An Exploration of Communitas Among Road Warriors

Introduction

The literature on community is vast, as is the literature on turnover intention and associated costs for professional services firms. There is minimal research focused on understanding communitas in liminal workplace environments such as professional services, or its potential impact on road warriors operating in these environments. In addition, there is a gap in understanding how a sense of communitas may impact employee retention in these firms. Retention of qualified consultants is vital for professional services firms to be successful. Prior research has largely neglected the role communitas plays in employee satisfaction and retention.

To address this gap in the literature, this study looks at communitas among consulting professionals who spend their workweek away from home at a client site. In this study, I present interview-based narratives indicating experiences of communitas among road warriors associated with a mid-size professional services firm. Through the interview process, it became obvious that these individuals experience communitas as a contributing factor that enables them to function as a road warrior.

This article proceeds as follows: I begin by providing contextual information about challenges facing professional services firms today. I, then, introduce the literature on community, followed by a rationale for using the term communitas instead. I, then, build on the interview narratives to provide a theoretical foundation for additional explorations of communitas within this occupational group. I conclude with a discussion of the findings, implications, limitations and suggestions for future research.

Challenges for Professional Services Firms

Professional services firms account for a significant share of modern economies (Heng, 2013; Nikolova, 2007; Scott, 1998). Consultants working for these firms are typically delivering knowledge intensive consultancy to their clients (Patterson, 2000). More than other industries, professional services are dependent on the skills, collaboration and resourceful innovation of its consultants to deliver services and solutions to clients. Consulting work is characterized by periods of intense client interactions requiring a high level of personal rapport. As a result, these firms are highly dependent on a solid base of talented consulting staff (Rust, Stewart, Miller & Pielack, 1996).

Professional services firms often face high turnover rates, jeopardizing their ability to provide clients with adequate services (Nikolova, 2007). Additionally, turnover raises operational costs which can be significant (Luo & Homburg, 2007). In addition, the resulting costs associated with recruitment and training and the cumulative costs associated with turnover can be substantial (Nikolova, 2007). In a service-orientated environment, the loss of relationship continuity with clients directly affects profitability. Turnover in professional services firms is explored through the concept of turnover intention, defined as the conscious and deliberate wilfulness to leave the organization (Tett & Meyer, 1993).

A number of studies focus on turnover intention among information technology road warriors, illustrating the challenges of retention (Joseph, Ng, Koh & Soon, 2007; Korunka, Hoonakker & Carayon, 2008; Moore, 2000). Additional staff-dependent challenges include developing offerings that incorporate multiple capabilities and delivering projects by partnering with multiple firms. These challenges further increase the pressure to retain consultants. Finally, firms are placing progressively more pressure on consultants to deliver professional services on projects where there are increasing levels of complexity.

Consultants are expected to extend themselves beyond their organization to collaborate with professionals across multiple geographies and organizations. In fact, they are reaching further outside their organizations or partnering organizations, turning to their peers for potential solutions, help and support. Inherent in the distributed nature of their work, road warriors are dependent upon technology-enabled communications to connect with members of their professional community. E-mail, instant messaging and networking sites play an important role for road warriors, connecting their professional and personal lives.

Community

Following is a high-level overview of the theories about community. The purpose is to highlight similarities and distinctions supporting my use of the term communitas, rather than community. Characterization of community in research literature can be confusing. Community has been considered as both a social and a place-based phenomenon, encapsulating the complexities of identity and belonging, similarity and difference, inclusion and exclusion and place and time (Bell & Newby, 1972; Cater & Jones, 1989; Delanty, 2010). In fact, Roberto Esposito (2010) argues that the very act of forcing community to become an ‘object’ by using conceptual language alters it.

Émile Durkheim and Ferdinand van Tönnies are two of the early theorists on community. Although somewhat dated, their ideas continue to have influence throughout social science research. Both Durkheim and Tönnies looked at community as a form of social organization and employed dichotomies to illustrate their thinking. Tonnies used the words Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft that were frequently translated as community and society (or civil society) respectively (Tönnies & Harris, 2001). Gemeinschaft or community represents small groups where everyone knows one another and relationships are face-to-face. For example, families and small communities, characterized by a sense of loyalty, shared values and shared aspirations. Gesellschaft or society/civil society represents a larger group where members may have little in common and do not share values. However, they share common projects, products or services that hold them together in a form of citizenship. This community often exhibits complex divisions of labour where members may have divergent aspirations.

Durkheim (1964) developed the concepts of organic and mechanical solidarity. Mechanical solidarity represents a society where individuals are connected to society without any intermediary. Society is organized collectively and members of the group often share the same beliefs. This shared belief system bonds the individual to society.

