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    Wooltorton, S. and Marinova, D. (Eds) Sharing wisdom for our future. Environmental education inaction: Proceedings of the 2006 Conference of the Australian Association of Environmental Education

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    Chapter 13A Hermeneutics of Respect: Elaborating an Ecopsychology

    for Loving Life and Loving Lives

    Michael Booth

    Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy, Murdoch University

    A quick search through a collection of books presently on my desk shows noindexing of respect. Those with detailed indexes jump from research methods toresponsibility; others go over in one leap to the entry risk. (One prominent book,with a long index, has nothing between representation and reterritorialisation, andmisses out risk which would have been half way down the next column.)

    Respect, at a very minimum, is built around notions of attention, so it has alwaysbeen a bit of a puzzle to me to see what contemporary intellectual work wants to giveits attention to. A point of wonder for me (I would not go as far as saying dismay

    although of late I wonder if I might soon admit to that feeling) is that respect is offeredin todays public sphere mostly to clients or to fellow members of professionalgroups. A patina of respect cloaks peoples public interactions, but to what extent isit a shroud for the closet skeleton of disrespect?

    Bosses are encouraged to ride their employees hard, council employees and otherbureaucrats are led to expect members of their public to be trying to rort the system,lecturers are trained to look for plagiarism, medical doctors assume their patientshave no understanding of their bodies or of what ails them, developers assume youcan raze a banksia woodland and replace it with yellow sandpits of nothingness. Inour psychologies of interaction the norm is for specialists in one field or another totreat others as potentially lacking in basic understanding of anything but ones ownspeciality. Rather than respect for self and others forming a core ingredient for ever-evolving selves and sustainable interconnected systems it tends to become a limitedand superficial aspect of contemporary Westernised lifestyles.

    To illustrate that point I draw on two stories of professionals interacting with others intheir everyday workplaces. Both stories come from people with diseases of the lung.The first comes from a 1997 article by Eve Ackerman, writing in the Fremantle Heraldof her experiences in Fremantle Hospital in 1997. The second story is from my ownexperience, in a doctors surgery in May, 2006.

    Story 1: The nurse who took my observations did not look at me. Her reply toanything I said was Ah ha. She checked blood pressure and pulse to oxygeninput still managing not to see me. I began to feel that I mattered very little, ifanything in the greater scheme of things in the emergency room. I wasshaking, sweating, exhausted. Youre getting enough oxygen at the momentshe grimaced to a spot somewhere above and behind my head. The youngdoctor who came next informed me that I would not be admitted because Icould actually still breathe. I told her that by 3am or 4 am in the morning mychest would become so tight I would become frightened and gasping. She toldme to come back then.

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    Story 2: The medical specialist shook my hand warmly and ushered the two ofus into his cramped but cosy room. Tell me about yourself he said, and Iobliged with an account of what I did and how I did it, and what I planned to dothat week. I also told him about my chest, the coughing, the growing shortnessof breath. He listened easily, and for half an hour our pleasant conversation

    traversed what I taught and who to, the state of higher education, days atOxford, the parlous state of hospital funding, mutually interesting travelexperiences and ways of soothing the cough. Finally, he said: well lets havea look then and held my chest X-ray up to the light. His gasped Oh God wasthe first indication that this was a serious matter. From then on he neverlooked me in the eye nor addressed himself to me. His words, his attentionturned instead to my wife. It was as if I was already dead. This is not going tobe easy was the most he would venture. When we asked him to spell outwhat his diagnosis would mean for me and us he said patronisingly: enoughfor now, youre not going to be able to take in anything else tonight. I sent hima politely ironic and carefully crafted letter and we never went back.

    Accounts of the health industry are strewn with stories of how medical expertise israrely matched by a suitably respectful bedside manner. It is easy then to come upwith clichd explanations for such professional behaviour as the pressures of anunderfunded hospital system or the lack of training in human interaction that medicalstudents get. Yet in seeing them in that way we may fail to understand such eventsas part of a continuum of a superficial approach to respecting ourselves and others.That continuum need not continue, and indeed unless we find ways to move awayfrom such an instrumental approach to respect I fear we will go on denying anddegrading one of our most powerful avenues for the loving of life and lives whichsustains our human existence.

