The embodiment of the alternative: a communicational and constitutive approach of an “alternative university”

Abstract

This paper proposes a communicative and constitutive theoretical framework to explore the embodiment of the alternative in an alternative university. It responds to a call to deepen the approaches of alternative organizations and to apply the constitutive approach of communication to organizational phenomena. Through the close study of ongoing communicational practices, this paper aims to explore how a communicational approach and Tarde’s three rules of repetition, opposition and adaptation could disclose what it means to be alternative on a daily basis. By undertaking an organizational ethnography of an alternative college in the United States, this paper explores how the alternative is embodied.