PREFACE Collective Hope

PREFACE Collective Hope

For social scientists, power and governance are big themes. Our ambition is to persuade that hope is too. Some may expect these issues to be addressed in this volume in a top-down fashion. We have not chosen this path. In a world racked by war, hunger, dislocation, and social upheaval, the contributors in this volume have opted for a bottom-up approach. If we can recognize and understand hope in situ and communicate our insights in intellectually challenging ways, perhaps we may be able to entice others to do likewise; steadily pulling the pieces together from our learnings from culturally diverse settings to fully grasp, and respect, the process by which groups set out to mold different futures for themselves.

In this volume, hope is aligned with reason and action and has social roots that empower individuals and collectivities. Through "parental and peer scaffolding," we are taught the process of hope and learn its social etiquette-how to empower others through the gift of hope and how to empower ourselves through receiving the hope that others offer. Like all social phenomena, hope can go very wrong; although as our authors remind us, we do not need to look to the collective for blame on this count. Individual hope is no less certain in the "goodness" of its outcomes than is collective hope. But regardless of outcomes, hope we must. It remains the human beacon of engagement with the task of mapping our destinies.

If hope is at the core of our being, the question becomes how do we hope productively, not only as individuals but also as collectivities. We refer to a positive form of this process-hope that is genuinely and critically shared by a group-as collective hope. Less sustainable, we argue, is public hope, at its worst a contagious but superficial form of hope peddled by spin doctors and uncritically accepted by expectant beneficiaries. One of the goals of this volume is to identify the conditions under which collective hope thrives and public hope is exposed, although we do not for a moment turn a blind eye to the overlap between these ways of hoping and to the synergies for social change that are created when they coexist. Such is the complexity of understanding the process of hoping well at the collective level. Only when we have satisfactorily accomplished this goal will we be in a position to offer a positive theory of hope, power, and governance. The articles that follow mark the beginning of our journey.

Defining Institutions of Hope

Institutions are conceived as the cultural regulators of life's journey. They are defined broadly as the interconnected rules, norms, and practices that order social encounters and signpost the way toward valued goals. Institutions of hope refer to sets of rules, norms, and practices that ensure that we have some room not only to dream of the extraordinary but also to do the extraordinary. Institutions of hope move us collectively away from a social script that makes engagement in shaping our futures seem futile toward one in which we are expected to be active and responsible participants contributing to a vibrant civil society. Institutions of hope are part of the family of enabling institutions that offset, loosen, or challenge the constraints imposed by regulatory institutions.

Institutions of hope, while richly explored in literature, art, and cultural studies, have received relatively little attention in the social sciences, particularly the more empirically driven social sciences. Over the past decade, however, interest has swelled within the discipline of psychology. Psychologists have advanced the case for a cognitive-affective process of successful adaptation defined by hope. Through learning the skills of setting goals and plucking up courage to actively and responsively try different pathways that might lead to the achievement of these goals, individuals can improve problem-solving capacity as well as mental outlook. This literature coheres around the theme of positive psychology-the study of how individuals can be the best they can possibly be-as opposed to a clinical preoccupation with why people fail to realize their potential. Positive psychology might be seen as the beginnings of an emerging institution of hope in itself, one that takes academic scholarship into the marketplace and the helping professions.

Institutions, however, rarely deliver what they promise standing alone. Institutions are about social behavior,

and social behavior cannot be compartmentalized. Plans of action developed with a counselor must confront the harsh realities created by other powerful institutions, some close to home such as the family and the workplace, others more distant such as legal and political systems. If individual hope is to be promoted within our enabling institutions (as practiced by schools, medical services, social welfare agencies), it must be accommodated in the design of our constraining institutions, most notably political and legal institutions at the community, regional, and international levels. This volume is directed toward understanding how this goal might be institutionally accomplished.