    My argument then is that respect for others that deep and genuine respect viawhich we recognise the uniqueness and worth of the other is an endangeredpractice, and one which we disregard at our peril. I long for an acknowledging of thatdanger to be built into our everyday/everynight becoming, through an understanding(or hermeneutics) of respect which goes beyond words to a mutualised, spiritualsense of community, companionship, care indeed love.

    What I need to emphasise for the sake of an analysis of respect is that workplacesare also deficient in communication, in collective creativity and in the loosening up of

    personal talents for application to complex problems. Contemporary Western societyadvocates relationships between people, while preventing the timing and use ofspaces that might promote these relationships. Putting this simply, Western societyas it is now oriented, is unsustainable as society because social acts and thesocietys dominating practices are not aligned with sustainability of practice, nor withthe respect between people that this would require. It is in this context that relationalwork in workplaces gets disappeared (Fletcher, 1999).

    In consumer relations, as, for instance, in 21st century call centres, pleasantries ofgreeting, and of being present for the other, keep pace with the speeding up of thetechnological machines (and managers timing their use, and husbanding the

    businesss money). Ironically operators are valued for their ability to smile down thephone while they must also match an average call time measured in seconds rather

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    than minutes. Working in call centres is stressful, not least because it presumes(writing of this following Hochschilds 1985 title) a managed heart. Being personableat a distance and without much expenditure of time means taking superficiality onboard as a friend to our common humanity. The implied lack of depth, and of anyuseable substance, in superficiality makes this for most of us an enemy in any

    attempt to get real. We maintain a skating on simplified surface of pleasantries, yetthe underlying losses in failing relationships mount up until failures to act, andcommissions of madness, become increasingly risky aspects of social life(Featherstone et al., 1995).

    The superficiality I am noting is in failing to acknowledge the intimate being ofanother person. In this respect it mirrors the concerns of Lvinas (see for exampleLvinas, 1998). Bataille in his work Theory of Religion (1989, see extract onexpenditure and sacrifice, p. 69) comments on the way intimacy cannot be expressedin writing or words (discursively). Respect for another means going beyond what ison the surface and acknowledging the persons depths, even before these are

    explored. This intimacy can only be based on intuition of how events have affected aperson, i.e., on some insight into their experiences, how they have become openedup to the world.

    Only time and reflection on both re-presented and shared experiences can givewords that excess (unfettered fluidity) of meaning that may link them to the intimateworld of another person. Acknowledging this time and the need for reflection is what Iam calling respect. I can link it to ceremonial respect by suggesting that officebearers in traditional societies often carried a weight of experiences that othersneeded to acknowledge; this may be less a consideration in Western societies whereoffice bearers change much more often and everyone has experience ofresponsibility for others.

    Without time to contemplate relevant events the grasp of others meanings arereduced to what Dorothy Smith (2005) calls ruling relations. By contrast, respect forothers allows our communications with them to take on a hermeneutic role that I shallexplore through the case study to follow. Hermeneutics or communicative integrationinto what is immanent for another brings into another consciousness traces of thedepth of experiences that have formed the other intimate being.

    Over the last fourteen years, in collaboration with Joan Eveline, Ive had some input

    into a number of case studies of workplaces. These have provided me withopportunities to reflect on whether participants in a variety of interactions andarrangements of organisational innovations have shown respect for others.

    Story 3: One of our first workplace case studies was of women engaged in amining operation. Our research showed how the company used the efforts andpresence of women workers, not only to do the paid work that men did, butalso to carry the unpaid task of keeping the boys happy at an isolated minesite. Moreover, employing women for that task was a key rationale for thecompany engaging in the Prime Ministers voluntary Affirmative Action Plan.We also showed how the realisation of their new-found status as irreplacable

    men-minders emboldened the women to ask for more, for better and more

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    equitable conditions, such as the removal of the pornographic pictures whichdecorated their work stations.

    One of the women leading that dirty pictures campaign took the brunt of themens backlash. They cut her head from a news article of her winning a state

    government award, attached it to a photo of a naked male body and displayedit all around the mine site. Yet such abuse and disrespect rebounded in waysthose men did not foresee. Other women, and the men in the work group ofthe woman in question, suddenly felt the backlash had gone too far. Beforelong the scene was set for the pornographic pictures to come off the walls andceilings. Soon after, the woman the men had targeted gained companypermission to mount the production of a video which allowed staff to tell andact out their stories and work through the perceived threats to masculine workidentities, so that within 12 months much of the gender-based tensions of thetime morphed into a mutual respect. Behind those series of events was therespect that the targeted woman had gained over four years from her work

    colleagues, the union officials and from management. That respect waslargely due to her capacity to make all who worked and met with her feelheard and understood, from her selfless dedication to make her workplacebetter for all, and from her talents in being able to help people communicateand work together in a respectful and meaningful way.

