Ms. Aida Morden’s doctoral thesis, Tenant-Landlord Communicative Interaction: The Influence of Litigation and Public Housing, has been selected by VDM Verlag Dr Muller Publishing, a German-based publisher, for publication. The book is released internationally and available to purchase on-line.
Aida Morden undertook a study on the relationship between housing officers and tenants of Housing NSW. Her focus of analysis was the quality of communication between housing officers and tenants. In her study, the author described how the evaluative and ethical choices of individuals influence the way they communicate with people. The study revealed that there is a general anti-dialogical (or negative) communicative interaction between housing officers and tenants. The study also revealed that tenancy issues in public housing are predominantly focused on tenants, their circumstances, attitudes and behaviour. Ms. Morden’s study insists that tenancy problems and issues are products of relationship. “It always takes two to tango,” she says. When issues occur, relationship between housing officer and the tenant, their communicative interaction must be analysed and most likely that resolution of the problem would be found in the quality of communication between the two parties involved.
Aida’s book goes on by further by claiming that this anti-dialogical communicative interaction and general antagonistic and conflictual social dynamics is not only apparent in public housing. In fact, public housing is a fractal, an image of the general anti-dialogical culture in bureaucracy and in non-government agencies in particular and in the society in general. What is needed is a negative feedback to counter this general culture. A dialogical communicative interaction that promotes a culture of friendship and harmony and decrease the perpetuation and expansion of an anti-dialogical culture must be encouraged. The government should encourage the promotion of humane culture characterized by the qualities of sharing, caring, honest, respectful and polite ways of dealing with each other. Presently, greater emphasis is given to infrastructure and built environment, i.e. more houses, and little funds for the promotion of a dialogical relationship that promotes humane and harmonious relationships between housing officers and tenants.