Organic solidarity represents larger communities where people have very different jobs, and together contribute to the larger society through industrial production and services. Individuality grows along with the society. Accordingly, society becomes more efficient at moving in sync, and at the same time, each of its parts has more movements that are distinctly its own.

The significance of these theories is their contribution to our conceptualizing about community. Anthropologists tend to study people living in a Gemeinschaft or traditional community and sociologists tend to study people living in a Gesellschaft or modern society. While more current thinking tends to blend these concepts, one can often trace the roots of community interventions or research back to these dichotomies.

There are several different ways of approaching research on community. They include communities based upon close geographic proximity (Mackenzie & Dalby, 2003; Staeheli & Thompson, 1997), communities as localized social groups and institutions (Gandy, 2002) and communities based on common identity, beliefs or practices (Lave, 2003). One common theme throughout the literature is an attempt to understand the concept of belonging.

Frequently studies of professional community are juxtaposed as either online or offline. Online community is a virtual community that exists online and whose members engage with one another through the use of technology. Offline community represents the more traditional face-to-face community. This study goes beyond these descriptions of community suggesting road warriors intermingle in a kind of virtual third-place of communitas. Turner (2009) defines communitas as a type of social aggregation characterized by a transient, liminal state mixing a variety of contradictory characteristics: temporary and permanent, close and distant, essential and fleeting. Communitas is a place where individuals come together, are transformed, and return to society renewed and reinvigorated. Building on this theoretical framework, communitas as experienced by road warriors, provides a social grounding that supports their unique professional work life.

Communitas

Victor Turner’s (1974, 1977, 2009) concepts of spontaneous, normative and ideological communitas have been used to discuss ‘togetherness’ in a wide range of social research. Turner (2009) refers to communitas as a sense of common purpose and communion, very similar to the ideal notion of community. Where the literature on community focuses on structures, Turner suggests that it is important to focus on what happens between structures. Symbolic and emotive impact occurring in the liminal and interstitial places should be examined.

When Arnold Van Gennep (1960) constructed his theory of rites of passage, his transitional or liminal phase was a place in which there could be some liberation from social norms. He defined the liminal place as a gap between the ordered worlds where almost anything could happen. Van Gennep utilizes the word liminal, derived from the Latin term for threshold and Turner develops it as a crucial component of his concept of liminality. Turner (2009) divides social life into structure and communitas, two fundamentally different, yet dialectically related, kinds of social relationship. Turner’s communitas with its characterization as a transient, liminal state infers that social life is a dialectical process that involves successive passages back and forth across these contradictory characteristics.

Communitas is an unstructured or rudimentarily structured and undifferentiated community of equal individuals (Turner, 1967, 1982, 2009). It is an essential and generic human bond and human interrelatedness (Turner, 1979, 2009; Turner & Turner, 1985). He elaborates that communitas is between individuals who are stripped of status or role characteristics (Turner, 1977). In his analysis of communitas, Turner suggests that the experience of socio-cultural dislocation often strengthens personal ties and, in this way, is reassuring and supportive of member communitas (Turner, 2009).

Methodology

The study was conducted with road warriors working directly for, or affiliated with a nationwide professional services firm that delivers integrated and comprehensive consulting and implementation services across the human capital management, financial management and campus solutions sectors of higher education. Many of the firm’s competitors within the industry are large multinational organizations. Competition between these organizations for clients and employees is fierce. One of the market differentiators for the firm is their commitment to both the success of their team members and the success of their clients.

Discussion

Van Gennep’s concept of betwixt and between, identified as liminal and transitional, is a foundational concept in Turner’s social modality of communitas. Research is often focused on social structure as an antithesis which precludes the counterstructural aspects of communitas. However, Turner (2009) himself acknowledged that communitas is related to mainstream social structure both dialectically and in juxtaposition with hierarchical social structure. Rather than representing an antithesis to social structure, communitas as a construct operates both within and outside the workplace social structure.

When people are thrown into a challenge or an ordeal, they develop a much deeper sense of communion. Take any group of people in a liminal state, and in all likelihood they will have experienced a deeper sense of community than those in mainstream society. This sense of liminality, fuelled by the challenge of completing certain tasks, fosters communitas. Even when the participants found themselves on a team with people they may not normally have spent time with, the experience of liminality eventually minimized their differences, bonding them strongly. Imagine being away from home more than 250 nights a year, sometimes for weeks at a time. This is the life that many consultants lead. Road warriors are in a recurrent transitional or liminal, state continually moving from one status or situation to another.

Communitas, as experienced by road warriors, may be born in either a face-to-face project where a group of road warriors is working closely together, or in the virtual place created by their engagement online. The road warrior’s life during the workweek is paralleled by Turner’s description of communitas, an existence located outside or at the margins of social time and place. More precisely road warriors are betwixt and between, existing at one moment within traditional society and at other times in the cracks within those social structures. A place with individuating relationships, and the suspension of roles and rules that typically exist in a more traditional social structure. Once formed, communitas follows them as they step into and outside of the normative social structure of the workplace.

