The Oxford Handbook of Metaphor in Organization Studies (Oxford Handbooks) 0192895702, 9780192895707

Table of contents :
Cover
The Oxford Handbook of Metaphor in Organization Studies
Copyright
Contents
List of Figures
List of Tables
List of Contributors
Foreword
1. Toward an Increasingly Flourishing Use of Metaphor/​s in Organization Studies
PART I METAPHORS: THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS
2. Defining the Role of Metaphor in Organization Studies
3. Defining, Refining, and Redefining Metaphor: A Reflective and Generative Discussion with Gareth Morgan
4. Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking Metaphors: The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse
5. The Meaning of a Word
PART II METAPHORS OF MANAGEMENT AND ORGANIZATION
6. Do Indigenous Metaphors Have Universal Applicability? Learnings from Māori in New Zealand
7. Metaphors for Diversity and Discrimination in and by Organizations
8. Images of the Life Metaphor in Organizational Studies
9. Metaphors of Digital Transformation
10. “Robots at Work”: A Metaphor or a Label?
11. Metaphors for Competition within and between Organizations: The Value and Use of Sports Metaphors
12. On Music-​ and Dance-​Related Metaphors for Organization and Management
13. Fifty Shades of Organization: Darkness and Light as Metaphors for Processes
14. On Color Metaphors in Organization Studies
PART III THE APPLICATION OF METAPHOR IN RESEARCH
15. Using Metaphors Critically and Reflexively in Empirical Organizational Research
16. Using Metaphors in Research: Visual Metaphors in Organizations
17. Metaphor in Gesture in an Organizational Context
18. Ensuring Validity and Reliability in Empirical Studies on Metaphor in Organizations
19. Just Like a Freefall: The Freedoms and Pitfalls of Critical Metaphor Analysis
PART IV THE USE AND ABUSE OF METAPHORS IN SETTINGS OTHER THAN RESEARCH
20. Metaphors in the Creative Journey: Using Metaphors in Practice
21. Using Metaphors in the Management Classroom: Conceptualizing Complexity, Exploring Mindsets, and Driving Change
22. Metaphors in Action: The Seductive Quality of Metaphors and Ways to Counterbalance It
PART V PERSPECTIVE ON METAPHOR
23. Translating Organizing and Organizational Metaphors: From the Universal to the Particular
24. Metaphors and Valence—​Do They Have It? Do They Need It?
25. Jobs and the Mac: Conceptual Metaphors as Cognitive and Rhetorical Resource
26. Metaphors and Organization Studies: A Critical Realist View
27. Research: Invitation to Metaphor
PART VI EPILOGUE
28. Organizational Metaphors of the Future: Some Suggested Types of Further Research
29. Afterword: Analogy All the Way Down: Analogical Thinking Is at the Core of Understanding Organizations Interpretively
Index

Citation preview

t h e ox f o r d h a n d b o o k o f

M E TA P HOR I N ORG A N I Z AT ION ST U DI E S

the oxford handbook of

METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES Edited by

ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD

Great Clarendon Street, Oxford, ox2 6dp, United Kingdom Oxford University Press is a department of the University of Oxford. It furthers the University’s objective of excellence in research, scholarship, and education by publishing worldwide. Oxford is a registered trade mark of Oxford University Press in the UK and in certain other countries © Oxford University Press 2024 The moral rights of the authors have been asserted First Edition published in 2024 All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system, or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior permission in writing of Oxford University Press, or as expressly permitted by law, by licence or under terms agreed with the appropriate reprographics rights organization. Enquiries concerning reproduction outside the scope of the above should be sent to the Rights Department, Oxford University Press, at the address above You must not circulate this work in any other form and you must impose this same condition on any acquirer Published in the United States of America by Oxford University Press 198 Madison Avenue, New York, NY 10016, United States of America British Library Cataloguing in Publication Data Data available Library of Congress Control Number: 2023941766 ISBN 978–​0–​19–​289570–​7 DOI: 10.1093/​oxfordhb/​9780192895707.001.0001 Printed and bound by CPI Group (UK) Ltd, Croydon, CR0 4YY Links to third party websites are provided by Oxford in good faith and for information only. Oxford disclaims any responsibility for the materials contained in any third party website referenced in this work.

Contents

List of Figures  List of Tables  List of Contributors  Foreword 

ix xi xiii xxiii

1. Toward an Increasingly Flourishing Use of Metaphor/​s in Organization Studies  Anders Örtenblad

1

PA RT I   M E TA P HOR S : T H E OR E T IC A L C ON SI DE R AT ION S 2. Defining the Role of Metaphor in Organization Studies  Joep Cornelissen

43

3. Defining, Refining, and Redefining Metaphor: A Reflective and Generative Discussion with Gareth Morgan  Cliff Oswick and David Grant

57

4. Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking Metaphors: The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse  Cornelia Müller

70

5. The Meaning of a Word  Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen

85

PA RT I I   M E TA P HOR S OF M A NAG E M E N T A N D ORG A N I Z AT ION 6. Do Indigenous Metaphors Have Universal Applicability? Learnings from Māori in New Zealand  Kiri Dell, Chellie Spiller, and Nimbus Staniland

101

vi   Contents

7. Metaphors for Diversity and Discrimination in and by Organizations  Regine Bendl and Angelika Schmidt

115

8. Images of the Life Metaphor in Organizational Studies  Rebecka Arman and Ewa Wikström

137

9. Metaphors of Digital Transformation  Bertrand Audrin and Eric Davoine

151

10. “Robots at Work”: A Metaphor or a Label?  Barbara Czarniawska

166

11. Metaphors for Competition within and between Organizations: The Value and Use of Sports Metaphors  Terri Byers and Charles Owusu

178

12. On Music-​and Dance-​Related Metaphors for Organization and Management  Paula Rossi

196

13. Fifty Shades of Organization: Darkness and Light as Metaphors for Processes  Stephen A. Linstead

212

14. On Color Metaphors in Organization Studies  Anders Örtenblad and Sumeyra Alpaslan-​Danisman

230

PA RT I I I   T H E A P P L IC AT ION OF M E TA P HOR I N R E SE A RC H 15. Using Metaphors Critically and Reflexively in Empirical Organizational Research  Mats Alvesson, Yiannis Gabriel, and Jörgen Sandberg

251

16. Using Metaphors in Research: Visual Metaphors in Organizations  Hermann Mitterhofer and Silvia Jordan

265

17. Metaphor in Gesture in an Organizational Context  Alan Cienki

286

Contents   vii

18. Ensuring Validity and Reliability in Empirical Studies on Metaphor in Organizations  Elena Bruni and Claudio Biscaro

300

19. Just Like a Freefall: The Freedoms and Pitfalls of Critical Metaphor Analysis  Lorin Basden Arnold

314

PA RT I V   T H E U SE A N D A BU SE OF M E TA P HOR S I N SE T T I N G S OT H E R T HA N R E SE A RC H 20. Metaphors in the Creative Journey: Using Metaphors in Practice  Claudio Biscaro and Elena Bruni

331

21. Using Metaphors in the Management Classroom: Conceptualizing Complexity, Exploring Mindsets, and Driving Change  Cynthia Wagner Weick

346

22. Metaphors in Action: The Seductive Quality of Metaphors and Ways to Counterbalance It  Sonja Sackmann

361

PA RT V   P E R SP E C T I V E ON M E TA P HOR 23. Translating Organizing and Organizational Metaphors: From the Universal to the Particular  Hugo Gaggiotti, Heather Marie Austin, Peter Case, Jonathan Gosling, and Mikael Holmgren Caicedo 24. Metaphors and Valence—​Do They Have It? Do They Need It?  Jonathan Pinto and Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen 25. Jobs and the Mac: Conceptual Metaphors as Cognitive and Rhetorical Resource  L. David Ritchie

375

391

405

26. Metaphors and Organization Studies: A Critical Realist View  Michael Reed

420

27. Research: Invitation to Metaphor  Hugo Letiche and Ivo De Loo

434

viii   Contents

PA RT V I   E P I L O G U E 28. Organizational Metaphors of the Future: Some Suggested Types of Further Research  Anders Örtenblad

451

29. Afterword: Analogy All the Way Down: Analogical Thinking Is at the Core of Understanding Organizations Interpretively  Haridimos Tsoukas

467

Index 

475

Figures

4.1 The spectrum of verbal metaphor in metaphor theories: a categorical distinction

74

4.2 A vitality distinction of transparent verbal metaphor in metaphor theories

76

4.3 From sleeping to waking: degrees of metaphoricity of transparent verbal metaphors

78

4.4 Foregrounding and temporal dynamics of metaphoricity in multimodal discourse

80

16.1 Frontispiece of Leviathan 268 16.2 John Heartfield’s “All fists clenched into one,” AIZ, Workers’ Illustrated Magazine 271 16.3 Left: an early organization chart—​Daniel Craig McCallum’s organization chart for Erie Railroad in 1855; right: a template of a contemporary organization chart

