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Art Islands

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An Art Island refers to an island characterized by prominent artistic or creative elements such as contemporary art museums, artist studios, site-specific art events, communities of artists, and art festivals that are often created by famous artists, architects, and creators (Qu 2020; Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021). Representative cases include peripheral islands Naoshima, Teshima, and Inujima in the Seto Inland Sea of Japan; Fogo Island Arts’ Bridge Studio on a remote island of Newfoundland, Canada, and the craft-art island of Bornholm, Sweden. Unlike the original island art, ‘art island’ implies a reterritorialization/creative place-making process (intervening in, interacting with, as well as influencing the co-creation between art and communities) shaped by art development in a context of social transformation. An important feature is social transformation: art islands frequently deploy socially engaged artwork and events. (Qu 2020; Crawshaw 2018; Favell 2016; Mccormick 2022).

Art intervenes on the island

   Art Islands involve interrelated processes that co-create a new art island identity between art and destination. Socially engaged art brings site-specific and community based public artworks, art projects, or events into a community (Qu 2019; Mccormick 2022). It imports typically non-local artistic and cultural elements that impact the local community’s original landscape, lifestyle, art, and culture (ibid). The social practice transition of contemporary art consists of stepping out of art museums and the traditional art world into the urban and rural social context as relational art sites (Qu 2020). Relational art sites are “assemblages, they are hybrid spaces where the line between what is essentially rural and urban, as well as local and global, is blurred through their intensive interactions with extra-local people, ideas, materials, capital, investments, discourses, and processes” (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021, 250). The transition from original island community to art island is marked by concurrently changing processes of intervention, resistance, adaptation, and co-creation at the local level (ibid). Artists and arts organizers often contemplate the utopic ideals implied in “art islands” (Favell 2016). In short, the community level outcomes of art-island intervention are not limited to art but connect to rural/urban planning, art tourism, creative place-making, rural development and revitalization (Qu 2020; Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021).

Art interacts with the island

  Within communities, art is usually described as having the potential to “read” local issues rather than solve them. (Crawshaw and Gkartzios 2016).  Art is limited in its capacity to remedy social issues (Qu 2020; 2019). Merely creating art museums and artworks or otherwise making an island more “artistic” does not necessarily make an art island. The overlapping relationships between art and tourism are becoming inseparable on art islands (Franklin 2018). Often, art islands mix art development with tourism development (Qu 2019; 2020), accompanied by creative entrepreneurship (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021; McCormick and Qu 2021).

  Art can be also considered as “an ingredient of landscape planning” (Crawshaw 2018, 10). During the art tourism reterritorialization process, observing whether the development enhances community prosperity or rather brings a commercialized destruction to the community is essential to evaluate whether art is only ‘on’ or also ‘for’ an island (Qu 2020).

Art island co-creation

   Aside from the external development of art or art tourism, the endogenous efforts within communities play an important role in creating art islands. Creative residents with businesses have the power to co-create the art island community through their resourceful behaviors by enhancing social, tourism, and art development (Mccormick and Qu 2021; Qu, McCormick, and Funck 2020). Newcomers also play an important role; urban-to-rural migrants, for example, “are more likely to establish fancy cafés and guesthouses, often incorporating elements of contemporary design in their operations to adhere to the ‘art island’ character.” (Prince, Qu, and Zollet 2021, 248). A healthy neo-endogenous synergy between art and island provides a relational understanding of this co-creation mechanism. Critically, given that each island possesses its own unique social structure and cultural context, no two art islands are alike. Each has its own set of interrelationships and its own brand of creativity. Art islands are complex, trans-local assemblages of contemporary art and tourism, shaped by complex art-community co-create and exchange.

Meng Qu

Bibliography (Chicago Manual of Style)

Crawshaw, Julie. 2018. “Island Making: Planning Artistic Collaboration.” Landscape Research 43 (2): 211–21. https://doi.org/10.1080/01426397.2017.1291922.

