts as organizing constructs for categorization. In instances when an interview quote could be interpreted to fit more than one category, we chose the quote that best exemplifies the concept. Analysis of the field notes, photographs, and online data aided in supporting our interpretations of life at the ecovillage.

Macro-Level Analysis: Exchange Logics in Context and Tensions Between Sustainability and Capitalism Logics

Logics are symbolic and material organizing principles that direct and underlie the decisions and behaviors of people through a “socially constructed, historical pattern of material practices, assumptions, values, beliefs, and rules” (Thornton and Occasio 1999, p. 708). A marketing system both defines and is defined by the exchange logics and the exchange contexts within which the transactions are carried out (Layton 2011). Therefore, we interpret exchange logics as the guiding values and rules for the transactions that take place within the ecovillage marketing system.

The dominant logic that underlines everyday exchanges and transactions in the context of the ecovillage is sustainability (Sherry 2014). We adopt a definition of sustainability put forth by the Brundtland Report: “development that meets the needs of the present without compromising the ability of future generations to meet their own needs” (UN Documents n.d.). Sustainability logics also lies in the heart of the shared values that bring people to UREV. It manifests itself in the members’ consumption behavior and the underlying ideology of their consumption practices, which can be summed up as exchange logics.

Context plays a crucial role in intentional community consumption (Askegaard and Linnet 2011; Stremersch et al. 2023). The context of the ecovillage setting is important in our particular example. Many ecovillages around the world are in rural settings, far away from the nearest town and isolated from the nearest neighborhoods. Andreas (2013) describes rural ecovillages as islands, forming isolated entities, a move counterintuitive to their stated missions. The UREV is situated in an urban environment, far from any bucolic rural setting. It is in a major metropolitan western US city, famous for its predominantly individualistic culture of conspicuous consumption. This context was a conscious choice for the founders, who retrofitted existing buildings in the heart of a densely populated inner-city neighborhood to create a visible, urban demonstration project of sustainable living. The context of the city amplifies contrasts between life at the ecovillage and life outside. For example, May compares the conventional disposal and consumption patterns of the metropolitan society with the sustainability logics embedded in the organizational culture of the UREV:

“I think we’re better at waste reduction. We compost. We greywater. We’ve got a smaller trash bin. It's both giving ourselves limits and also showing that we don’t need as much. There's a strong culture of non-consumption. We have clothing swap parties. There's a strong kind of, thrift shop and used secondhand purchasing, whether it's through Craigslist [a classified advertisements website] or whatever. There's a strong culture around reuse and reduction. There's a lot more food growing that's happening.”

While many examples of sustainable living can be observed in the exchange logics and the context of the ecovillage, tensions exist between the life within and outside of it. The metropolitan city's noisy, congested, and car-centric context provides a high-contrast backdrop for the sustainable lifestyle the ecovillagers try to create. On a philosophical level, residents contrast the context of the ecovillage values with the large capitalistic system at its doors, as Karla proudly proclaims that the “amazing” thing the members have accomplished “flies in the face of capitalism on so many levels.” Examination of our ecovillage member experiences uncovers several difficulties and challenges. Sometimes members compromise the anti-capitalist, sustainable, and eco-friendly consumption practices and values for expediency. Heather explains:

“I use it [the car] if there's not a good bus route. I use it for time efficiency, essentially. If it's going to take me an hour or more—because much of my work is in [a distant neighborhood], so if it's going to take me an hour to get to a meeting, I’ll drive.… I would prefer, if I didn’t have to work, or if there was better public transportation infrastructure in [the city], then I wouldn’t drive.”

While an emphasis on consuming less and living sustainably are the principal values of the community, some members splurge on shopping sprees and online gift registries. May describes the dichotomy of her own clothes shopping:

“Thrift stores, there's a couple good ones right up the street. There's the Goodwill [a national thrift store chain] up on [name of neighborhood] …. And then the clothing swaps, which are great. So, we try to do that maybe four times a year, maybe more. People come and just throw all their clothes around, and it's just free. You bring your clothes, and you take whatever you want. And occasionally I’ll go to —I’ll buy something new. Occasionally I’ll go to REI [an upscale outdoor sports retail chain] and splurge [laughs].”