276

16.4 Front cover of a BT shareholder communication, September 2001

278

16.5 “Traffic light” risk matrix format

279

16.6 Logo of the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s protest campaign by the artist Peter Millen

281

21.1 The learning cycle of metaphors in management coursework

358

22.1 The seduction process in using metaphors

364

23.1 The cognitive operation of a primary metaphor

377

24.1 Plotting the valences of Morgan’s Images of Organization 399

Tables

7.1 Metaphors for diversity and (anti)discrimination based on the literature search

117

9.1 Overview of the metaphors of digitalized organizations

155

11.1 Sports metaphors for competition in and between organizations

183

12.1 Music-​and dance-​related metaphors for understanding organizational life

202

18.1 Overview of how to ensure representativeness, reliability, and validity with metaphor in empirical data

303

20.1 Metaphor in the creative journey

335

22.1 The seductive quality of metaphors as a function of contextual factors

369

23.1 The Aymara vocabulary of work

381

24.1 Philosophical positions on language and metaphor

396

Contributors

Sumeyra Alpaslan-​Danisman is an instructor in Continuous and Professional (Deve­ lopment) Studies at Baruch College and Queensborough Community College at City University of New York, USA. She holds two MAs in Management and Human Resource Management, and a PhD in Business Management. She worked as an Associate Professor at Mevlana University and researcher at Ohio State University and Stony Brook University. She has published mainly on management and research methods, and her research interests are intersections of human resource management and organizational behavior, expatriation, metaphors, and qualitative research methodology. Mats Alvesson is Professor at School of Management, University of Bath and Lund University and affiliated with City University, London and Stockholm School of Economics. He has done extensive research and published widely in areas including qualitative and reflexive methodology, critical theory, organizational culture, knowledge work, identity in organizations, gender, organizational change, and leadership. His latest books include Reflexive Leadership: Organizing in an Imperfect World (2017, with Blom and Sveningsson) and Return to Meaning: A Social Science with Something to Say (2017, with Gabriel and Paulsen). Rebecka Arman is Associate Professor at the School of Business Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. She has conducted research into managerial work in healthcare, HR work and narratives during organizational downsizing, institutionalization and institutional work in medicine, as well as downsizing and being alone at work in the retail sector. Her most recent study was about retirement and HR narratives portraying aging employees as a problem or a solution. She teaches leadership and org­ anizational theory and is interested in communication studies in organizations. Lorin Basden Arnold is Provost and Vice President for Academic Affairs at Kutztown University. A graduate of Purdue University, her education had a split focus on organizational and interpersonal communication. She has taught across the communication studies curriculum, with primary attention to interpersonal, family, and organizational communication, as well as qualitative methodology. Her research has primarily addressed issues related to family, often with embedded critical and/​or feminist analytic frames. Her most recent work has been devoted to mothering and how cultural expectations of motherhood frame and restrict the experiences of mothers.

xiv   Contributors Bertrand Audrin is Assistant Professor of Human Resource Management and Organi­ zational Behavior at EHL Business School in Lausanne, Switzerland, and holds a PhD in Management from the University of Fribourg, Switzerland. His research focuses on the digital transformation of organizations and more specifically on the issues of change management and the storytelling and narratives that surround digital transformation phenomena. His research also investigates the implications of digital transformation for work practices and skills, and the transformation of human resource management practices. Heather Marie Austin holds a Master of Arts in Applied Linguistics with a concentration in Foreign Language Pedagogy and has over a decade of experience in the TESOL field in the USA, Turkey, and Japan. In addition to teaching preparatory English, English for academic purposes, and English for specific purposes, she has been actively involved in materials development, curriculum design, CALL, committee work, and conducting research. Her professional and scholarly interests include discourse analysis, sociolinguistics, fluency development, materials and curriculum development, and educational technology. Regine Bendl is Associate Professor at the Institute for Gender and Diversity in Organization at WU Vienna, for which she served as Professor and Chair from 2015 to 2020. Her research focuses on organizing and managing diversity, gender/​feminist/​queer perspectives, and subtexts of organization theories. Alongside numerous journal papers and book chapters, she has published 13 books as coeditor, including The Oxford Handbook of Diversity in Organizations and The Handbook of Research Methods on Diversity Management, Equality and Inclusion at Work). Besides her editorship of Equality, Diversity and Inclusion—​An International Journal (2010–​15), she has held several journal editorial positions. Claudio Biscaro is Professor of Human Resource Management at Johannes Kepler University in Linz, Austria, and holds a PhD in Business from the University of Venice. Claudio studies creativity, innovation, and social change, and, through the lens of dialogic interactions, he explores the effect of metaphors, framing, and narratives. He not only works in management but is also active in environmental science. Thus, his work has been featured in management-​related journals such as the Academy of Management Review and Organization Science, but also in environmental science journals such as Plos One, Natural Hazards, and Environmental Research Letters. Elena Bruni is Assistant Professor at LUISS Guido Carli University, Rome, and former Marie Curie Skłodowska at WU Vienna. She obtained her PhD in Management and Business from the University of Venice. Her research activity revolves around the investigation of the linguistic and rhetorical processes that stimulate institutional change. In particular, she focuses on the mechanisms in which metaphors and other figures of speech are used to ascribe legitimacy, and how different modes of communication (e.g., visual and written) may trigger or stifle collective action. Her work has been recently published in the Academy of Management Review.

Contributors   xv Terri Byers is a Professor at the University of New Brunswick, Canada. Her work has focused on understanding sport organizations, with a specific interest in critical pers­ pectives of organization control and increasing diversity and inclusion in sport through innovation and technology such as virtual reality. She is widely published in sport management journals and books, and on practitioner forums, is a consultant to sport organizations in England and Canada on issues of governance, and has received research funding from the UK and Canada. Peter Case is Professor of Organization Studies at the University of the West of England and a member of the Bristol Leadership and Change Centre. He also holds a part-​time chair in management at James Cook University, North Queensland, Australia. His scholarly interests in leadership studies and organization theory are complemented by extensive international experience of leading applied research projects in the areas of rural development and global healthcare. Peter has published widely in academic journals and his books include Worldly Leadership, Belief and Organizations, and Origins of Organizing. Alan Cienki is Professor of English Linguistics at the Vrije Universiteit (VU) Amsterdam (Netherlands), where he directs a research group on Language Use and Cognition. He also founded the Multimodal Communication and Cognition Lab, known as PoliMod in Russian, at Moscow State Linguistic University. He is the author of Ten Lectures on Spoken Language and Gesture (Brill) and coeditor of the two-​volume handbook Body–​ Language–​Communication (De Gruyter) and Metaphor and Gesture (Benjamins). He is former Chair of the international association for Researching and Applying Metaphor (RaAM). Joep Cornelissen is Professor of Management at Rotterdam School of Management, Erasmus University, and Chair in Strategy and Organisation (part-​ time) at the University of Liverpool. He is interested in metaphor and communication during processes of innovation and change. In addition, he also has an interest in questions of scientific reasoning and theory development in management and organization theory. His work has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Academy of Management Journal, Journal of Management Studies, Organization Science, and Organization Studies. Joep is also the founding Editor-​in-​Chief of Organization Theory, and serves on several editorial boards. Barbara Czarniawska is Professor Emerita of Management Studies at Gothenburg Research Institute, School of Business, Economics and Law, at the University of Gothenburg, Sweden. She is a member of the Swedish Royal Academy of Sciences, the Swedish Royal Engineering Academy, the Royal Society of Art and Sciences in Gothenburg, Societas Scientiarum Finnica, and Fellow of the British Academy. Barbara takes a feminist and processual perspective on organizing, recently exploring such phenomena as the future of the welfare state, the robotization of work, and personnel management of spies. She is interested in techniques of fieldwork and in the application of narratology to social science studies.

xvi   Contributors Eric Davoine is Professor of HRM and Intercultural Management at the University of Fribourg in Switzerland, board member of the association of French-​speaking HRM researchers (AGRH), codirector of university executive programs in the field of HRM and Philosophy for managers, and member of editorial and reviewer boards of several journals including Career Development International and Journal of Global Mobility. His research explores the impacts of globalization processes on careers and HR practices, and his results have been published in journals such as International Business Review, International Journal of Human Resources Management, and European Management Journal. Ivo De Loo holds a doctorate degree from the Open University of the Netherlands, Heerlen, and is Professor of Management Accounting and Control at Nyenrode Business University, Netherlands. He is mainly interested in how management accounting and control is shaped and changed in organizations. In addition, he has developed an interest in research methodology, about which he has published in several well-​known accounting journals, such as Management Accounting Research, Critical Perspectives on Accounting, and the Accounting, Auditing & Accountability Journal. He is a member of the editorial board of the latter journal, as well as of Qualitative Research in Accounting and Management. Kiri Dell is from the Māori tribal area of Ngāti Porou. She works with many Indigenous nations across the world to raise Indigenous voices. Her main research areas are related to Māori land development, working across multiple disciplines of entrepreneurship, law, engineering, and science to build land-​based ventures. Based at the Management and International Business School, University of Auckland, she lectures in Māori economy, Māori entrepreneurship, and Māori land issues. She is Director of the postgraduate diploma in Māori Development and Director of Tuakana, Māori, and Pacific academic success. Yiannis Gabriel is a social psychologist, currently Professor Emeritus at the University of Bath and Visiting Professor at Lund University. Yiannis has written on organizational storytelling and narratives, leadership and followership, management learning, and the culture and politics of contemporary consumption. He has used stories as a way of studying numerous social and organizational phenomena including leader–​follower relations, group dynamics and fantasies, nostalgia, conspiracy theories, insults, and apologies. He maintains an active blog at www.yia​nnis​gabr​iel.com, where he presents popularized versions of his research and also discusses his musical, political, and other interests. Hugo Gaggiotti is Professor at the University of the West of England, Bristol, UK. The focus of Hugo’s writing is on the intersections between rhetoric, rituals, and nomadic management, and how organizations could contribute to the construction of vulnerability in particular contexts of displacement, transfiguration, and liminality, such as international borderlands, multinational assembly plants, and ephemeral project-​based