Crawshaw, Julie, and Menelaos Gkartzios. 2016. “Getting to Know the Island: Artistic Experiments in Rural Community Development.” Journal of Rural Studies 43: 134–44. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.jrurstud.2015.12.007.

Favell, Adrian. 2016. “Islands for Life: Artistic Responses to Remote Social Polarization and Population Decline in Japan.” In Sustainability in Contemporary Rural Japan: Challenges and Opportunities, edited by Stephanie Assmann, 109–24. London and New York: Routledge.

Franklin, Adrian. 2018. “Art Tourism: A New Field for Tourist Studies.” Tourist Studies 18 (4): 399–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/1468797618815025.

McCormick, A. D. (2022). Augmenting Small-Island Heritage through Site-Specific Art: A View from Naoshima. Okinawan Journal of Island Studies 3 (1).

Mccormick, A D, and Meng Qu. 2021. “Community Resourcefulness Under Pandemic Pressure: A Japanese Island’s Creative Network.” Geographical Sciences (Chiri-Kagaku) 76 (2): 74–86.

Prince, Solène, Meng Qu, and Simona Zollet. 2021. “The Making of Art Islands: A Comparative Analysis of Translocal Assemblages of Contemporary Art and Tourism.” Island Studies Journal 16 (1): 235–54. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.24043/isj.175.

Qu, Meng. 2019. “Art Interventions on Japanese Islands: The Promise and Pitfalls of Artistic Interpretations of Community.” The International Journal of Social, Political and Community Agendas in the Arts 14 (3): 19–38. https://doi.org/https://doi.org/10.18848/2326-9960/CGP/v14i03/19-38.

———. 2020. “Teshima – from Island Art to the Art Island.” Shima: The International Journal of Research into Island Cultures 14 (2): 250–65. https://doi.org/10.21463/shima.14.2.16.

Qu, Meng, A. D. McCormick, and Carolin Funck. 2020. “Community Resourcefulness and Partnerships in Rural Tourism.” Journal of Sustainable Tourism, 1–20. https://doi.org/10.1080/09669582.2020.1849233.

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Island Vulnerability and Resilience

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Vulnerability and resilience are nebulous and contested concepts. Island studies has provided plenty for understanding them, sorting out differences, and proposing ways forward. Two key points are (i) vulnerability and resilience are not opposites and (ii) they are processes, not states.

Vulnerability and resilience are social constructions. Many languages do not have direct translations for the words and many cultures do not have the notions, especially as defined and debated in academia. As such, both must be explained in detail to be communicated and acted on. Island studies contributes significantly by noting that both exist simultaneously, meshing with each other, and that both must arise by people and societies interacting with themselves and their environments. They are also much more than interaction, since nature and culture cannot be separated, as is the case for society and the environment. Thus, vulnerability and resilience are simply part of being, rather than distinct entities or traits.

As such, they express and espouse reasons for ending up with situations and circumstances where dealing with opportunity and adversity is more possible or less possible. They are long-term processes describing why observed states exist, not merely descriptions of those states. These explanations must cover society and the environment interlacing rather than disconnecting from one another and must involve histories and potential futures, not merely snapshots in space and time.

For islands, environmental phenomena and changes are frequently seen as exposing or creating vulnerabilities and resiliences. Yet an earthquake or the changing climate do not tell people and societies how to respond. Instead, those with power, opportunities, and resources make decisions about long-term governance aspects including equality, equity, collective support, and societal services.

We know how to construct infrastructure to withstand earthquakes. This task cannot happen overnight, but requires building codes, planning regulations, skilled professions, and choices in order to succeed. Taking island examples, leaders inside and outside Haiti controlling the country over decades decided not to build for earthquakes, leading to devastating disasters in 2010 and 2021. Meanwhile, Japan adopted a different approach meaning that few collapses were witnessed despite earthquakes in 2003, 2011 (which had a terrible tsunami toll), and 2022 that were far stronger than Haiti’s.

This long-term process of stopping or permitting earthquake-related damage is a societal choice, meaning that disasters emerge from the choice of vulnerability and resilience processes. Disasters do not come from earthquakes or other environmental phenomena, so they are not from nature and “natural disaster” is a misnomer.