    Respect for others lives opens up their lived experience to companionable inquiry.When I say to you, how are you going?, I set the scene for more than a matter ofmanners. I open a door which may charm you with the time I spend with you, tolisten, to invite you into a sharing in the whole of living that extends every personssense of who they are and who they are becoming. Without that (charming) habit oftaking time to listen of letting you tell me who you are becoming humanity islessened. And paying less attention to humanity in the Westernised world is to be likethe frog in the water of increasing temperature.

    Yet in todays light modernity or software capitalism (Baumann, 2000) lengthyaccounts of ones personal memories are frowned upon, and regularly dismissed asof hardly any value to others. For a persons individual experiences, however movingfor them, most of us have little time. Like Collins in Austens Pride and Prejudice whose patron, Lady Catherine de Bourgh and her possessions and estate are foreveron his lips it can be a bore to have acquaintances repeat at length what they value.

    Your personal encounter with living could burden me with details (useful for yourself)that I can do nothing with. I note in institutional life, in a university, no less, very littletime left for joining in more than a superficial exchange of personal stories. Sharing ofmemories shows signs of transforming into being primarily a family duty, anobligation to those who are close, to help with their becoming.

    Thus respect for invisible and unspoken experiences, which cannot readily bemonitored, becomes unlikely for instrumentally motivated people. We are also led totrust (or mistrust) mostly on a simple basis of categories, rather than from summingup impressions of a person. We see this person as a psychologist, a philosopher, agovernment official, a doctor or patient, and that person as a refugee, an illegal

    immigrant, mad, terminally ill or pregnant. While the disciplining of our own lives mayhave taught us to respect the category we fit people into, the demands on us to be

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    productive, whether as plumbers, doctors, teachers or researchers, means we havelittle time for the persons involved and their diverse histories.

    Lack of space for oneself, as well as of the spaces in interactions for others to listenand hear the messages of ones experience, constrains contemporary interactions

    between people. Boundaries between people have space as well as timeconnotations. Giving respect involves both giving the time that it takes to traverseboundaries and providing others with the space to engage in appropriate ways.Space will ensure that boundaries can remain respected, so that as they are crossedthey are not violated.

    Practice of respect is not just knowing how to speak of it, i.e., knowing discursively itsplace, but also experiencing its deeper intimacy. To meld such experience with theactions of reflecting about what we are doing and thinking, or indeed of writing aboutit, means creating and maintaining open boundaries, controlling the impositions oftime and work-discipline and remaining both an individual and immersed in

    collectivity. It is only marginally easier in speaking; easier because there are morechannels for expression. These are all skilful practices, and not just an attitude, amanner of presentation per se, not a mere basic sociability, making conversation.Expressing respect through words and through the body utilises already the ability tosense anothers concerns and to connect with these.

    Such indescribable aspects of intimacy explain why respect is a conceptually difficulttopic. If analysis can restore depth to a term whose importance has lessened, it willsucceed only by countering the processes lessening that importance. Chief amongthese is the lessened interest in the social, as a community forming process. RobertPutnams books (2000 and 2003) provide evidence for this, as does the recentdevelopment of a concept of social capital. Among the communitarians, and insustainability studies, there has been discussion of how to reverse a dominatingdisregard for community. In the rush to be an able competitor in an individualist-oriented consumerism, families and persons seem trapped into spending far lesstime thinking through what it would be like to be their neighbour, and far moreconcentrating on self-image. The pressures of government policies and of the marketfor employment have advanced this trend.

    This is where interest in self, entangled with interest in the other, can play a part. Imay relax and greatly enjoy getting to know you better, once I can be reassured that

    your own interest in me will over-ride the irrelevancy of your life or your story forme. It is short-sighted to judge this self/other entanglement in the negative, however.For there is a sense of mutual regard that blossoms in how we practise and developrespect. Paying you respect has much to do with this, i.e. with the respect I feel youpay me. This mutual regard necessarily takes time to establish. There are, I suggest,significant and valuable contributions to social living in public in such sharing ofevents and their impacts on the individuals participating in them.