Contributors   xvii work. Hugo’s work has appeared in a range of interdisciplinary journals and his books include Organizational Ethnography: An Experiential and Practical Guide (2022) and Origins of Organising (2019). Jonathan Gosling is Emeritus Professor of Leadership at Exeter University. He is now an independent academic and consultant at Pelumbra.com with roles including, with the Forward Institute, promoting responsible leadership in government, NGOs, and business; and supporting the front-​line leadership of HIV and malaria control programs in Africa. He represented UK universities at the Rio+​20 UN Sustainability summit and contributes to the “greening” of management education—​for example, as coauthor of the textbook Sustainable Business: A One Planet Approach and cofounder of One Planet Education Networks (OPEN). He worked for many years as a community mediator and is a keen sailor. David Grant is Professor of Management and Senior Deputy Director of the Institute for Climate Risk and Response, UNSW Sydney, Australia. His research focuses on how language and other symbolic media influence the practice of leadership and organization-​wide, group, and individual-​level change. Much of this research has been funded by government (Australian Research Council) grants. He has published in a range of peer-​reviewed journals as well as practitioner outlets, and has coedited several books including Metaphor and Organizations (1996, with Cliff Oswick) and the SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse (2004, with Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, and Linda Putnam). Mikael Holmgren Caicedo is Associate Professor at Stockholm Business School, Stockholm University, Sweden. His research interests are in the organization of management accounting and control, internal auditing, and the poetics and rhetoric of org­­­­­anizational and accounting practices, specifically the structures and forms that are advocated by formal and informal standard-​setting communities and the nexus between metaphor and story. His work has been published in journals including Critical Perspectives on Accounting, Culture and Organization, Financial Accountability & Management, and the Journal of Contemporary Accounting & Organisational Change. Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen is Professor at the Department of Working Life and Innovation at the School of Business and Law at the University of Agder. He holds an MBA from the Norwegian School of Economics and gained his PhD at the Copenhagen Business School. In addition to his position at the University of Agder, Garmann Johnsen has been Adjunct Professor at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology (NTNU), Senior Researcher at NORCE (previously Agderforskning), and visiting scholar at several universities including UC Berkeley and Cornell in the USA, and Kingston University in the UK. Silvia Jordan is Professor of Management Accounting at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. She previously held positions at the London School of Economics and Political

xviii   Contributors Science and at the University of Innsbruck. Her research interests include organizing and learning in high-​ reliability contexts, the role of calculations and graphical representations in risk management, and organizing across spatial and organizational boundaries. Her work has been published in journals including Accounting, Organi­ zations and Society, Human Relations, Management Accounting Research, European Accounting Review, Management Learning, and the Scandinavian Journal of Manage­ ment, as well as in multi-​contributor books. Hugo Letiche received a drs. in Psychology from Leiden University and a PhD in Adult Learning from the Free University, Amsterdam. He is Research Professor LITEM l’Université Paris-​Saclay and Visiting Research Professor Nyenrode Business University. He was Director of the practitioner PhD program at the Universiteit voor Humanistiek Utrecht. Recent books: Magic in Organizations, Turn to Film, and L’art du sens dans les organizations. His current research interests are in the ontology of the turn-​to-​affect and the ethnography of accountability. Among other journals, he has published in Revue Française de Gestion, Culture and Organization, Organization Studies, and AAAJ. Stephen A. Linstead is Professor of Management Humanities, School of Business and Society, University of York, UK. He researches organization culture, change, and development, engaging with both social sciences (geography, psychology, social anthropology, and sociology) and arts and humanities (film-​making, history, literature, music, performance, philosophy, photography, and visual art). Winner of the UKRI Best Research Film award (2018) for Black Snow, his most recent books are The Magic of Organization (2020, edited with Hugo Letiche and Jean-​Luc Moriceau) and Viral Verses: Art in Exceptional Times (2020, edited with Nick Linstead and Bryan Ledgard). Hermann Mitterhofer is Associate Professor at the Department of Education at the University of Innsbruck, Austria. His research interests include the methods of critical discourse analysis and visual cultural studies, and their application to widely debated societal concerns such as terrorism, war, and immigration. His work has been published in journals including Accounting, Organizations and Society, Management Account­ ing Research, the Scandinavian Journal of Management, Zeitschrift für Pädagogik, MedienPädagogik, Zeitschrift für Psychotraumatologie, Psychotherapiewissenschaft und Psychologische Medizin, and Journal für Psychologie as well as in multi-​ contributor books. Cornelia Müller is Professor of Language Use and Multimodal Communication at the European University Viadrina Frankfurt/​Oder, Germany. Her publications include articles and book chapters on gestures and language and on multimodal metaphors. She launched the journal Gesture and the book series “Gesture Studies” (both with Adam Kendon) and is editor-​in-​chief of the handbook Body-​Language-​Communication (2013, 2014). She is the author of Metaphors, Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking: A Dynamic View (2008) and has coauthored Cinematic Metaphor: Experience-​Affectivity-​ Temporality (2018, with H. Kappelhoff). She is currently working on a textbook: Gesture

Contributors   xix and Language. Her research interests revolve around language as genuinely multimodal phenomenon. Anders Örtenblad is Professor of Working Life Science at the University of Agder, Norway. He has edited books that have been published by Edward Elgar Publishing, Oxford University Press, Palgrave Macmillan, Routledge, and SAGE. Together with Linda L. Putnam and Kiran Trehan, he guest-​edited a special issue of Human Relations, “Beyond Morgan’s Eight Metaphors: Adding to and Developing Organization Theory,” and coedited Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies (2017). He is the editing founder of the book series “Palgrave Debates in Business and Management”. Cliff Oswick is Professor of Organization Theory at Bayes Business School (formerly Cass), City, University of London (where he previously served as Deputy Dean between 2011 and 2016). His research interests focus on the discursive study of organizing processes and nontraditional approaches to organizational change. He is an Associate Editor for both the Journal of Change Management and the Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, and former chair of the board of trustees for the Tavistock Institute of Human Relations (2014–​20). Charles Owusu holds a Master of Arts (MA) in Sport and Recreation Studies from the University of New Brunswick in Canada, funded by the New Brunswick Innovation Foundation, focusing on understanding the role of sport governance in human rights violations of female athletes. He holds a Bachelor’s degree LLB, Major in International Law from Zhejiang Gongshang University, China. Charles is pursuing a career in sports law after his graduate program and aims to improve the sport system in his home nation, Ghana. Jonathan Pinto is Associate Professor of Organisational Behaviour and Negotiations at Imperial College Business School, where he has worked since obtaining his PhD from the University of Pittsburgh in 2008. His work spans both the dark side of organizational behavior (e.g., organizational corruption, workplace aggression) and its antidote (e.g., whistleblowing, paradox theory) and has been published in the Academy of Management Review, Group & Organization Management (GOM), Human Relations, the International Journal of Management Reviews (IJMR), the Organizational Psychology Review, and Physica A among others. He currently serves as Associate Editor of IJMR (since 2016), and of GOM (since January 2021). Michael Reed is Professor in Organizational Analysis at Cardiff Business School, Cardiff University, Wales. His research interests focus on the complex power relationships between political elites and organizational elites within neoliberal regimes, with particular reference to the role and authority of “experts.” This research interest has been developed within a critical realist approach to the study of organizations. He is one of the founding editors of the journal Organization, and he is Fellow of the Academy of Social Sciences UK and the Learned Society of Wales.