Meso-Level Analysis: Actors, Governance, and Tensions Between Community and Bureaucracy Logics

Intentional communities require some level of internal governance (Cunningham and Wearing 2013; Kirby 2003) that supports the collective's structure and organization, which sometimes conflicts with the wide variety of perspectives of market system actors. Layton identified the actors, e.g., individuals, households, managers, buying groups, and aggregate segments, groups, and communities, as entities participating in the marketing system, each with diverse resources and differing ideologies (2011). While on the one hand, the unique capabilities and perspectives of the actors enrichen the ecovillage experience and help the intentional community to function, on the other hand, variance in these attributes and individuals’ expectations can facilitate tensions in participatory collaboration concerning governance. Ecovillage members join the community with several shared values based on the logics of sustainability and social justice. May describes the type of people who are drawn to live in an intentional community:

“… there's a range [of types of people]. There are people who are kind of environmentally or politically conscious around social justice or environmental justice issues, and feel that this is part of—like, I think this describes me, is part of what I see as part of the solutions and kind of making the solutions happen, and experimenting and sharing with others how we feel kind of more people need to live or will be forced to live in these ways in the future. This is like a healthy and joyful way of doing that. Others—they’re like relatively new to [the city], they have some kind of environmental consciousness and feel like this is a really good way of living in community in a city that can feel very—cities in general can feel very isolating. I think there are people who are drawn to the social aspects of living in community. Other people are drawn, kind of, more conceptually and with kind of a political analysis. Others who like to garden. I think it can appeal to a variety of folks.”

What Rod refers to as the “officiality of things” is the governance of the ecovillage as the marketing system. When tensions rose between the actors because of the responsibilities associated with governance, UREV decided to hire external managers, who are not UREV members, for the job. This strategy helped ease tensions. Ecovillage members also serve voluntarily on a number of committees, including the welcoming committee, the garden committee, the facilitation team, the management committee, and the visitor committee. However, tensions between community and bureaucracy logics arise due to a lack of accountability and agreed-upon rules. When asked what happens if a member is not serving on a committee, Karin responds:

“Nothing. Right now, nothing happens. Nothing happens if you don’t come to meetings. […] Don’t participate, nothing happens. Some people—a few people have been asked to not be members anymore, but I don’t think it was as a result of not coming to meetings. I don’t know what happened in there, but they’re not asked to move out. I think, legally, you can’t do that. So, then they get to live here, just pay the rent, and live here, and everybody is doing the work for them.”

For some members, the shared values, based on the logics of sustainability and social justice, are also indicative of a rejection of wider social rules, and those who were drawn to the UREV identified as anarchists. Karin recalls, “… there hasn’t been that attachment to commitment in the early days. A lot of people who were the original founders of this, from my understanding, classified themselves as anarchists, and they don’t want any rules.” But as May noted above, the rejection of governance structures was problematic, and “…now people are beginning to see the downside of that” (Karin). Kevin concurs and likens the change to the familiar governance of a family: “…it's gone through many phases, ups, and downs…it's definitely more like Mom and Dad now. Before, it used to be like a little more anarchy.” The beginnings of UREV resemble an “autarchy”, which Layton initially characterized as “anarchy” (2011), wherein “largely self-sufficient, poorly informed households, seeking to fill provisioning gaps, engage in sharing, barter and more generally, reciprocity, with other community members” (Layton 2019, p. 217) yet over the years the UREV has emerged to be a more structured and purposeful community.

The membership process is one example of the importance of a formalized governance structure as a strategy to manage tensions of collaborative governance. Monica describes the rigors of the process: Monica

At that time, I tried to go through the membership process. I went through the membership process like three times before I actually became a member, because the membership process is pretty—I don’ know if you know anything about it, but it's pretty intensive. You have to participate, here, and get to know everybody in the community. Since they make decisions by consensus, everybody has to know you and approve of you becoming a member and living in the community.