    What underlies respect is consideration, holding back, letting the other speak andshow what they intuit. This is just one stage of a multistage process, and each takestime, and has timing as a crucial feature. Time for developing mutual respect, time to

    let accounts play through and not be cut short, time to explore differences all theseare necessary. Choosing what to add from ones own life, in ways that extend shared

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    understanding, and then joining in the mutual resolution of issues these commentsthrow into the conversation, are key components of an extended process. Theprocess is hard to limit to time made available institutionally, say between the end ofa meeting and the next appointment of each employee. Within meetings, thepressure to keep to set items on an agendum, and disregard for the phases of

    understanding (and writing) practice, relegate consideration of forming up newpractices between participants to the margins.

    So my writing on respect is built around giving time and spatial opportunities toothers. Giving them my attention involves me in their (for me) time-consumingdetails. To justify the importance of respectful behaviour I need the time to show thatpeople paying attention to others makes a difference, and is a vital component oforganisations.

    I claim that paying respects in ceremonial ways is an extension of this framing(readily discounted as outdated) that does have a valuable role. Paying attention

    means watching out, as well as listening, and it involves care and compassion for theother and what they may overlook as well as enthusiasm for what they are explicitlysharing. Ritual is important in the spaces for slowness that it opens up, as well asthe deeper zeroing in on undeveloped (seemingly vague) themes and covert insightsthat it suggests.

    Relating to others in many everyday contexts has for most of us become,nevertheless, a thin parody of familiar relations and of familiarity. The falseness ofAnd how are you today? spoken by a stranger, particularly when they have phonedyou out of the blue, or are weary themselves after hours on the checkout desk, isclear enough in Australia, and probably (with just minor changes of expressiveness)elsewhere. When a phone call or a greeting at the cash register is lining the recipientup for an instrumental event, the time spent in replying Im fine, thank you is anadditional imposition. What is intended as civility, yet is monitored, and evenmanaged by a cue sheet stuck to the till, becomes marked as lacking respect,because there is no intention to explore, to spend time, to move into even thesmallest degree of intimacy. Even when there is a show of friendly relations, it canusually only be a promise of possibility, unless well handled by people not understress. What I mean by superficiality is therefore the failure to keep sincerely to ascript which initially suggests familiarity. In particular the participants in this play ofrespect are not given the skills to voyage into this area of relating with all its

    complexities. For instance, respect implies both no-go areas, and a warmth ofconcern that recognises these rapidly in the context of the other person, and conveysrespect for those areas, that will not be open for discussion.

    If, unexpectedly, a caller from a call centre, or a teller at the bank, or attending aretailers till, ignores their main routine and shows a concern for how you are, theevent is post-normal, extraordinary. Discrepancies like these peel away the surfaceof conformity. They reveal the normal pattern of routine practices (and Garfinkel,1967 invited students to explore these breaks in normality to see what thenhappens). Here in my writing I draw attention, somewhat clumsily andreductionistically, of course, to everyday breaks in the patterns of normality. Smith

    (2005) and other text producers can do this too, and so break away from beingsimply another medium for transmission of ruling relations.

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    Such writing does however require time (on the part of both the producer of text andits reader). As Smith remarks (1999: 98): theory must formulate referring,representing, inquiry, and discovery as the locally organised social practices of actualpeople. Explaining how reactions to unexpected relating, are formed in process, and

    then dialogically worked through, is a lengthy business. There is also the need forrespect for the passage of time for the individuated subject, who has to work thingsout that are no longer simple or routine. Understanding how to work things out thenenables the person to form some mutual respect for what the speaker is trying tocommunicate. The working out process is given weight as an effort that takes time.Smith (1999: 126) puts this, referring to Garfinkels work as:

    Referring is not achieved wholly within language; beyond any givenutterance, it relies on a differentiation in the world that is humanlydiscoverable and discriminable somehow or other.

    She characterises this then as a sequential social act.