Since climate change affects the weather and weather does not cause disasters, climate change does not often affect disasters. For instance, islands have experienced tropical cyclones for millennia, with the storm season happening annually. Plenty of knowledge exists to avoid damage and plenty of time has existed to implement this knowledge, yet disasters are still witnessed frequently such as Hurricane Maria in the Caribbean in 2017 and Cyclone Harold in the Pacific in 2020. When people and infrastructure are not ready for a storm, then disasters occur. Climate change increases intensity and decreases frequency of tropical cyclones, yet does not impact long-term human choices to prepare (creating resilience) or not (creating vulnerability). The choice not to do so is a crisis of human choice, not a “climate crisis” or “climate emergency”—so those phrases are also misnomers.

Island studies has long taught the islander mantra that environmental and social changes are always to be expected at all time and space scales. Vulnerability becomes the social process of expecting life to be constant and not being ready to deal with different or altering environments, at short (e.g. earthquake) or long (e.g. climate change) time scales. Vulnerabilities most commonly arise because people do not have the options, power, or resources to change their situation due to factors such as poverty, oppression, and marginalisation. Others make the decision for the majority to be vulnerable. Resilience becomes the process of continual adjustment and flexibility to make the most of what the ever-shifting environment and society can offer to support everyone’s life and livelihoods. To do so requires options, power, and resources.

Yet island studies demonstrates that limits to resilience are nonetheless evident. Human history displays a long list of island communities being wiped out and entire islands being forcibly abandoned. Manam Island, Papua New Guinea has been evacuated a few times due to volcanic eruptions. Many Pacific island communities disappeared in the fourteenth century due to a major regional climatic and sea-level change while nuclear testing during the Cold War left many atolls uninhabitable. The Beothuk indigenous people of Newfoundland died out due to violent and disease-ridden colonialism. In the 1960s and 1970s, Chagossians were forced off their Indian Ocean archipelago to make way for a military base. All such situations test resilience—or lose it entirely.

Island studies thus demonstrates the construction of vulnerability and resilience as concepts, as processes, and as realities, illustrating the care in interpretation and application needed for both in order to capture a comprehensive picture. Vulnerability and resilience neither contradict nor oppose each other, rather overlapping and morphing according to context and nuance. Island vulnerability and resilience are very much based on the perspectives of those observing and affected.

Ilan Kelman

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Cenáculo

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Cenáculo was a group of gatherings that met at the Golden Gate[1], founded by João dos Reis Gomes, Fr. Fernando Augusto da Silva and Alberto Artur Sarmento, which became relevant for the ideas presented, although, so far, no minutes or official documents of the gathering that allow us to objectively evaluate the intellectual debate. As for the constituent members, and aware of the lack of space for the acceptance of new elements, Joana Góis reports on 24 members (Góis, 2015: 24-25), among them the son of João dos Reis Gomes, Álvaro Reis Gomes.

Visconde do Porto da Cruz expresses that the group is not open to new generations: “Em volta do ‘Cenáculo’ apareciam curiosos que não se afoitavam a aproximar-se de centro tão restrito, onde, especialmente, Reis Gomes e o Padre Fernando da Silva, não viam com bons olhos o advento de novos valores” (Porto da Cruz, 1953: 12).

Joana Góis shares Visconde’s opinion and adds that the gathering was a mystery in terms of collective action, but expressed itself very well through the role of its individualities: “A ‘misteriosa’ geração reunia-se em silêncio e permaneceu, acima de tudo, na esfera privada e sem expressão pública dos seus trabalhos” (Góis, 2015: 21).

            Cenáculo elements gravitate towards the edition of two periodicals directed by Major João dos Reis Gomes, Heraldo da Madeira and Diário da Madeira, respectively, whose orientations approach subjects related to autonomy, regionalism and history, literature, traditions and politics related to Madeira, all under the inspiration of a certain conservatism and patriotism, but with the focus on the construction and defense of a Madeiran identity.