Micro-Level Analysis: Flows, Roles, Networks, and Assortments Tensions Between Individualism and Collectivism Logics

As Layton (2011) posits, for a marketing system to function effectively in creating and delivering assortments, economic flows must occur. Layton (2007) defines assortments as outputs of marketing systems that can be tangible and intangible products differentiated by attributes and location in space and time. The flows in a marketing system take place between the sellers and the buyers as assortments in the form of possessions, ownership rights, risk, money, transfer of economic values, as well as the “possession of the economic value inherent in the products, services, experiences, and ideas being exchanged” (Layton 2011, p. 269). Within the ecovillage, members are responsible for the everyday functioning of the community and for the longer-term sustainability of the marketing system such that flows, roles, and networks for the exchange of assortments need to be in place. Annie describes how these elements are evident in the context of the village:

“I mean, the basic, underlying theme is that people live here who have a dedication to lowering their negative footprint. So, it fosters joint decision-making, consensus decision-making, eating together. Just, sort of, the idea of interdependence as opposed to isolation [laughs] and dependence—or independence. So inter-dependence, since you kind of need to rely on each other a little bit in order to function. So, there is that which is relying on each other in a very healthy, kind of inter—you know what that means.”

Layton (2019) also argues that “[e]ach actor in a specific marketing system is involved in many other marketing system networks, sometimes complementary to the focal system, sometimes competing or perhaps conflicting, sometimes just adjacent, sometimes in an embedded system, always in supervening systems” (p. 216). Thus, the ecovillage members as actors in specific village roles are also part of multiple marketing systems that are embedded in and adjacent to each other, which causes tensions between roles in and among these multiple networks. Tensions can arise when members’ responsibilities for ecovillage roles clash with responsibilities in the larger context of contemporary consumer culture. Monica describes the challenges of balancing life within the village with personal responsibilities:

“I think, of course, there are challenges in finding the time to live my life outside of the community and make money and pursue my career as a lawyer and pay off my bills and loans and all of that, which I kind of need to be a lawyer to do. And, also, balance the time to participate in the community and be involved in the community as well, so that's a balancing act that I’ve been working on.”

Layton (2011) proposes that “the assortments generated by marketing system are highly visible indicators of the nature of a society, its values and its commitments” (p. 272). Along with goods and services, assortments as a concept also includes experiences and ideas as well as what is being offered, sought, accessible, acquired, and accumulated (Layton 2011). As an intentional community collective, shared values around sustainability logics dictate not only the kind of assortments generated but also the flows within the marketing system and the roles acquired by the ecovillage members. In its development as a network with processes and flows, the ecovillage manages assortments for the benefit of community members. As Ruth describes:

“Our process has developed a lot in big ways toward accomplishing having an intentional community. Well, like, in terms of just having meetings, it was a while before we took notes at our meetings. It was a while before we had what we have now, which are agenda planning teams, where two people are responsible for collecting input from the community on what they want to have on the agenda, but also looking at what things need to be on the agenda from stuff we’ve done in the past. And then communicating what's going to be on the agenda before the meeting happens. [laughs] And then having skills to actually facilitate a meeting and be there and facilitate and stuff. I mean, we didn’t start out with any of that stuff.”

These examples of assortments generated in UREV contribute directly to its members, surrounding communities, and the greater public. UREV is seen as a demonstration project as it holds regular tours and many educational events open to the public. When asked how Annie would describe the UREV to someone who does not know about ecovillages, she answered:

“… there's this focus on environmental awareness as well as social awareness. So, a lot of people are doing their startup projects or demonstration projects that are happening here. Like, solar panels, or hot water solar, or gray water, composting, obviously, all those kinds of things. It's kind of a demonstration of, ‘You can do this even in the middle of the city.’ Because that's what's very different about this place than other intentional communities, is a lot of times they’re set in a rural place, where this is super urban. So, having to do that, actually, is kind of, in a way it's its own challenge, right?”

Contributing to the community with material or symbolic resources, mentally or physically, is a requirement for an intentional community to continue its existence. Simon notes:

“We have some participation requirements—like, official participation requirements—but there's a lot of, I think, implied pressure to be active and participating. The members do–everybody wants everybody else to be participating and to be a member of this larger project that we all made the decision to join.”

