Adventurers and lovers: organizational heroines and heroes for a new time
Résumé
Narratives resonating with profound layers of culture have such a strong influence because they use archetypes. Archetypes, understood in the Jungian way, as constructs in the collective unconscious, ready to hold important cultural material, can shape the plot, characters, time and place of such tales. I analyzed the empirical material collected during a longitudinal ethnographic study of Polish and UK alternative organizations, such as cooperatives, value driven businesses, anarchist collectives and others, operating in the margins of the capitalist system, looking for underpinning archetypical tales, which referred to their general principle of organizing. I have found two such overarching motifs: the Adventurer (or the classic Campbellian hero) and the Lover. The narrative thrust of the archetypical tales seems to be directed in opposite ways. The hybrid they form may have an interesting potential for radical change.