            We believe that the most outstanding action of Cenáculo, as a collective, is the formation of Mesa do Centenário, with the objective of carrying out the celebrations of the 500th anniversary of Madeira. Always with the intention of a nationwide celebration, the action of the members of Mesa do Centenário led to the challenge of modernizing Funchal, in order to dignify the event’s stage.

            Between Cenáculo and Mesa do Centenário there seems to have been a natural transition and, based on the positions conceived and publicized in the Diário da Madeira, the commemorative program of the Madeira Centenary was designed. The “Geração do Cenáculo” managed to add a cultural foundation to the event, which triggered an atmosphere of conflict with metropolis, which meant that, between December 1922 and January 1923, Lisbon was not represented, despite the several international commissions.

The fact turned out to be fruitless due to the lack of argumentative sustainability in relation to the Madeiran identity because, according to Nelson Veríssimo, “Faltaram intelectuais que exaltassem esses princípios que congregaram vontades e animaram a condução de populações por entusiásticos guias” (Veríssimo, 1985: 232). After the festivities, the “cenaculistas” were also participatory voices in the Comissão de Estudo para as Bases da Autonomia da Madeira.

Cenáculo’s line of thought approaches, from what we can assess from its members, through the newspapers and the action of Mesa do Centenario, a Madeiran identity close to patriotic values ​​(Portuguese settlement, exaltation of the Portuguese element) and not so much cosmopolitanism also present in the Madeiran feeling[2].

The meetings and ideas of the “ninho da águia” (Eagle’s Nest) are the target of critics who were fascinated by the group: “[Reis Gomes] Vindo do labirinto da vista da cidade, depois de haver feito a sua longa jornada profissional diária – […] – encontrava no íntimo cavaco com amigos, reunidos numa das salas do hotel Golden Gate, o benéfico oásis para o seu descanso físico e intelectual” (Vieira, 1950: 18). In relation to literature, João dos Reis Gomes and the “Geração do Cenáculo” became forerunners of intellectuals who, in the 1940s, saw “na narrativa de ficção com forte cunho regionalista” the possibility “de constituir uma história, uma memória, uma biblioteca, uma identidade cultural forte para as gerações futuras da Ilha” (Santos, 2008: 569).

Paulo César Vieira Figueira

References

Góis, Joana Catarina Silva (2015). A Geração do Cenáculo e as Tertúlias Intelectuais Madeirenses (da I República aos anos 1940) [Masters dissertation]. Porto: Faculdade de Letras da Universidade do Porto.

Gouveia, Horácio Bento de (1952). Reis Gomes – Homem de Letras. In Das Artes e Da História da Madeira, nº 13. Funchal, 29-31.

Gouveia, Horácio Bento de (1969). O académico e escritor João dos Reis Gomes. In Panorama, nº 29. Lisboa, 6-9.

Figueira, Paulo (2021). João dos Reis Gomes: contributo literário para a divulgação da História da Madeira [Phd thesis]. Funchal: Universidade da Madeira.

Pestana, César (1952). Academias e tertúlias literárias da Madeira – “O Cenáculo”. In Das Artes e da História da Madeira, vol. II, nº 38. Funchal, 21-23.

Porto da Cruz, Visconde (1953). Notas & Comentários Para a História Literária da Madeira, 3º Período: 1910-1952, vol. III. Funchal: Câmara Municipal do Funchal.

Salgueiro, Ana (2011). Os imaginários culturais na construção identitária madeirense (implicações cultura/economia/relações de poder). In Anuário do Centro Estudos e História do Atlântico, nº 3. Funchal: CEHA, 184-204.

Santos, Thierry Proença dos (2008). Gerações, antologias e outras afinidades literárias: a construção de uma identidade cultural na Madeira. In Dedalus, nº 11-12. Lisboa: APLC/Cosmos, 559-582.

Veríssimo, Nelson (1985). Em 1917 a Madeira reclama Autonomia. In António Loja (dir.). Atlântico, nº 3. Funchal: Eurolitho, 230-233.