xx   Contributors L. David Ritchie received his PhD from Stanford University in 1987 and is currently a Professor of Communication at Portland State University. His primary research focus is metaphor use, storytelling, and humor in naturally-​occurring discourse, with emphasis on communities and cultural institutions. He is the author of three books, including two books about metaphor theory, and over 40 refereed journal articles and book chapters on this and related topics. Recent publications include Metaphorical Stories in Discourse (2017), as well as articles in Metaphor and Symbol and Metaphor and the Social World. Paula Rossi is a Doctor of Administrative Sciences. She currently works as Assistant Professor at the University of Vaasa, Finland. Her research interest covers various themes, such as systems-​thinking, systemic change, and experienced conflicts, all closely intertwined with understanding the complexity of everyday organizational life. Her research has been published in international journals such as Public Management Review and Knowledge Management Research & Practice. In the latter, her article addressed the metaphor of music as a sensemaking device in reimagining the concept of organizational conflicts. Sonja Sackmann is Professor Emerita, University of Munich, Germany, and Guest Professor at the School of Economics and Business Administration, University of Tartu, Estonia. She held a chair in organizational behavior, was Director of the Institute Developing Viable Organizations, and taught at the University of St. Gallen, Switzerland; UCLA, USA; Jao-​Tong, China; WU Vienna, Austria; EBS and Konstanz, Germany. Her research, teaching, and consulting focus on leadership; organizational culture; change; personal, team, and organizational development; and cross-​ cultural management in national and multinational contexts. She received her PhD in Management from UCLA, USA, and her MS and BS in Psychology from the University of Heidelberg, Germany. Jörgen Sandberg is Professor at the University of Queensland (UQ) Business School, Australia, Honorary Professor at Warwick Business School, UK, and Co-​Lead of Practice and Process Studies, a multidisciplinary research hub within the UQ Business School. He has published extensively in the areas of competence and learning in organizations; practice, process, and sensemaking theory; theory development; philosophy of science; and research methodology. His most recent books include Re-​ imagining the Research Process: Conventional and Alternative Metaphors (2021, with Alvesson) and Skillful Performance: Enacting Capabilities, Knowledge, Competence and Expertise in Organizations (2017, with Rouleau, Langley, and Tsoukas). Angelika Schmidt is Associate Professor at the Institute for Change Management and Management Development at WU Vienna. Her main research interests are interfaces in organizations, communication and discourse in organizations, participation and collective action, and new forms of employment and their consequences for what happens in organizations. A current focus is the unveiling of the sharing

Contributors   xxi economy. She has published her work in the British Journal of Management, Journal of Managerial Psychology, Gender, Work & Organization, and Equality, Diversity and Inclusion. Chellie Spiller, of Māori descent, is Professor of Leadership the Waikato Management School. She has extensive business experience and brings this experience to her academic work and leadership development programs. Her research explores wayfinding and authentic leadership, governance, and economies of well-​being. She is widely published and her books include Wayfinding Leadership: Groundbreaking Wisdom for Developing Leaders (2015); Reflections on Authentic Leadership: Concepts, Coalescences and Clashes (2015) and Practical Wisdom, Leadership and Culture: Indigenous, Asian and Middle-​Eastern Perspectives (2020). Chellie was a Fulbright Senior Scholar at the Harvard Kennedy School and University of Arizona. Nimbus Staniland (Ngāti Awa, Ngāi Tūhoe) is Senior Lecturer in the Department of Management and International Business at the University of Auckland Business School, New Zealand. Her research focuses on the question of how Māori research methodologies can be applied to investigate the workplace experience and the organization of work in order to identify practices and processes that facilitate or hinder self-​determination for Indigenous Peoples. In doing so, she is working to expand our understanding both of what constitutes research in Business Studies and of business, work, employment, and careers more widely. Haridimos Tsoukas is the Columbia Ship Management Professor of Strategic Management at the University of Cyprus, Cyprus, and a Distinguished Research Environment Professor of Organizational Behaviour at Warwick Business School, University of Warwick, UK. He was the Editor-​in-​Chief of Organization Studies (2003-​ 2008). He is the author of Philosophical Organization Theory (2019) and Complex Knowledge: Studies in Organizational Epistemology (2005), both published by Oxford University Press. He has co-​edited several books, including The SAGE Handbook of Process Organization Studies (2017, with Ann Langley, SAGE). His research interests include organizational knowledge, organizational becoming, practical reason in management studies, philosophy, and organization studies. Cynthia Wagner Weick is Professor Emeritus of Management at the University of the Pacific, California, where she held a joint appointment in the business and engineering schools. Weick’s expertise is in creative approaches to strategy, including metaphor, management of technology, and innovation. She has published over 30 refereed journal articles, book chapters, and books, including Out of Context: A Creative Approach to Strategic Management (2003), a collection of articles that use metaphor to enhance understanding of management. Weick earned her PhD at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania, and her MS and BS in Crop Physiology at the Ohio State University.

xxii   Contributors Ewa Wikström is Professor of Management at the School of Business Economics and Law, University of Gothenburg. She has published extensively on sustainable leadership, teams, communication, and collaboration across organizational and professional boundaries in complex environments. She has recently studied organizational capability for age management and prolonging work life from the perspective of knowledge retention, HR narratives, and managerial routines as well as international comparisons. She is a member of multidisciplinary research centers such as the Centre for Ageing and Health.

Foreword

This book about the power and potential of metaphor is timely. For much of the history of the field of organizational studies, we have operated under the assumption that research is a matter of producing objective and valid knowledge that is based on verifiable empirical data. This positivist orientation to organizational science seeks to build causal theories through the use of rigorous scientific methods. Data collection and analysis are seen as independent of values or normative expectations of the researcher, who is considered to be a detached observer in the tradition of the natural sciences. An awareness of the influence of our linguistic constructions, especially metaphors, reminds us that researchers’ values have consequences for how social science activity is conducted, what topics are chosen, what methodology is adopted, and how we conceptualize the consequences of such knowledge. The activity of organizational research is always already relationally embedded and implicated in the very world that the researcher seeks to study (see Barrett 2008). A book such as this that calls attention to the ways we construct the world through metaphor is a clarion call to appreciate the potential of social science to question what is taken to be normal and legitimate, in order to create a language that can facilitate new modes of thinking and action, and advance alternative social forms that challenge the status quo. Metaphor is, at its simplest, a way of proceeding from the known to the less known. The qualities of one domain are transferred in an instantaneous flash of insight to some other domain that is by remoteness or complexity less known. The test of metaphor is not any rule of grammatical form, but rather the quality of semantic transformation that is brought about. This potential for semantic transformation is what makes artists, poets, leaders, and scientists alike so attuned to the power of metaphor, and aware of its potential for directing perception and enriching awareness. Good metaphors provoke new thoughts, excite with novel perspectives, vibrate with multivocal meanings, and enable people to see the world with fresh perceptions not possible in any other way. Metaphors posit a framework for selecting, naming, and framing characteristics of one domain by asserting a similarity with a different domain, implying meanings that may not have been otherwise noticed. In this sense, metaphors are filters that suppress some details and emphasize others; in short, organize our view of the world. More than a displacement or shifting of words, metaphor is an interaction between systems of thought that produce a meaning larger than either of its subjects. Through the resonance of possible associations, a new contextual meaning is created. We could say simply that metaphor is a way of re-​describing the world. But it is much more than that. Metaphors name things into being. They can bring human affairs into a

xxiv   Foreword new light, perhaps seeing the mundane in novel ways. Metaphors are so pervasive that they are guiding our ways of being, whether or not we notice their influence. Words create worlds. In calling attention to the influence of metaphor in how we construe organizing, this book makes a major contribution. Often metaphor is more capable of capturing the continuous flow of experiences that cannot be conveyed in literal language. Imagine a child who cannot describe to his mother that his foot is asleep. He has no way of relaying the strange sensation. In frustration, he says to his mother, “There are stars hitting my foot.” The child associates a new, unfamiliar experience with one that he can grasp. He has a sparkling, glittering, tingling sensation that seems to be impacting his foot from outside his body. At the age of four he cannot say, “I’m experiencing numbness which is a result of inadequate flow of blood which I seem to have circumvented.” Indeed, even as adults we use metaphor to relate the experience: “My foot is asleep.” Several chapters in this book are a summons to consider ways that a proposed metaphor can enlighten the continual flow of human experience in organizational life. Authors make an important distinction between “live” and “dead” metaphors. “Live” metaphors can be generative (Barrett and Cooperrider 1990) and ones in which a transformation is suggestive. A “dead” metaphor is one that is nontransparent and has become so familiar and habitual that we cease to be aware of it as a metaphorical construction; the concepts associated with the metaphor have become established and are treated as literal references. These submerged metaphors are candidates for reification (see Barrett and Sarbin 2007). The chapters in this book summon us to become more aware of the ways in which we have tacitly accepted some metaphors in such a way that we forget the “as if ” construction that has taken on literal meaning. One of the most potent effects of metaphors is that they can facilitate learning and insight. A live metaphor can provoke immersion in an experience, create an anomaly, provoke active thought experimentation, frame expansion. Thus for a young science student who is cognitively blocked in trying to grasp the structure of an atom, the metaphor “the atom is a solar system” could indeed be useful. The student may now begin to “see” neutrons and electrons revolving around a gravitation center. He or she might engage in such active thought experimentation long enough to allow a new understanding of the atom to emerge (see Srivastva and Barrett 1988; Barrett and Cooperrider 1990). Several chapters in this volume summon us to consider and experiment with novel metaphors that invite us to expand our awareness of nuances in organizational life. Good metaphors, “live” metaphors, provoke new thoughts, excite us with novel perspectives, vibrate with multivocal meanings, and enable people to see the world with fresh perspectives not possible in other ways. This book offers several novel metaphors as candidates for novel perspectives. These chapters bid us to consider organizational life as dance, jazz, jam bands, tangos, glass cages, glass palaces, and so on. They consider the implications of organizational life through the lens of sustainability metaphors, metaphors of darkness, light, and shadiness. Several chapters invite us to notice how metaphors shape the creative journey, how they can be used to enrich shared understanding, how they can be used in classrooms to increase awareness of worldviews, and

