Ethics and Sustainable Community Design

Abstract

Sustainable communities depend on ethical people. This book explains how multi-modal systems thinking can be applied to ethical and normative issues of community life. It also provides a practical way forward by using the methodology and SmCube software for social systems analysis and design. These are presented in an extensive case study of life in Rosvik, a village in northern Sweden, where a group of villagers struggle to sustain their village against the loss of people and economic resources to large industrial centres of the south. The book examines the predicament which villagers are struggling with and provides a design of activities to revitalise the village, challenge its leadership and retain the next generation. Ethics and Sustainable Community Design will be of interest to managers, community activists, social workers and anyone interested in a new scientific tool that preserves the humanity of community life against mechanisation and an industrialised world view.

About the Author

Veronica D. de Raadt, BSocWk, MA, PhD is director of the Institute for Management and Social Systems (www.mssinstitute.com), a research institute dedicated to the ethical design and management of viable organisations and communities. She has studied in universities in Australia, USA and Sweden. Her particular research interests focus on the family, marital relationships and small communities in technologically driven societies. She has taught psychology, sociology and research methods at Luleå University of Technology and worked as a social worker in Australia and USA. She and her husband Donald are Australians and live in Sweden with their children Julia, Johann and his wife Jenny. Their oldest son, Timothy lives in the USA with his wife Jennifer and daughters Paige and Piper.