Summary

Our analysis of the social matrix elements revealed logic tensions at the macro, meso, and micro levels. At the macro-level, the clash between sustainability and capitalist logic in the ecovillage created tensions in exchange logics and context. At the meso-level, we detected tensions between the actors and governance in different ways in which the ecovillage members reacted when faced with the bureaucratic obligations to run the marketing system created by UREV. Finally, at the micro-level, the flows, roles, and networks essential for the ecovillage to maintain its existence and assortments that are the products of the market system interactions create tensions between ideologies of individualism and collectivism. See Table 2 for a summary of our findings on logic tensions and strategies in the marketing systems of the ecovillage. Our findings demonstrate the ways logics at multiple levels interact and how actors adopt various strategies to manage tensions arising from competing logics.

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Table 2.

Social Matrix Elements, Logics Tensions, Strategies, and Quotes from the Ecovillagers.

Social Matrix Elements	Logics Tensions	Strategies	Additional Quotes (edited to be concise)
Macro Level Analysis
Exchange Logics and Context	Sustainability vs. Capitalism Philosophical and moral differences between the life within the ecovillage and the life outside of it. Ease of dominant social paradigm (DSP) actions in everyday life. Lure of consumer culture.	Sustainable lifestyle is deemed as superior in comparison to Dominant Social Paradigm (DSP). Low-impact compromise of values, temporary suspension of sustainable ethics. Occasional engagement with DSP contextualized as a “splurge.”	“Just an interest in the concept of people doing something different, and doing something that was potentially beneficial both to the people who are part of it, but also a more sustainable way to live, in general, but also in [the city], which can be very challenging because it's a cars-centric city, and it doesn’t really have much culture embedded in the city around ecological sustainability practices. So, it was like trying to figure out how to live in this city, how to find my place in this city. It sort of seemed like a bit of its own identity within a much bigger identity that I was worried about how well I would relate to this city in general.” (Heather) “I have a bike and I have a metro pass so I can take busses and trains. I have a yearly pass that makes it very feasible—economically feasible to not have a car. I used to also—when I would perform I would tow a bunch of music equipment to setup my shows around town. I would basically just have a little ‘kippie’ trailer—a child seat that would put a bunch of musical stuff in and pull it on the bicycle. It feels very rewarding to have people really see it. They’re like ‘Wow, you brought that all in your bike’.” (Antonio) “Yeah, I have a car, and I’m dependent on my car. And I’m not willing to give up the speed, you know what I mean?
Meso-Level Analysis
Actors and Governance	Community vs. Bureaucracy Stress of consensus decision-making process. Conflicts with no clear way to manage the collective.	Limit engagement in the community. Formalization of the organization and structure as a strategy to manage tensions of collaborative governance. Development of the conflict resolution team. Member departure.	“So, [a child] who lives here, had high levels of lead in his blood because of lead exposure in the building, and they knew about lead stuff here. So, I specifically asked about lead, and was given a vague answer. So, we moved in, and five days later someone comes out with the lead report. There was like lead all over the place. So that was like—I’m still super-irritated. It wasn’t like anyone intended to expose us to lead, it was just people weren’t competent in certain really important ways. And then the way maintenance happens here is just completely ridiculous. And it's all changed—we have a new manager, now, and things are in a good movement. But we came here in this transition between things, so there was stuff there. I knew it was going to be frustrating, but this is past my limit. […] Yeah. And there are certain things—like, that is just not okay. It's a legal issue, that's the one thing.” (Pamela) “So, there's been these patterns of creating—like, where nothing ever happens and nothing gets done, and things are just left in states of disarray and junkiness, and that's kind of the norm. Not because anyone likes it—maybe like two people out of everyone—but because, to try to do something, you get this negativity thrown at you in different ways. It's really interesting. Like, I can get things done and just work through it and be like, ‘Whatever.’ So, I think I can deal with it, but it's not pleasant. So, to try to make projects happen was really difficult. And I’m committed and I want to have these really cool, amazing eco projects, and all these people come and do it.” (Pamela) “There’re times when I just want to go away permanently. But there's a certain sadness to think about leaving it, too. Because then it's like an unfinished project that you just cut out.” (Heather)
Micro Level Analysis
Flows, Roles, Networks, and Assortments	Individualism vs. Collectivism Balancing the goals of the collective against personal agency identities. Unclear community rules and expectations from its members.	Coping through the use of material or symbolic resources. Embracing ambiguity so that personal responses are in line with the Ecovillage ethos.	“Living intentionally in community. So, making decisions collectively—consensus-based decision-making, that's not necessarily everyone's favorite thing. It's challenging for sure.” (May) “It can be very tiring, it can wear you out to be navigating your social relationships and your cooperative relationships and your differences of opinion, and to try to do it in a principled way is very difficult, so it can be a kind of energy-sucked too.” (Heather) “Very few people here have full time jobs [in the ecovillage]. I’ve seen this progression happen when people come in with a full-time job, and then they don’t anymore, because the pressure of having that job and participating. I don’t know how I can do both, personally. There's no way I could do both. […] Sometimes when people are not participating, it's not because they don’t want to. Sometimes it's because they’re overwhelmed with their personal lives.” (Lorraine) “It's just that balance of time and energy. My partner and I are in a phase where we’re starting off our careers, and that takes a lot of energy. And I find that I think my quality of life is pretty good here because I have friends and neighbors in the building and the building next door. And we have this great garden. But sometimes it's just overwhelming. I don’t know. I think, in some ways, this is a great community for me to be part of. In other ways, if I were going to design a community that was totally tailored to me, it might not focus quite so much on environment, and might focus more on human relationships and social justice and that kind of thing. And partly because I have health issues—I have chronic pain—there's certain things that I can’t do. Like, I can’t do too much working in the garden, like repetitive motion. I can’t ride a bicycle anymore, unfortunately, even though that's part of what I originally came here for.” (Thelma)