Foreword   xxv also how they can be misleading and seductive. Taken as a whole, this book invites us to a critical and reflexive awareness that appreciates the complex flow of organizational life and suggests ways to enrich our understandings. Since Morgan’s Images of Organization (1986) highlighted how metaphors guide theorizing, we have been waiting for a book like this one. This is the first volume to bring together the myriad ways that metaphors can enhance creative theory building. As metaphors unveil layers of meaning, this book will be important to researchers who can enrich their perspectival awareness, embrace complexity, appreciate context dependency, explore alternative nuances, and open new vistas of meaning. If it is true that we create the worlds that we later discover as real, this book is indispensable for helping us imagine new organizational worlds. May 2022 Frank J. Barrett Professor of Management and Organizational Behavior Graduate School of Defense Management Naval Postgraduate School Monterey, CA

References Barrett, Frank J. 2008. “Value-​Free Conception of Science.” In International Encyclopedia of Organization Studies, edited by Stewart R. Clegg and James R. Bailey, 1601–​5. Portland, OR: SAGE. Barrett, Frank J., and David L. Cooperrider. 1990. “Generative Metaphor Intervention: A New Approach for Working with Systems Divided by Conflict and Caught in Defensive Perception.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 26 (2): 219–​39. Barrett, Frank J., and Theodore R. Sarbin. 2007. “The Rhetoric of Terror: ‘War’ as Misplaced Metaphor.” In Information Strategy and Warfare, edited by John Arquilla and Douglas A. Borer, 16–​33. New York: Routledge. Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. London: SAGE. Srivastva, Suresh, and Frank J. Barrett. 1988. “The Transforming Nature of Metaphors in Group Development: A Study in Group Theory.” Human Relations 41 (1): 31–​64.

chapter 1

toward an inc re asi ng ly fl ourishi ng u se of metaph or/ ​s i n organiz ation st u di e s anders örtenblad

The factory metaphor defines the university as an assembly line. Like products, students go down the assembly line, with teachers as workers squirting into them knowledge from different disciplines. The result of this process is unified products that are the same. (Jensen 2006: 49; see    also Browne et al. 1995)

Introduction The simplest way to explain what “metaphor” is might be that it means understanding something in terms of something else (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980) (a more extensive explanation is offered later in this chapter). Examples of metaphors, within the area of organization studies, are “organization as machine,” “this organization is a brain,” “this university is a garden,” “my employees are workhorses,” and “recruitment is fishing.” Each metaphor illuminates certain aspects of that which the metaphor makes an effort to understand, while overshadowing other aspects (Black 1954: 288; Brown 1976; Kövecses 2010: 91–​3). Metaphors have, for a long time, been acknowledged in the study of poetics, and it has often been claimed that metaphors merely have the function of beautifying the language—​such as in “you are my rose”—​or the function of “word cutting” by letting

2   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD a metaphor replace literal language, implying that the metaphor says “more than a thousand words.” More recently, and for subjects such as organization studies, it has been argued that metaphors are far more elementary and important than that: Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3) The process of metaphorical conception is a basic mode of symbolism, central to the way in which humans forge their experience and knowledge of the world in which they live. (Morgan 1980: 619) Metaphors do not represent merely a nice way to present what is already understood, but aid in structuring most of the complex events that happen. (Deetz 1986: 172–​3) [M]‌etaphor [is] a primal, generative process that is fundamental to the creation of human understanding and meaning in all aspects of life. (Morgan 1996a: 228)

Thus, metaphors play a role in the development of scientific theory (see, e.g., Haack 1988). Through “generative metaphor,” a process of seeing-​as by which new perspectives are gained (Schön 1979/​1993), and “metaphorization,” a process of de-ossification and dismantling of dead metaphors that have become taken-​for-​granted concepts (Chia 1996), researchers as well as organization members can reflect on current understandings of various phenomena and creatively suggest alternative understandings or, expressed in other words, question their own or others’ “metaphor-​in-​use” (see, e.g., Ortony 1979/​ 1993: 13; Tsoukas 1993: 325; Morgan 1996a; Inns 2002). Metaphors are especially usable when it comes to understanding complex phenomena (Spicer and Alvesson 2011), such as organization and leadership. Each suggested metaphor can represent one possible view of reality (cf. Tsoukas 1991: 570). In this way, metaphorization can even lead to paradigm shifts (Chia 1996: 141). Metaphor is merely one of several figures of speech—​or “linguistic tropes” or “styles of discourse” (Manning 1979: 661), as they also are called—​which are used in studies of organization and organizations. Not seldom, though, metaphor is considered to be the most basic and superior of the tropes (e.g., Brown 1976; Glucksberg 2001), and it is probably the trope that has so far been most frequently acknowledged in organization studies. The other three “super tropes” are “irony,” “metonymy,” and “synecdoche.” While “this organization is a machine” said about a bureaucratic, highly efficient organization would be a metaphor, “this organization is a snail” about the same organization would be an example of irony. Thus, while metaphor involves some kind of similarities between two domains, irony is “seeing something from the viewpoint of its antithesis” (Putnam 1992: 108), thus saying the opposite of what one means (Black 1962: 35). The meaning of each of the tropes “metonymy” and “synecdoche,” as well as the relation between them, is complex (see, e.g., Fraser 1979/​1993; Gibbs 1979/​1993; Lakoff and Johnson 2003). In the area of organization studies, “metonymy” is often defined as an expression where the whole is represented by a part—​such as when a cogwheel represents a whole

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    3 machine—​while “synecdoche” is defined as an expression where a part is represented by the whole—​such as when a whole machine represents a cogwheel (cf. Manning 1979; Oswick et al. 2002). Among other figures of speech and “linguistic artifacts” (Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988), “analogy” can be defined as “the transfer of an explanatory structure from the source domain to the target domain” (Tsoukas 1991: 570), such as “employees are to the bureaucratic organization what cogwheels are to the machine.” Finally, a simile is “a comparison of one thing with another” which “involve[s]‌ explicit comparisons and assert[s] directly the similarities between the compared items” (Tsoukas 1991: 569). In this book, the trope “metaphor” is the main focus of interest, while other figures of speech are occasionally also dealt with. An important rationale behind this handbook is that further knowledge on “metaphor” can help to increase the potential of metaphor in organization studies even further (see Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume). Metaphor and metaphors need to be acknowledged as important tools in organization studies, and the many ways in which they can be used need to be further explored and developed. The overall aim of the book is to acknowledge the usability of metaphor in the area of organization studies and to acknowledge the existence of, explore, and suggest solutions to challenges that metaphor use comes with, all in order to stimulate both further use of metaphor and metaphors in organization studies, and further interest in metaphor and metaphors per se, as tools in such research. Those readers who expect a chapter-​by-​chapter description of the content of the book will not be disappointed—​they will get it at the end of this introductory chapter. Before that, though, there are a few other issues that need to be dealt with. First, readers are offered an overview of the introduction of metaphor and metaphors to the area of organization studies, as well as the use of metaphor and metaphors within this area. Second, I go into more depth on the concept of “metaphor” and what it means, in a section primarily aimed at “(advanced) beginners” to metaphor and metaphor studies. Thereafter, some advice from the book for further use of metaphor and metaphors in organization studies is offered.

Metaphor/​s in Organization Studies: Introduction and Use Even if others had touched upon the theme of metaphors for organization before him (e.g., Meadows 1967; Berg 1979), Professor Gareth Morgan has been and can rightfully be acknowledged as the scholar who with emphasis introduced “theory as metaphor” (Morgan 2011/​2017: 19) and “metaphorical thinking” to the area of organization studies (see, e.g., Örtenblad et al. 2017b). Morgan believes that “metaphor is the process that drives theory construction and science, generating metaphors that create theories” (Morgan 2011/​2017: 20, emphasis in original). In a groundbreaking article, “Paradigms,

4   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory” (Morgan 1980) and an equally groundbreaking book, Images of Organization (Morgan 1986, which has been republished in updated versions; see Morgan 1996b, 2006), he used metaphors to present and categorize the roots of organization theory: machine, organism, brain, culture, political system, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and instrument of domination.1 Morgan wanted to show how all organization theory (and organization practice too) is shaped by metaphors, each with its strengths and limitations, and that the world we “see” is always filtered through one or another metaphor (Morgan 2017) and for that reason is subjective: [W]‌e are always dealing with partial understandings and need to recognize that no single theory or perspective will ever be giving us a comprehensive and fully accurate view of the situations with which we are involved. (Morgan 2017: xiv; see also Brown 1976; Morgan 1980; Hesse 1987; Tsoukas 1993)

The aim of the book Images of Organization (Morgan 1986) was to foster a kind of critical thinking that encourages us to understand and grasp the multiple meanings of situations and to confront and manage contradiction and paradox rather than pretend that they do not exist. (Morgan 1986, quoted in Morgan 2017: xx)

Morgan considers his own approach to be that of a “constructive postmodernist” (Morgan 2017: xxvi), and in Images of Organization (Morgan 1986) he suggested that [t]‌he best we can do is to learn to read the ontological complexity of the situations with which we are faced through the medium of multiple theoretical perspectives [i.e., metaphors]. (Morgan 2017: xv, emphasis in original)

Morgan encouraged readers to use a variety of metaphors, depending on the character and demands of the specific situation, not limited to the eight metaphors he described himself in Images of Organization (Morgan 1986, 1996b, 2006), something that he has pointed out several times: While the book focuses on a number of key metaphors that have relevance for understanding a wide range of organizational situations, there are others that can produce their own special insight. Effective organizational analysis must always remain open to this possibility. (Morgan 1986, cited in Morgan 2016: 1038) [T]‌he challenge is to become skilled in the art of using metaphor: to find fresh ways of seeing, understanding, and shaping the situations that we want to organize and 1  The book Images of Organization (Morgan 1986, 1996b, 2006) has had a huge impact on many people with an interest in organization studies (see Örtenblad et al. 2017a). Gareth Morgan and his work deserve a whole book on their own—​something which they have actually received, in terms of the book Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors (Örtenblad et al. 2017b).