Vieira, G. Brazão (1950). Um grande vulto que a morte levou: João dos Reis Gomes. In Das Artes e da História da Madeira, nº 2. Funchal, 17-19.

[1] The Golden Gate, known as one of the “esquinas do mundo”, in the words of Ferreira de Castro, and due to its geographical location, close to the Cathedral of Funchal, the port, the Palácio de São Lourenço and the Statue of Zarco, is a famous restaurant space that favors the passage of citizens from all over the world, mainly through its esplanade, something that is still verifiable today.

[2] Cf. Ana Salgueiro, “Os imaginários culturais na construção identitária madeirense (implicações cultura/economia/relações de poder)”, 184-204.

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Islandness

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At present, there are two prevailing views of what islandness is, and which is the difference between this term and its relative term, insularity. The first perspective adopts the narrative that islandness is somewhat an academic evolution of insularity and the second suggests that insularity is a standard feature like small size, remoteness and isolation, special experiential identity and rich and vulnerable natural and cultural environment. Adding to the public discussion that relates to how sciences view islands and consequently how islands are managed through public policies, it is crucial to shed light to islandness as a contemporary term.

As Conkling (2007, 200) argues, islands are most fundamentally defined by the presence of often frightening and occasionally impassable bodies of water that create a sense of a place closer to the natural world and to neighbors whose eccentricities are tolerated and embraced. Given this affirmation, he argues (Conkling 2007, 200) that “islandness is often considered as a metaphysical sensation deriving from the heightened experiences that accompany the physical isolation of island life, […] as an important metacultural phenomenon that helps maintain island communities in spite of daunting economic pressures to abandon them”. He briefly describes islandness as “a construct of the mind, a singular way of looking at the world”. It is either being on an island or not. 

In any case, given that both concepts (insularity and islandness) communicate, islandness is also assumed to include four main characteristics/aspects: boundedness, smallness, isolation and littorality (Kelman 2020, 6). Boundedness describes the borders and the physical limits of islands. Smallness refers to land area, population, resources and livelihood opportunities. Isolation stands for distance, marginalization and separation from other land areas, people and communities. Last but not least, littorality, refers to land-water interactions, coastal zones and intersections of achipelagos and aquapelagos (Kelman 2020, 7).

Additionally, Baldacchino (2004, 278) from another more practical perspective, argues that “islandness is an intervening variable that does not determine, but contours and conditions social and physical events in distinct, and distinctly relevant, ways”. He underlines that “this is no weakness or deficiency; rather, therein  lies the field’s major strength and enormous potential” (Baldacchino 2006, 9). He also makes an interesting suggestion about the link between islandness and insularity: “researchers and practitioners should be aware of how deep-rooted and stultifying the social consequences of islandness can be and this specific feature can actually be called insularity” Baldacchino (2008, 49). So, he assumes that islandness is not a synonymous of insularity, but the latter is one of many features of islandness that describes a specific condition that characterizes island communities. Insularity can be regarded as a brief term to describe insular remoteness which can include three types of remoteness: the physical, the imaginative and the politico legal (Nicolini and Perrin 2020).

There is sufficient evidence that islands – small islands in particular – are distinct enough sites, or harbour extreme enough renditions of more general processes, to warrant their continued respect as subjects/objects of academic focus and inquiry. There is a debate within the nissology framework, i.e. the study of islands in their own terms, about the uniqueness of islands. Still others find islands ‘living labs’, central to understanding what happens subsequently on mainland territory. Islands are often viewed as places that need to be saved and treated differently from the mainland to reach dominant continental standards. Indeed, islands have always been a bone of contention, either seen as paradise or hell. 