Macro-Level Tensions

Value incongruence between sustainability and capitalist logics, which manifested as macro-level tensions, was particularly noticeable in the market system element of exchange. Layton (2019) argues that “each actor in a specific marketing system is involved in many other marketing system networks, sometimes complementary to the focal system, sometimes competing or perhaps conflicting, sometimes just adjacent, sometimes in an embedded system, always in supervening systems” (p. 216). However, Layton's theorizing can be expanded to include the difficulty of adhering to a sustainability ethic in the face of the DSP (Kilbourne McDonagh, and Prothero 1997) for UREV members, marketing system engagement demands careful thought and effort on the part of the actor, particularly in consumption decisions that may violate the context's value system. For instance, Heather's description of her experience when using a personal car for time savings and convenience resulted in some angst. Rather than a blending two logics approach (Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007), she justified her desire to preserve a different resource (time) with her desire to uphold UREV values. In this way, she balanced plural logics (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli 2015), each of which is supported by differing value systems: the macro-level economic system offers infrastructure support of regular and frequent personal transportation consumption while the value congruence with UREV community ethos points to public transport as the better choice. Participating in market exchange as a buyer in these conflicting value systems, Heather faced the tension of balancing plural logics in what for others in different marketing systems (Layton 2019) may be a purely economic choice. Adherence to UREV values heightened the tensions she faced in a choice that may be framed as mundane and value conflict-free for other members of the metropolis.

UREV members’ generalized differences between the capitalistic and sustainability logics are resolved by privileging sustainable behaviors and language of moralistic superiority (Chatzidakis, Pauline, and Bradshaw 2012). Members maintain their moral commitment to community sustainability values by treating conventional consumption activities as aberrations. While not the harmonious balance found in other market systems logics (e.g., Scaraboto and Fischer 2013), sequestering conventional consumption to special occasions and splurge events signals a sharp differentiation between logics. The market system logics employed here are reminiscent of Giesler's (2012) problematization theory, which is demonstrated by the tensions between the capitalistic logic for the metropolis with its ideology of hyper-consumption and the sustainability-focused ecovillage.

If in capitalistic systems, sustainable consumption is seen as the aberration, the ecovillage logic flips the script, wherein the sustainable consumption logic is normalized, even mundane yet also sacred (due to its higher moral standards), and the capitalistic system is relegated to the profane, yet also in some ways sacred (Belk, Wallendorf, and Sherry 1989) when embedded in special occasion rituals. The UREV actors privilege ideals of a sustainable logic in market exchange interactions over a capitalistic logic.