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    5 manage. (Morgan 2006: 5; see also Morgan 2006: 340, 342–​3, 365; see also, e.g., Morgan 2011/​2017: 25; 2016; 2017: xxiii)

Many are those who have commented on Morgan’s work. For instance, Tsoukas (2017: 218) suggests that what Morgan did was to invite readers to engage in reflective thinking, and Jermier and Forbes (2011: 445) suggest that it can help us to better understand not only organization theories but also everyday speech about organizations (other comments on Morgan’s work can, e.g., be found in Örtenblad et al. 2017b). Morgan’s approach to metaphor and metaphors has also gained critique and criticism (e.g., Pinder and Bourgeois 1982; Bourgeois and Pinder 1983; Tinker 1986; Reed 1990; Tsoukas 1993; McCourt 1997; Oswick et al. 2002; for Morgan’s own rebuts, see, e.g., Morgan 1983; 1996a: 229, 234–​9; 2011/​2017: 24–​5; 2017: xvii–​xviii, footnote 1). One of many merits of Morgan’s Images of Organization (1986, 1996b, 2006) that is rarely pointed out is its potential to give space for many somewhat different interpretations and, thus, its potential to encourage creativity regarding how metaphor and metaphors can be used within organization studies. Morgan thus paved the way for the use of metaphors in a variety of different ways in organization studies. The original ideas of metaphor in organization studies have since then been translated (Czarniawska and Sevón 1996), in terms of having been interpreted and reinterpreted. In fact, one could even claim that some have misinterpreted Morgan and his thoughts on metaphor and metaphors (Tsoukas 2017). Some translations are similar and more faithful to the original ideas—​and the researchers could thus be said to have followed in Morgan’s footsteps—​while others have developed versions in which the original ideas are less recognizable. Other forms of metaphor studies—​with minor connection to Morgan’s original ideas—​have been added. In what appears to have been a more or less parallel development of using metaphor in organization studies (in relation to Morgan’s work, Morgan 1980, 1986)2, Manning (1979) coined the concept of “metaphors of the field,” for metaphors that are used by organization members (or other “non-​researchers”) and that the researcher identifies and analyzes in their empirical studies. This type of metaphor research was taken up by several other scholars (e.g., Koch and Deetz 1981; Deetz 1986; Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988; Srivastva and Barrett 1988; Cornelissen 2012). In such research, not rarely are the identified metaphorical expressions deduced to “root metaphors” (Srivastva and Barrett 1988) (“root metaphor” means, according to Inns (2002: 309), “the dominant or defining way of seeing”; see also a more extensive definition, somewhat further down in this chapter) or categorized into “metaphor clusters” (Deetz 1986).3 The ideas 2 

It is difficult—​not to say impossible—​to say who inspired whom, but it is also correct to say that one of the earliest works (Koch and Deetz 1981), in the “metaphors of the field” (Manning 1979) tradition, in fact cites Morgan’s (1980) article. 3  Many commentators have dealt with the relation between metaphorical expressions and some kind of “deeper” structure, such as root metaphors (see, e.g., Lakoff 1979/​1993: 203; Schön 1979/​1993: 149; Burke 1992; Gibbs 1992; for critique, see, e.g., Cameron 1999; Inns 2002; Schmitt 2005: 373; Cornelissen et al. 2008: 16–​17).

6   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD of Morgan, on the one hand, and Manning and his followers, on the other hand, have over time become mixed, and today works referring to both Morgan’s and Manning’s works can easily be found (see, e.g., Pinto 2016; Schoeneborn et al. 2016; Sillince and Golant 2017). Studies of organization members’ metaphors have often focused on the metaphors that naturally occur in their language, and the studies have often been descriptive, in that the researchers were interested in the organization members’ deeper understanding of how something is. Some research has, though, taken a somewhat more normative turn, in that the researchers have studied the role metaphors can play for organization members in achieving things such as organizational change (Pondy 1983), organizational transformation (Sackmann 1989), creative problem solving (Proctor 1989), and creativity (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018). Other researchers have, in contrast, emphasized the more negative role that organization members’ metaphors can play, and one can even talk of studies of the abuse of metaphors in organizational settings (Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988; Höpfl and Maddrell 1996; Czarniawska 2004). Rather than the naturally occurring metaphors, which the literature mentioned above was occupied with, another track has instead studied metaphors that the researchers invited—​or elicited—​from organization members (e.g., Oswick and Montgomery 1999; Vaara et al. 2003; Gabriel and Ulus 2015). There are also those who have combined several methods, such as Smith and Eisenberg (1987), who studied both invited and naturally occurring metaphors, and—​ in addition—​ asked one group of organization members (employees) to react to the metaphors used by another group of organization members (management). In what could be considered as a transcendent of the distinction between metaphors of the researchers and metaphors of the field, the researcher introduces a metaphor to organization members to facilitate and support their group or organization development (see, e.g., Barrett and Cooperrider 1990). There are also lots of other “translations” or “tracks” of types of metaphor studies. One influential track of organizational metaphor research has continued on Morgan’s work on metaphor in general, and has been occupied with work on metaphor on a meta-​level; it has dealt with themes such as what metaphor is and how it works (Cornelissen 2004, 2005), the role of metaphor in theory development (Tsoukas 1991, 1993; Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008), how organizational researchers develop and select metaphors (Cornelissen et al. 2005), or, more generally, the potential of metaphors in organization studies (Inns 2002; Oswick et al. 2002; Driver 2017). Another track has used metaphors to suggest overviews of the roots of understandings of any other phenomenon than—​but, of course, still closely connected to—​“organization” (as was Morgan’s 1980, 1986 theme). One such type of study is when—​in a similar way to Morgan (1980, 1986) with organization theory—​researchers use a set of metaphors to categorize theory/​literature in a specific area within organization studies, such as “organizational communication” (Putnam et al. 1996), or “social capital” (Andriessen and Gubbins 2009). A variant of such research is when either metonymies (e.g., Morgan 1996a, 2011/​2017, 2016; Schoeneborn et al. 2016), analogies (Tsoukas 1993), or second-​level metaphors (Alvesson 1993) are used to offer a set of alternative

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    7 specifications of a metaphor, such as when Alvesson (2013) offers a set of second-​level metaphors for the “culture” or “organization as culture” metaphor (e.g., “compass,” “mental prison,” and “social glue”). Yet another track has been focusing on a certain type of use of the researcher’s own metaphors in empirical research. More specifically, it makes a distinction between “variable” and “root metaphor” (Smircich 1983). To explain the concept of “root metaphor,” Morgan says that [t]‌he whole concept of “root” evokes an image of something that is grounded and from which other things stem and grow. It encourages us to look for the origin, source or foundation of any given metaphor in another related metaphor, or to assess whether it stands as a new development on its own account. (Morgan 2016: 1035; see also Brown 1976, 1977; Inns 2002)

The distinction between root metaphor and metaphor is similar to the distinction between deep and surface metaphor (Schön 1979/​1993: 149). Smircich (1983) suggested the distinction between (critical) variable and root metaphor in order to distinguish between those studies on organizational culture that approach culture as something an organization has—​a variable among other organizational variables that can help the organization to accomplish something (culture as variable)—​and those studies that approach culture as something an organization is, where culture is used as a lens through which “everything” in an organization is viewed and where “organization” is a particular form of human expression (culture as root metaphor). Alvesson (1995) has developed this distinction further and has mainly used “culture” (but also other metaphors) as a root metaphor in empirical studies of organizations, a method that has at least some parallels with Pepper’s “root-​metaphor method” (Pepper 1942/​1972: 91–​6). The above is by no means an exhaustive presentation of the history of metaphor and metaphors and their use in organizational studies; I have concentrated the presentation on the early history along with some important developments and groundbreaking works. The present book is an effort to offer a smorgasbord of current (at the beginning of the 2020s) works that in one way or another use metaphor or metaphors in the study of organizing and organizations. Thus, several of the above tracks of metaphor use in organization studies are illustrated and exemplified in the book. Some of the contributors are well-​established within the area of metaphor in organization studies, many of them having played major roles in the development of the field over the years. Others have more recently begun using metaphor and metaphors in their studies of organizations and organizing.