    Ironically, saying you are busy, and cutting short the routine of quasi-friendliness,may result in mutual respect that also feels somewhat less than superficial.Responding to the time taken up in anothers life is ruling this exchange. So mutualrespect may emerge with your quickness to say, no, Im not interested to a callcentre caller. Saying Im too busy now or even Im going to have to put the phonedown presents a clear response freeing the worker at the other end to get on withanother call. At the supermarket, an inquiry into the cashiers day, or concern forwhat they are having to do, can work similarly. You may then sense a sincerity in thecallers or cashiers final words. Respect from them, though limited, has emerged ingratitude for your directness, and the way the words spoken recognise constraintspresent for them as workers. I have frequently noted the increase in respect formyself as a lecturer, when for a moment I comment on the constraints on my work,and how I am feeling, and break a conventional expected pattern of delivery to dothis. Once again it is the interplay between past genres and the present localsituation, a dialogic imagination (Bakhtin, 1981), that is crucial to this briefemergence of respect.

    Towards a postdisciplinary eco-psychology

    A hermeneutics of respect is a holding back from judgment, from prejudging, andexpecting this same toleration for diversity from others. Yet it is also that building of

    mutuality that enables the other to become aware of what will be relevant from theirexperience. In any micropolitics for comprehending sustainable exchanges, keyelements to focus upon are the backgrounds each party have for making theirjudgments, and the degree to which they have succeeded in tracking overlaps inthese background fields of experience. In a community of diverse members suchbackgrounds are hard to establish. Any background of outstanding experiences willbe partly implicit and unspoken. There are issues both of intimacy and of partialitywhich will ensure this.

    Respect is not an empty performance of ceding precedence to a senior person, norproviding the space that some have the advantage to claim. Respect, however

    lacking in public life for those less fortunate, less powerful, less well placed, isexpected, and usually given on the surface, but not as an ethical requirement.

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    However, this normality of respect for others as a display of social neutrality for all,plays into the gradual disrespect into which respect has, I suspect, been falling.

    Political correctness in 2006 in the Westernised world encourages the breaking downof ceremonial differences, for shouldnt we all, in a democracy be willing to talk and

    relate to each other openly and without barriers? Indeed in an entrepreneurial societygiving respect and taking time for ceremony may seem like a sign that a person doesnot have their business eye completely on the ball unless of course the context isdoing business with a less Westernised society. In the world of globalised, just-in-time, rapid decision-making and competitiveness, respect seems not to need thissocial standing use any more. Diversity, corporate social responsibility, window-dressing, marketing, customer service and spin, all speak more eloquently to what isrequired in the public world. In family settings the term respect struggles to keep up.How many teenagers put respect for their parents as a priority? Love, comfort,regard and understanding all carry more weight.

    The term respect is needed however, I have argued, for effective relating. Theseother terms: love, competition, responsibility, understanding, comfort and regard areall insufficient to convey how relational work proceeds on a basis of inquiry andrecognition, with an expanding of each persons grasp of how the other has had torelate experiences to common frames of discourse. Efforts at e-labor-ating how thedetails of anothers life have affected their framing of events and their life chances,and the consequent possibilities of encouraging and drawing upon that persons skillsand inclinations are indications of the work that goes into relating. It is not a simplematter of caring, of comforting, of accepting responsibility (in the sense of acting asnecessary), of maintaining a strong-minded friendly competitiveness. All of thesemake relating a one-sided issue of acting (as a dutiful individual) with the other inmind, or at most of putting out a friendly accepting face and hand.

    Contemporary terminology for relational work is poor, partly because that work isdisappearing (Fletcher, 1999). Also, where social science has dealt with it this hasbeen cognitively framed, typically as frames for relating across social normativepositions and for the accompanying networking. Social science has little grasp of thetacit understanding between people that enables them to place each other as sharingin a common humanity, even as the terms for describing this are oft rejected,including this one (a common humanity).

    In the late 1960s some social psychologists researched non-verbal communication. Amore recent example is the German expression psychology of the 1980s(Asendorpf and Wallbott, 1982). By this they meant the signs, both deliberate andcasual, that are used by an observer to assess another person. They were primarilyinterested in stereotypes and what could readily be put into clichs. For instancepeople with spectacles are more likely to be judged intelligent. Their work alsoindicated how large a portion of how we assess people relies not on what they havespoken but on their body language. An angry person will be seen that way in mostcases whatever they say in self-description. There was even an attempt to useanalysis of variance to quantify how much of the variance in these studies could beattributed to body language and it approached 80% (e.g. Gladstein, 1974).