Studying liminal spaces involves an exploration of sociolinguistic constructs to encompass not only structural but also inter-structural social contexts, whether they are spontaneously emergent or deliberately constructed. Katcher (2002) discussed one of the key elements of communitas as an engagement in performance or play without role distance. Several participants’ comments reflect the disregard for job roles and a marked willingness to be there for other road warriors. Other identifying elements of communitas are an intensification of lateral bonds, the minimization of differences between participants and a commitment to task.

Another important facet of liminality is that of mobility. Several subjects spoke about their ability to move back and forth between states and social areas. In Van Gennep’s original formulation, liminality is the uncertain phase where the initiate is outside of society but prepares to re-enter society. In this state, there is very little freedom of movement due to the strict nature of the ritual processes. When applying the idea of liminality to consultants, there is a freedom of movement which allows them to exist in multiple social worlds with recurring entrances and departures.

Normally spontaneous communitas cannot be sustained for long periods of time. It marks a ritual space where a qualitatively different type of social bonding is generated and new expressive possibilities flourish in a moment of authentic interpersonal contact. It is during these periods of liminality that the behavioural changes necessary for passage into another state occur (Katcher, 2002). I suggest, due to the transitional nature of the road warrior’s work environment, the state of communitas becomes regenerative. Participants described fluid transitions where members flow in and out of groups. Turner (2009) indicates, at a symbolic, meaningful level, communitas might include rudimentary social structures in the form of autonomy or a perception of autonomy outside mainstream social structures. Road warrior’s spontaneous communitas appears routinized within the normative structure of their social life, where they cultivate and regulate relationships of communitas within a sustained framework.

Conclusion

Although the field of consultancy is a broadly researched area, there has been little focus on communitas or the role it plays in employee retention. In order to understand how consultants perceive their experience of communitas, this research applies the anthropological concepts of liminality and communitas. Consultant’s working conditions blur boundaries among the client organization, the consulting organization and co-workers. Consultants find themselves in between, a part of both organizations, but not a full member of either. Being part of both organizations but at the same time not a full participant in either organization places the consultant in a liminal state. Accordingly, the concept of liminality is very useful for exploring the depth of their communitas experience.

This study explored the experience of communitas among road warriors in a professional services firm, describing the very personal social bond that exists among road warriors. Communitas goes beyond community. Consultants, experiencing communitas, might find all the elements of mutual support and care provided by a traditional community, but they find them as part of a group of people undergoing a shared ordeal. The experience of communitas exists because of the liminal nature of their work.

Communitas is not a simple state; it is as complicated as normative social interactions (Fernandez, 1986). Theoretically, the concept of communitas is already applied across a number of contexts. Extending the application of communitas to understanding liminal work groups that exist both outside and within a hierarchical social structure may allow researchers to expand research to situations where workplace structure provides grounding, yet group members experience autonomy setting them apart from non-liminal groups.

Finally, this research suggests managers in professional services firms would benefit from an understanding of how communitas among road warriors supports and enables their staff, and an exploration of the ways road warriors interact and interplay both within and outside their organizations. This research advances the idea that the experience of communitas enables road warriors to continue performing a stressful and challenging job. Communitas among road warriors is deeply rooted in the larger construct of community, where characteristics such as ethics, values, symbolism, friendship and belonging reside. This study shows that communitas can be found in liminal settings and sustained through iterative boundary crossings into more normative social structures.

Limitations and Future Research

Continued research of communitas among road warriors should remain qualitative in nature, allowing the potential to illustrate and theorize concepts. This study was conducted primarily with consultants based in the United States. Research should be expanded to look at professional services firms in India, where research indicates that the turnover rate is much higher, in some cases as much as 80 per cent (Gupta, 2001).

Road warriors are continually moving from one community to another, shifting roles at any given time. This article touches on the significance of exploring sociolinguistic constructs when studying liminal spaces. Sociolinguistic identity constructs are embedded in many aspects of social life, including race, class and ethnicity. Future research should be done to evaluate the link between these constructs and professional identity in order to clarify the relationship to communitas in liminal work groups.

Suggestions for additional research include more studies with similar participant groups to validate these findings. Insights might also be gained by expanding this study to other work groups described as liminal based on the intensity of their work coupled with being away from family and other community structures while performing their jobs. Finally, communitas warrants recognition as a factor in individual and collective meaningfulness of and personal identification of professional identity. Research providing clarity about the relationship between communitas and professional identity would contribute to and enhance the ongoing conversation in this area.