Defining “Metaphor” Metaphor is a figure of speech in which a conceptual understanding from one domain (which is often something that is generally better understood) is used to understand

8   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD something in another domain (which is often less well understood), and when these domains are normally not associated with each other. The former domain—​containing the understanding we base the understanding in—​is often called the “source domain,” while the latter—​which we aim to understand—​is called the “target domain” (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Aspects from the source domain are carried over so that we talk about the target as if it were the source. For instance, when person A says to person B that “you are a monster,” person A uses a common understanding of “monster”—​as, for instance, something terrible, dangerous, uncontrollable—​to present her or his feelings for and understanding of person B. The “monster” is, in this example, the source, and the understanding of monster that is referred to is fetched from the source domain. Person B (i.e., “you”) is the target, and the actions or whatever that have caused person A to call person B a monster are within the target domain. Metaphor is “central to language and thought” (Inns 2002: 306). Some even claim that all knowledge and even all language is metaphorical (Brown 1976, 1977; Hesse 1988). We can imagine what it would be like when we, the people living on the planet called Tellus, for the first time meet “intelligent life” from another planet, very far away from our planet (if that will ever happen). We would use our existing knowledge (i.e., source domain) even to be able to say what “they” (the target) are. We might call them “monsters,” “aliens,” or—​as I wrote above—​“intelligent life.” These terms and understandings all come from our world, not theirs. They might—​if we could interview them, or communicate with them at all—​not at all regard themselves as “monsters,” “aliens,” or “intelligent,” or even as (what we mean by) “life.” They might not even regard themselves as individuals, or a group or a collective—​such dimensions might simply not be important to them. It would, thus, be impossible for us to say anything about “them,” without referring to our existing knowledge, something that also makes it less plausible that we would ever be able to even identify any of “them,” if it were not for the fact that they fitted in with at least some of the expectations we have of “intelligent life,” “monsters,” or “aliens” (or any other understanding that is in our source domain/​s, i.e., our existing knowledge, when we meet “them” for the first time). In this way, we would use metaphors to even make sense of “them.” Thus, to fully avoid metaphors is difficult, if not impossible. This example also illustrates that the development of new knowledge always has to take place in relation to what we already know (see Czarniawska and Joerges 1996), and in this sense knowledge development can be said to be metaphoric per se. As Morgan puts it, “[w]‌ithout a prefiguring image of the phenomena to be studied . . . there are no hypotheses to be tested” (Morgan 1983: 605–​6). While the full knowledge we have of everything, so far, may or may not be enough to understand “intelligent life” from another planet, it has taken us at least some distance on Tellus, such as giving us a better understanding of “organization.” But the example points to the limited aspects of something unknown that we can make sense of by any single metaphor. In fact, in the above case not even the use of all possible metaphors we know of so far, put together, would, without doubt, help us to make sense of “them” in a meaningful way. If we were using merely one of them, such as “monster,” our understanding of “them” would, of course, be limited to the source domain of “monster,”

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    9 which might mean that we expected them to be, for instance, terrible, dangerous, and uncontrollable. This is one reason why Gareth Morgan in his Images of Organization (1986) suggested eight metaphors (not just one) for organization, and additionally encouraged readers to suggest new metaphors. Since metaphor means using understanding from some other area than that which we primarily aim to understand, there are always several or even many areas, and thus metaphors, to choose from—​a more-​or-​less subjective choice (cf. Tsoukas 1993) that may be intentional or more spontaneous, or even unintentional. Each metaphor simultaneously enriches something and neglects other aspects: For the student of language and thought, metaphor is a solar eclipse. It hides the object of study and at the same time reveals some of its most salient and interesting characteristics when viewed through the right telescope. (Paivio and Walsh 1979/​ 1993: 307)

Each metaphor is thus partial: “given that an unfamiliar concept can be corresponded in more than one way to other more familiar objects, it follows that metaphors are inherently partial” (Tsoukas 1991: 571). For example, in the metaphor “my employees are workhorses,” “workhorses” could be replaced by, for instance, “slaves,” “growing plants,” or “robots”—​all of which come with quite different associations and say quite different things about “my employees.” Very little—​if anything—​can be said about organizing or any organization (or anything else, for that matter) without using any metaphor at all. If it were possible, what we could say would be something rather uninteresting, such as that “there are nine employees” (then again, this could instead have been put as “there is a group of employees” and, thus, some kind of choice was made in this instance too).

What Is a Good Metaphor? To be really accurate and helpful when it comes to describing what a good metaphor is, one would have to know the reason for suggesting it in the first place (e.g., Tourangeau and Sternberg 1982)—​is the aim, for instance, to exceed the recipients’ current understanding or rather to reproduce something? As long as the metaphor helps to fulfil the objective of the individual who uses it, the metaphor could be said to be a good one—​it has to be “judged in terms of its practical impacts” (Morgan 2011/​2017: 27). Nevertheless, to say something about what could be demanded of a good metaphor, it is important to find a balance in the overlap between source and target—​the source and the target must not be too similar/​close to each other, and not too dissimilar/​far away from each other either—​an “optimum overlap” is required, as denominated by Oswick et al. (2002: 298; see also, e.g., Morgan 1980: 611–​12; 1983: 605; Inns and Jones 1996). “Organization as traffic” (see Örtenblad, Chapter 28 in this volume), for instance, might involve too much similarity, in that traffic in fact is also mostly considered to be organization, while “organization as ice-​cream” might involve too

10   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD much dissimilarity—​ice-​cream may not have a lot to say about organization (see, e.g., Cornelissen et al. 2005: 1550; for an extensive discussion and problematization, see Cornelissen 2004; see also Tourangeau and Sternberg 1982). There may, however, be occasions when there is reason to go beyond this rule, and introduce metaphors that involve much more dissimilarity than is the rule (see, e.g., Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume). Anything other than the above, quite general denominator of a “good” metaphor would rely on the perspective taken of what “metaphor” is and, not least, the relation between metaphor and meaning, which is something dealt with later in this chapter.

Should Metaphors Be Taken Literally? As several metaphor scholars have reminded us (e.g., Ortony 1975; Glucksberg et al. 1982), a traditional, impactful way of understanding “metaphor” has been to view it as an implicit comparison or simile. A simile is, thus, when it is made explicit which exact part/​s of the source domain is/​are being referred to, as in “you are as uncontrollable as a monster.” Such a statement is true even when interpreted literally, in contrast to the metaphorical expression “you are a monster.”4 In this sense, a metaphor is an implicit simile—​the only difference between metaphor and simile is that the latter is explicit while the former is implicit. This might lead us to believe that metaphors must not be taken literally, but to say so would be to oversimplify. This is because we must also consider that there are (at least) two different approaches to what “metaphor” is and how it works (see, e.g., Black 1962; Tourangeau and Sternberg 1982; Cornelissen 2004, 2005). First, there is the more traditional comparison approach, where the metaphor lies in that which is similar between the source domain and the target domain. In the above example, the similarities between “monster” and “your behavior” may, for instance, be that they both appear uncontrollable to the person who expresses the metaphor. Another approach, the interaction approach (Black 1962) prescribes that a metaphor is a blend between understandings from the two domains involved, and thus creates something other than each of the domains. Accordingly, “monster” said about an individual does not, within this metaphor approach, actually refer to any predefined characteristics the individual in question and “monster” may have in common—​ similarity, here, is not antecedent; it is created through the metaphor (see also, e.g., Hesse 1988; Tsoukas 2017: 220). Thus, “monster” in “you are a monster” means something different—​such as “a person whom to some extent is difficult to control”—​from what “monster” may usually mean. Within the metaphor, the “individual” (i.e., “you”) becomes more “monster-​like” and—​likewise—​“monster” becomes more “individual-​ like” (see, e.g., Hesse 1980). This is what the expression “you are a monster” means and, 4  Whether all language is basically metaphoric or if there is reason to distinguish between metaphor and literal language is a well-​debated topic in metaphor theory (e.g., Davidson 1978; Lakoff 1979/​1993; Searle 1979/​1993; Hesse 1987, 1988; Haack 1988; Morgan 1996a: 229–​31; McCourt 1997).