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    Ambiguity in expressions is closely related: by body language I may signal fairlyclearly my distaste for my aunts hat (with the roses and small berries, say), butverbally, if challenged I can deny my reactions and nothing comes of it. In a sense aquasi-respectfulness is maintained. If I spoke my feelings, this would be quitedifferent. Some relationships have never recovered from one persons outspoken

    honesty (as they saw it) in voicing their reactions to anothers behaviour, clothes,actions and other presentations.

    Maintaining respect thus has a social standing component of importance and it isneither ceding precedence nor relinquishing space. It is maintaining a degree ofverbal ambiguity, opening the way to future relating, without a certain prejudiceresulting from previous reactions that were clearly remembered. A hermeneutics ofrespect has to leave the place for this social ambiguity clearly represented in itsmodel of process.

    Respect, understood against this background, has less connection to being precise,

    the epitome of description in our scientifically organised worlds, and more connectionto that zeroing in on the fullness of possibilities that a new ecology for human lifecannot ignore. This prefigures a new science, one that combines being social withits natural science credentials. Such a science does not try to quantify the social norto ignore social acts and their collaborative nature and the way they stem frommultiplicity. It avoids building barriers between disciplinary contexts, and so puttingthe social in a different place from science.

    For convenience, I shall call this new science post-disciplinary. Its emphasis is onintegrating what would otherwise remain bounded by separating categories of criteriabased professional groupings what Cooper (e.g., 1987) has called the labour ofdivision.

    The boundedness of disciplines seeking precision is immensely valuable, of course,but completeness needs something more, especially in the pervasive social spheresof human and more-than-human nature. We, humans, are as political as we arepsychological, and neither aspect should be left unaffected (unrespected) by theother. The same goes for the many other boundaries that human discourses oftenlabour to observe. What follows is that listening to another person should not take ona reductionist stance based in psychology, or economics, sociology or literature, butintegrate these as needed to understand that person. Anything less will be one-

    sidedly inadequate, and a sure path to an unsustainable humanity.

    References

    Asendorpf, J., & Wallbott, H.G. (1982). Contributions of the German ExpressionPsychology to nonverbal communication research. In Journal of NonverbalBehaviour, 6(3), 135-147.

    Bakhtin, M.M. (1981). The Dialogic Imagination: Four Essays. University of TexasPress, Austin.

    Bataille, G. (1989). Theory of religion. Translated from French, New York: ZoneBooks.

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    Baumann, Z. (2000). Time and space reunited. In Time and Society, 9(2/3), 171-185.

    Cooper, R. (1987). The visibility of social systems. In M.C. Jackson, P. Keys & S.Cropper (Eds). Operational research in the social sciences (pp. 51-59). NewYork: Plenum.

    Fletcher, J. (1999). Disappearing acts: Gender, power and relational practice at work.Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press.

    Garfinkel, H. (1967). Studies in ethnomethodology. Englewood Cliffs, N.J.: Prentice-Hall.

    Gladstein, G. (1974). Nonverbal communication and counseling/psychotherapy: Areview. The Counselling Psychologist, 4(3), 34-57.

    Hochschild, A. (1983). The managed heart: Commercialization of human feeling.

    Berkeley, Calif.: University of California Press.

    Featherstone, M., Lash, S. and Robertson, R. (Eds). (1995). GlobalModernities.Thousand Oaks, London.

    Lvinas, E. (1998). Entre nous: On thinking-of-the-other. Translated from French.New York: Columbia University Press.

    Putnam, R.D. (2000). Bowling alone: The collapse and revival of Americancommunity. London: Simon & Schuster.

    Putnam, R.D. (2003). Better together: Restoring the American community. London:Simon & Schuster.

    Smith, D. (2005). Institutional ethnography: A sociology for people. Walnut Creek,CA: AltaMira Press.

    Smith, D. (1999). Writing the social: Critique, theory, and investigations. Toronto,Buffalo: University of Toronto Press.

    AcknowledgementThe Institute for Sustainability and Technology Policy (ISTP), Murdoch Universityacknowledges the poignant help of Michael Booths partner Joan Eveline in locatingand making it possible to share what is now sadly Michaels last paper. Thank you forgiving us such an opportunity to pay homage to this gentle, erudite and inspiringacademic.