Cross-disciplinary research on the essence of islands and what constitutes the insular condition within a growing framework of “nissology”, has reinforced the need to distinct insularity from islandness.  No island is insular, meaning “entire to itself”. An approach that is based on the argument that islands need to be studied on their own terms which is also aligned with a more politically correct usage of relative terminology, has gradually substituted insularity with islandness. Insularity as a term, has been extensively used in academia and public speaking to describe expresses ‘objective’ and measurable characteristics, including small areal size, small population (small market), limited resources, isolation, and remoteness, as well as unique natural and cultural environments, that synthesize an insular condition. However, it also involves a distinctive ‘experiential identity’, which is a non-measurable quality expressing the various symbols that islands are connected to (Spilanis et al. 2011, 9). The term “insularity” has unwittingly come along with a sematic baggage of separation and backwardness. This negativism does not mete out fair justice to the subject matter (Baldacchino 2004,272).

And it is of great importance that islandness and all four dimensions mentioned above, needs to be more closely examined trough various discipline lenses. The core of  “island studies” is the constitution of “islandness” and its possible or plausible influence by the traditional subject uni-disciplines (such as archaeology, economics or literature), subject multi-disciplines (such as political economy or biogeography) or policy foci/issues (such as governance, social capital, waste disposal, language extinction or sustainable tourism) (Baldacchino 2006, 9). The evolution in terminology that relates to islands is only one of the signs that affirms that islands are indeed loci for major issues and developments in the 21st century, which their being studied in their own terms considered to be one of the most fundamental epistemic challenges today.

Mitropoulou Angeliki & Spilanis Ioannis

References

Baldacchino, G. 2004. The coming of age of island studies. Tijdschrift voor economische en sociale geografie, 95(3) : 272-283.

—. 2006. Islands, island studies, island studies journal. Island Studies Journal, 1(1): 3-18.

—. 2008. Studying islands: on whose terms? Some epistemological and methodological challenges to the pursuit of island studies. Island Studies Journal, 3(1): 37-56.

Conkling, P. 2007. On islanders and islandness. Geographical Review, 97(2): 191-201.

Kelman, I. 2020. Islands of vulnerability and resilience: Manufactured stereotypes?. Area, 52(1): 6-13.

Nicolini, M., & Perrin, T. 2020. Geographical Connections: Law, Islands, and Remoteness. Liverpool Law Review, 1-14.

Spilanis, I., Kizos, T., Biggi, M., Vaitis, M., Kokkoris, G. et al. (2011). The Development of the Islands – European Islands and Cohesion Policy (EUROISLANDS). Final report. Luxemburg: ESPON & University of the Aegean. Available at: https://www.espon.eu/sites/default/files/attachments/inception_report_full_version.pdf (Accessed: 07 December 2020)

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Ioannis Spilanis

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Ioannis Spilanis is a Professor at the Department of Environment, University of the Aegean (Greece) and active member of the Laboratory of Local and Island Development. His research interests, among others, include regional and local development, development of island ecosystems, tourism development, planning and sustainable development. His research projects have been published in various distinguished international journals. He has been working as a scientific consultant for the private and public sector for more than twenty years.

Islandness

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Angeliki Mitropoulou

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Angeliki Mitropoulou is a PhD Student at the Department of Environment, University of the Aegean (Greece) doing research about, islandness, island sustainability and place branding. She has worked for the public and private sectors for almost a decade and now has a position at a research company. She is also a research fellow at ENA Institute for Alternative Policies and an active member of the Aegean Sustainable Tourism Observatory.

amitro@env.aegean.gr

Islandness

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Meng Qu

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Meng Qu, Ph.D., is the co-convener at Small Island Cultures Research Initiative (SICRI), Research Director of the Art Island Center on Naoshima Japan, and an Assistant Professor at the Hiroshima University Graduate School of Humanities and Social Sciences and Visiting Research Fellow at Wakayama University Center for Tourism Research. He is also an editorial board member at the Event Management Journal, Journal of Responsible Tourism Management (JRTM), and an advisory board member at CREATOUR International. His research draws from a range of disciplinary and theoretical perspectives, especially from the fields of socially (revitalization) engaged art, creative/tourism geography, rural and island studies, with a focus on East Asia.