Meso-Level Tensions

Tensions for the UREV members are not always about the physical place as an urban ecovillage or value-laden opposition to hyper-consumption and capitalism. When individuals voluntarily join ecovillage life, they come for a sense of community, sustainability, and a life where resisting and rejecting neoliberalism and capitalism is supported, even celebrated. Sometimes tensions arise within the UREV, which operates as a self-managed, complex organization bounded by a sustainability logic. The level of commitment to live sustainably 24 h a day, seven days a week means the members enact roles to support the network and flow of assortments needed to maintain the community and face challenges to live their values. Collaborative living in a sustainable context requires much commitment of time, energy, and other resources, which members sometimes find burdensome. Governance is seen as needed, but a lack of participation or a perceived imbalance of effort to manage the organization is a source of tension and conflict. Intentional communities provide a context for collective action for sustainable consumption and demonstration of resistance to neo-liberal capitalism and the associated politics of environmental ethics (Chatzidakis, Pauline, and Bradshaw 2012).

“While autarchy is relatively, often locally stable, the second pattern, emergence, is inherently dynamic, as participants respond to changing environments, perceiving external or internal catalysts that lead to action” Layton (2019, p. 217). Autarchy and following pattern of emergence are evident in the meso-level tensions and strategies of Ecovillage. Layton considers emergence primarily in terms of actor specialization, but in the UREV, this is not the case.

Through the development of conflict resolution teams and collaborative decision-making, the ecovillage governance provided a superstructure with a goal of community cohesion in times of catalytic shifts. The development of the UREV governance framework reflects Layton's (2011) evolution of reciprocity, redistribution, and exchange as members create rules and accepted practices in the management of the village. For some members, roots in the disruptive philosophy of anarchy chafed with the collaborative ethos of the village life, yet over time more productive activities of social change prevailed. The strategy of formalizing conflict resolution demonstrates how moving from opposing discourses (Giesler 2008, 2012; Karababa and Ger 2011; Thompson 2004) toward moderation of blended logics (Scaraboto and Fischer 2013; Thompson and Coskuner-Balli 2007) helped members manage tensions and sustain the organization. The professional managers hired for the job at UREV, which is not typical in intentional communities, provide an extra level of governance. This strategy helps to ease the tensions and move some of the governing responsibility off the shoulders of the members.

Micro-Level Tensions

Members enact various roles in the village network to maintain the flow of assortments arising from the village context and those deriving from the consumerist metropole. Layton notes that “[…] individuals and entities (the actors) each bring differing sets of capabilities, such as capital – economic, social and political – to an exchange, and each will frame their understanding of what is in hand in terms of their own unique sets of experiences and learnings” (2019, p. 215). UREV members sustain the community through the roles which leverage their capabilities in support of, and with a focus on, the values of the context. In this way, the marketing shaping movements in the larger economy are somewhat contained, and its influence is met with a community rather than an individual reaction. The tensions between the roles and responsibilities of the ecovillagers and their personal ambitions and desires require diligence and balance of multiple logics. Rather than a blending of logics, members manage to hold conflicting logics of collectivist and individualist value systems in a balance of plural, conflicting logics (Ertimur and Coskuner-Balli 2015; Giesler 2008) but generally eschew the individual consumption culture in favor of collectivist values.

Communities with intervening moral value systems add a layer of complexity to marketing system theorizing. As Layton notes, “… each act of economic and/or social value based exchange takes place in a social matrix, where participants share a common understanding of what is going on, accept norms and rules or conventions of behavior within an exchange transaction, and work within an established community infrastructure” (2019, p. 215) Other examples are religious communities (i.e., the Amish of Pennsylvania or Hasidic Jewish communities in Williamsburg, New York) or rural ecovillages. This additional layer of value metrics in these communities goes beyond the familiar price or service value exchange in Layton's theorizing. As voluntary members of a sustainable value community, ecovillage members negotiate exchange value at multiple levels.

Ecovillagers who voluntarily join and participate in the community are mindful of the underlying values and, to some extent, the expectations associated with a highly sustainable lifestyle in an intentional community. While UREV members are voluntary participants in the role, flows, and network of the village, wherein they collectively produce and consume a variety of assortments, they are not voluntary members of a capitalistic system. The agency and the choice to join the UREV indicate a considered effort to privilege the sustainability logic. As with most ecovillages (Cunningham and Wearing 2013; Hong and Vicdan 2016; Kirby 2003), micro-level tensions often arise where individualism (Holleman 2011) and collectivism collide. Organizational processes and structures in the forms of roles, flows, and networks provide support for the primacy of the collective as the dominant logic.