The ‘Porcupine in the Room’: Socio-Religious Entrepreneurs and Innovators within the Framework of Social Innovation

Randy M. Ataide

Chapter 7 in Social Innovation, 2012, pp 178-198 from Palgrave Macmillan

Abstract: Abstract In Parerga und Paralipomena (1851), Schopenhauer created a parable about the dilemma faced by porcupines in cold weather. He described a ‘company of porcupines’ who ‘crowded themselves very close together one cold winter’s day so as to profit by one another’s warmth and so save themselves from being frozen to death. But soon they felt one another’s quills, which induced them to separate again, and so on. The porcupines were ‘driven backwards and forwards from one trouble to the other’, until they found ‘a mean distance at which they could most tolerably exist’. Freud, and others, would later pick up on Schopenhauer’s metaphor related to the long-term nature of human relationships, and our desire to both crave and be repelled by intimacy and understanding in human relationships across cultures, settings, and times (see Prochnik, 2011).

Keywords: Fair Trade; Entrepreneurial Activity; Social Enterprise; Social Entrepreneurship; Social Entrepreneur (search for similar items in EconPapers)
Date: 2012
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Persistent link: https://EconPapers.repec.org/RePEc:pal:palchp:978-0-230-36709-8_8

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DOI: 10.1057/9780230367098_8

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