Art Islands

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Role Conflict

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Structural functionalism is a particular branch of sociology that looks rather mechanically at social structure and explains its coherence and persistence across time. It can be described as a school of thought whereby society is conceived as an amalgam of institutions, relationships, roles and norms. Each serves a particular purpose, and each is indispensable for the continued existence of the others and of society as a whole. Within this model of social order, a role is an identity label that assigns individuals particular places and powers within the social system; places and powers that are in turn recognisable by others who belong to that same society. Thus: a teacher is a classroom is expected to teach, to read and grade assignments; and to provide scholarly advice; while a student is expected to learn; follow their teachers’ guidance; compete assignments; and so on. Every person is society is expected to perform multiple roles – for example, that of a parent, teacher, friend, neighbour, political activist, club member, supermarket shopper, bus passenger, and so on – together forming a role set. For each role, persons typically enter into relationships with different members of their society.

There is nothing specific about small social systems here. What becomes significant is that, with smaller social systems, the likelihood that role overlap occurs increase. You board a bus as a passenger, but the driver is your uncle; you teach a class, but one of your students is your cousin; you work in a bank, but one of the staff members is your partner … The members that are ‘at home’ in relation to one particular role are also members of one’s other role/s. The odds of this happening increase with the practice of role multiplicity, a function of flexible specialisation. When such situations occur, the norms, responsibilities and behaviour expected by the complementarity of roles (driver-passenger; teacher-student; etc.,) can get blurred and become indeterminate.

Such situations breed role conflict: they provide unclear signals as to which particular protocol should prevail to the parties in the relationship. The situation is open to creative exploitation or accommodation, and can even lead to corruption. Such behaviour is denounced, of course; and there may be strategies to put into place to prevent such situations from emerging in the first place: teachers should not teach and assess their own relatives; and partners should not work in the same bank branch, for example. But in practice, such elegant solutions may not exist, especially where there is no open availability of alternatives.

To the untrained eye of an external observer, role conflict is rife in small societies. The complex interlocking nature of friendships and relationships can render the presumed objectivity and legal-rational basis of roles somewhat dubious. Outsiders can find themselves bemused by the games that people in small social systems play: role multiplicity, for example, has been described as crisis management verging on the comic (Weeks and Weeks, 1989) and role overload (Krone et al., 1989, p. 62), apart from role conflict (Baldacchino, 1997, p. 170). To insiders, this is just the routine of life in a small (often island) society. Role overlaps are “messy” (Baldacchino, 2007, p. 7). They will not go away. They must be managed as best they can; boundaries should be respected, and role incumbents spared from the embarrassment or uncertainties that can impact on their work and their probity.

Functionalism is no longer such a dominant school of thought in sociology. It has been criticised heavily for such weaknesses as neglecting agency, its inability to accommodate conflict and to properly explain social change, and its failure to address such inequalities as those based on race, class or gender. For this reason, the study of roles in social systems is no longer a popular pursuit. However, the design of ‘checks and balances’ within or between organisations often assumes that impartiality and professional objectivity across human relationships can be established.  But the multiple ways in which people may be known to, and related to, each other, with associated sympathies and antipathies, in small social systems is a given that can impact such relationships.  Political parties, for example, can dominate all three branches of government, directly or otherwise, even in democracies; and not just in small island jurisdictions; although in the latter such a situation is more likely to unfold (Baldacchino, 2012).

Godfrey Baldacchino

Baldacchino, G. (1997). Global tourism and informal labour relations: The small scale syndrome at work. London: Mansell.

Baldacchino, G. (2012). Islands and despots. Commonwealth & Comparative Politics, 50(1), 103-120.

Baldacchino, G. (2013). History and identity across small islands: A Caribbean and a personal journey. Miscellanea Geographica, 17(2), 5-11.

Krone, C., Tabacchi, M. & Farber, B. (1989). A conceptual and empirical investigation of workplace burnout in the food service. Hospitality Education and Research Journal, 13(1), 83-91.

Weeks, J., and Weeks, P. (1989). A day in the life of the Ministry of Education: case study Vitalu. Survival is the name of the game. Paper presented at Pan-Commonwealth meeting on the organisation of ministries of education in small states. Malta: University of Malta.

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