GAIA

Archetypes in Organizations

Self

Shadow

Anima and Animus

Persona

Sage

King

Adventurer

Trickster

Eternal Child

Gaia

Cosmogony

Soteriology

Gaia

• Personification of our planet

• The life-giving forces

• Symbol of life and nature

• In Greek pantheon one of the primordial deities, Prôtogenoi

To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.

(William Blake)

Gaia

• Mother goddess

• Omnipotent

• Caring and protective

• Cruel and imperious

• Fertility

• Symbiosis

• Death and decay

Gaea rising from the earth, Antikenmuseen, Berlin

Gaia

• The global ecosystem

• System supporting the rise and development of life

• Evolution

• Self-regulation

• Survival

Henri Rousseau, jungle scences

Dark Side – Disaster and Fall

• The violence of Nature

• Plagues and calamities

• Human made disasters and the degradation of the global ecosystem

Joseph Mallord William Turner, Snow Storm - Steam-Boat off a Harbour’s Mouth

Examples

• Godfreya Reggio’s Koyaanisqatsi (and the rest of the Qatsi Trilogy)

• John Burnside’s poetry

• Jacques-Yves Cousteau’s under water documentaries

[…] We've been going at this for years: a steady delete of anything that tells us what we are, a long distaste for the blood warmth and bloom of the creaturely: local fauna and words for colour, all the shapes of ritual and lust surrendered where they fell, beneath a fog of smut and grime and counting-house as church, the old gods

[…] (John Burnside, Travelling South, Scotland, August 2012)

Ecological Awareness in Organizations

Gap between the individual and organizational awareness on the one hand and ecology, on the other – to be bridged by resorting to the Gaia archetype (Elisabeth Ryland, 2000)

Organizations should cooperate with the ecosystem, and search for symbiosis

Scnece from Ron Fricke’s Baraka

Leading proponents of the environmental value system advocate a new and sustainable industrial revolution. The sustainable approach is intended to counteract the widespread poverty, social crises, global instability, and general habitat destruction resulting from the untenable assumption of current economic principles. The goal for sustainable business activity is one of stable global biosystems rather than unlimited material prosperity of the few (Elisabeth Ryland)

Orientalism

Orientalism (Edward Said, 1978):

• romanticization of the life and culture of postcolonial countries

• imperialistic tendencies of the West striving to subdue these countries

• both tendencies combined in discourse legitimizing the Western attitudes as historically, economically and politically justified The Siesta, by Frederick Arthur

Bridgman

Postcolonial Studies

• Otherness and postcolonial mentality

• Postcolonialism is the study of the effects of colonialism on culture

• Respect for cultural diversity

• Creation of a full cultural polyphony

Streetart with Nelosn Mandela

Postcolonial management

„Conducting empirical research in geographically postcolonial contexts [and in] the attempts at developing management theories complying with postcolonial ideas present in other fields of study” (Kostera and Śliwa, 2010)

Antonio Ole, Africa Remix

Neocolonialism

„ A continuation of direct Western colonialism without the traditional mechanism of expanding frontiers and territorial control, but with elements of political, economic and cultural control” (Bobby Banerjee and Anshuman Prasad, 2008)

Diego Rivera, Sugar cane

Ecological Awareness

Gaia Hypothesis: The Earth as a complex living system that consists of the biosphere, the atmosphere, the lithosphere and the hydrosphere, self-regulating and seeking homeostasis (James Lovelock, 1979)

Pear Tree by Karolina Matyjaszkowicz

Green Management

• Ecotopias, navigating visions of sustainable societies –Marius de Geus (2002)

• Green planning – indexes for ecological goals (Vincent de Norcia, 1996)

Ecopreneurship

„The adoption of environmentally-responsible business practices can conceivable open up an additional range of opportunities for entrepreneurs. The move to a sustainable business framework provides numerous niches which enterprising individuals and firms can successfully identify and service. These include the development of new products and services; improving the efficiency of existing firms; new methods of marketing; reconfiguring existing business models and practices; and so forth” (Michael Sharper, 2005)

Ecopreneurship After the Crisis

• Label and/or superficial image?

• Out of the mainstream?

• Green revolution?

Paul Gauguin, Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?

„Green” as Marketing Tool

Marketing campaigns useing slogans of ecology and sustainable growth to attract clients (Vinícius Brei and Steffen Böhm, 2009)

Mark Rothko, Earth And Green

Green as a revolution

„Ecocultures [–] communities in which lives and lifestyles are organized around the recognition that social and ecological well-being are interlinked, and where sustainability and resilience are prioritized and actively nurtured. In other words, ecocultures are exemplars in the art and science of sustainable living”. (Steffen Böhm, 2015)

Nicholas Poussin, Et in Arcadia Ego

Re-positioning Management

The repositioning project must thus include a two-fold movement: first, it must be able to effectively critique the enjoyment machine produced by capital; and second, it must be able to offer an alternative regime of enjoyment that can reposition existing social relations. […] [It can do so by] produc[ing] knowledge that can disrupt the taken-for-granted ‘goings-on’ […] But ‘knowledge comes only in lightening flashes’ [that] simultaneously illuminate and blind us. […]In my view, organization theory cannot really be of any relevance, if it is carried out by theoreticians who never leave their offices or academic campuses; organization theory needs to be politicized.” (Steffen Böhm, 2006)

Return

The Earth is not our sister and she is not dying. But the chill we can feel is real: she has ceased to love us.

The breath she is drawing is not her last. When you wake up just before dawn next time, hold yours and listen: how deep it is.

She inhales and her eyes ale closing.