Reporting theatre: Understanding housing cooperative strategies during energy crisis

The importance of energy as a common good becomes especially pronounced during crises. This paper reconstructs the response of housing cooperatives to the energy crisis by applying Kenneth Burke’s five categories of theatre interpretation and eighteen impression management strategies inspired by Erving Goffman’s dramaturgical sociology to assess the dominant cooperative approaches. We analyse a unique dataset of 215 annual reports of Polish rural housing cooperatives, which display a range of reactive, proactive, and collaborative attitudes to high energy prices and fuel shortages resulting from the embargo on Russian coal. The unexpected nature of the crisis led four out of five rural housing cooperatives to adopt defensive impression management strategies. The three most common strategies were crisis attribution (66%), resourceful management (18%), and deliberative silence (12%). Our findings portray housing cooperatives as solitary and routine actors, undertaking an extraordinary effort often beyond their capacities. While cooperative efforts were partially supplemented by resident solidarity, particularly within micro-cooperatives reliant on coal with a stronger sense of community, the uncertain future of these entities calls for louder advocacy, targeted financial support, and better recognition of rural cooperatives as heating communities and intermediaries essential for ensuring local energy security.