Organizational Activism and Its Relation to "Reality" and Mental Imagery

Abstract

The paper explores some of the attributes of organizational activists, in terms of their personality types, their characteristic behaviors, and their imaging styles when personally confronting their own futures. It was found that activists prefer intangible imagery to the tangible sensible world; are intuitives rather than sensers; are internally rather than externally oriented; are somewhat compulsive; are self-generative in terms of their identity; and are diversity generators rather than diversity regulators. The study provides a significant bridge between (a) Lewin 's little-recognized formulation of the life-space notion in terms of 'degrees of reality/irreality'; (b) the intuitivesensing dimension of Jung's theory of psychological types; and (c) the internal-external dichotomy of Rotter and others. The overall aim of the paper is to contribute to the integration of the conceptual foundations of the social sciences, in order to create an eventual theory of social change. A redefinition of planning and change is presented, in terms of the interaction between the two kinds of reality discussed in the paper: Reality-], the finite sensible material reality, and Reality-2, the limitless world of symbols and imagery.

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