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    11 thus, this expression should be interpreted literally. It is worth pointing out here that the words that the metaphor consists of can be interpreted literally first after they have received a new meaning (Black 1954). Even if Black (1962) referred to the target as a “field” (Black 1962: 41) and both the source and the target as “ ‘systems of things,’ rather than ‘things’ ” (Black 1962: 44)—​compare “domain”—​there has been reason to even further emphasize that the interaction that is at work in any metaphor is between the whole domains (see also, e.g., Sackmann 1989: 466–​7). Such a development of the interaction approach has been given the name domains-​interaction view (Tourangeau and Sternberg 1982) or domains-​interaction approach (Cornelissen 2005), and emphasizes, thus, the interaction between the two whole domains (see also, e.g., Cornelissen 2004; Cornelissen et al. 2005). For instance, “monster” as a source domain contains not only such abstract characteristics as those I have referred to above (terrible, dangerous, and uncontrollable) but also more concrete ones, such as size (most people would probably agree that a monster is “big”) and physical appearance (e.g., “slimy,” “hairy,” etc.). The domains-​interaction approach has lately been heavily acknowledged, not least within the area of organization studies. For this reason, I will in the remainder of this chapter refer to the distinction between a comparison approach and a domains-​interaction approach, which can be regarded as a choice between perspectives for those who aim to use metaphor or metaphors in organization studies. To return to the use of metaphors in organization studies, and to illustrate the above approaches to metaphors with examples from the field, we can consider how researchers in the area of organization studies sometimes express themselves when writing about those people who work in a certain organization—​be it employees or managers—​in as “clean” and literal a manner as possible. They often use terms such as “organization member” (or “organizational member”) and “organization actor” (or “organizational actor”)—​this book being no exception; not even this very chapter is an exception—​both of which are metaphorical expressions. It is as if all organizations were associations (and the people were members of those), or theatres (and the people were actors on the stage) (see, e.g., Cornelissen 2004). Another example is when organization scholars suggest that organization members or actors have “strategies” for dealing with various issues, such as with conflict resolution (e.g., Kazakevičiūė et al. 2013); “strategy,” as if they were all rational planners or even as if there was a war going on that they were fighting in. We can easily state that not all organizations that organization scholars study are associations or theatres, and nor are all the people in those organizations rational or/​and war-​makers. Using the “organization member” metaphor as an example, the comparison approach might lead us to conclude that predefined similarities between the source (member of an association) and the target (an individual who works in a certain organization) emphasize some kind of more or less tight connection between the member/​individual and a bigger, abstract unit (association/​organization). If we instead practiced the domains-​ interaction approach, we would, for instance, conclude that “organization member” has come to gain a somewhat new meaning (which is not limited to the understanding of “individual” or of “member of an association”), such as “an individual that somehow is,

12   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD more or less tightly, connected to an organization of any kind,” but also that “member” belongs to the larger domain of “association,” along with aspects such as commitment, membership votes, unpaid work, voluntariness, the so-​called “third sector,” etc. While it was most likely once an obvious metaphor, the expression “organization member” has become common in organization studies and gained a meaning of its own—​common enough for us to take it literally, to regard it as a literal expression. No longer, at least not within organization studies, is the common meaning of “organization member” limited to those individuals who are actually members of any association (or any institution being a member of an association). “Organization member” should be interpreted as those working in the studied organization—​no matter whether this is an association, a private company or a public organization—​because this is what the term has come to refer to, at least within organizational studies. Another example is an expression that does not occur rarely in organizational literature, that something is “only” a metaphor. This is, for example, sometimes commented upon when the human being is used as a metaphor for the understanding of organization, such as in writing about “organizational memory,” which some have commented is “only” a metaphor (e.g., Argyris and Schön 1978; Locke and Jain 1995). A plausible interpretation of what such comments mean is that organizations do not have memories in a literal sense, while individuals do, and thus “organizational memories” do not exist per se; they are merely to be regarded as a figurative construction, to help us better understand knowledge storing in organizations. Thus, such statements (that something is “only” a metaphor) can be made sense of through the comparison approach. When adopting the domains-​interaction approach, however, we would see that a new meaning has been constructed—​in interaction between the source domain of “human memory” and the target domain of “organization”—​and that such “organization memory,” literally understood, is something that we can find in practically any existing organization, in terms of documents, routines, standard operating procedures (SOPs), manuals, etc. (see also Cornelissen et al. 2005: 1565). The theory on organizational memory—​as well as the “organization member”—​was once a very alive metaphor, but has since then become a “dead metaphor”: that is, it has “become so familiar and so habitual that we have ceased to be aware of [its] metaphorical nature and use [it] as [a]‌literal [term]” (Tsoukas 1991: 568). This refers to a life cycle model of metaphor (Bowdle and Gentner 2005). Such a perspective suggests that, to start with, metaphors are alive—​and, thus, obviously cannot be interpreted literally—​ and over time they become dead metaphors (see also Brown 1976; Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988). Metaphors such as “organization member” were once alive metaphors that helped us to understand some aspects of organization and, especially, people in organizational contexts, but over time the metaphors have “died,” and have thus become more or less literal expressions. In fact, in this chapter lots of other metaphorical expressions, other than those that have been used as explicit examples, have appeared. Not all readers might have thought of these as “metaphors” and we could say that most or even all of them are “dead metaphors.” Examples include the image of Gareth Morgan as “groundbreaking”;

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    13 scholars following in his “footsteps”; language as “clean” from metaphors; people working “in” organizations; and referring to further “down” in the chapter.

How Do We Know Which Aspects of a Source Domain Are Being Referred To? As we have seen, a metaphor such as “you are a monster” may, for instance, refer to the fact that the individual expressing this is suggesting that the other individual is terrible, dangerous, or uncontrollable—​to mention just a few examples of understandings we could find in the source domain of “monster.” Thus, metaphors are, almost by definition, ambiguous (e.g., Srivastva and Barrett 1988; Inns 2002). But to express the meaning of any specific metaphor is not an unproblematic thing to do. For example, if researchers within the area of organization studies were to point out that, every time the metaphor of “organizational memory” is used, it refers to “documents, routines, SOPs, manuals etc.,” the metaphor would lose at least some of its capacity to be a creative tool in the process of creating new understanding (see also Inns and Jones 1996: 123–​4). Thus, metaphors develop over time as the source domain and target domain interact. Explaining in a more “literal” sense what any metaphor means, each time one uses it, would be a risky project because it would put constraints on the metaphor’s further development. How, then, are we, as researchers, supposed to know which certain aspects of a particular source domain are being referred to when we study others’ metaphors, and how are we supposed to make clear which aspects we are referring to ourselves when using existing metaphors and suggesting new ones? First, to start with the latter, there are suggestions as to how we could go about using and suggesting metaphors, which avoid suggesting that we should simply point out which exact aspects we are referring to, using literal language. Instead, we could, as suggested by Alvesson (1993), use several (or at least one more, in addition to the main metaphor) levels of metaphors, such as when “compass,” “mental prison,” or “social glue” is used to specify what is meant by “culture,” in the metaphor “organization as culture” (Alvesson 2013; see also Brown 1977, who suggests that the question “in what respect?” could be asked using sub-​ metaphors to elaborate any metaphor into a model). Among others, Morgan (1996a; 2011/​2017: 21; 2016) and Schoeneborn et al. (2016) have suggested that any metaphor can be specified through the use of another trope, “metonymy.” Morgan (1996a: 231) claims that “[a]‌metaphorical image relies on some kind of metonymical reduction to make it concrete.” Tsoukas (1993) suggests that analogy helps to operationalize any metaphor. When it instead comes to metaphors that are used by organization members, it is a bit more complicated, since it may not always be a good idea to ask the organization members to use other metaphors, metonymies, or analogies to specify the metaphor they first used. Instead, there are a few theories that may help to make sense of the use of any metaphor and the meaning of it (see, e.g., Cameron 1999; Cornelissen et al. 2008).

14   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD One theory is the so-​called conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 2003; see also Gibbs 1992), in which the locus of metaphor is in concepts, not words, and most of our fundamental concepts are regarded as organized as spatialization metaphors (such as “happy is up”), which have both internal and external systematicity, and are rooted in physical and cultural experience, “shaped to a significant extent by the common nature of our bodies and the shared ways that we all function in the everyday world” (Lakoff and Johnson 2003: 245). The theory proclaims that language, as something we are born into, rather constitutes reality and that each metaphor—​as a natural part of language—​is thus something that has a more or less fixed meaning, at least in a given culture at a specific point of time: Metaphorical mappings vary in universality; some seem to be universal, others are widespread, and some seem to be culture specific. (Lakoff 1979/​1993: 245)

We can therefore assume that any organization scholar, at least within the same culture and time era, who uses the metaphorical expression “organization member,” is referring to an individual who is relatively tightly connected to the organization in which s/​he works. (See also Andriessen and Gubbins 2009, who put into practice a version of the conceptual metaphor theory approach in their study of social capital.) The approach that perhaps has the most potential to challenge the conceptual metaphor theory is the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach (Cameron 2007; Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume; see also, e.g., Musolff and Zinken 2009/​2015), which is backed up by the discourse dynamics framework on how metaphor works (Cameron 2010). This approach prescribes that the “context” that needs to be taken into account when understanding any particular metaphor is much more specific than the culture or language, namely the discourse. Moreover, the meaning of any metaphor is also dependent on the individual (see also Inns 2002). This approach presumes that metaphor cannot be separated from its discourse context without becoming something different, and implies not (only) that the meaning of any metaphor can be found in the culture at stake, but also that the specific context plays an important role. Meaning can here be seen not to be located in concept/​language/​metaphor per se, and is far more dependent on the unique situation, inclusive of such factors as the specific conversation into which the metaphor is put, and where in the sentence it is used. This approach even allows two people within the very same conversation to make sense of the same metaphor in different ways. Thus, in addition to culture and time, it takes factors such as the specific conversation, where in the sentence the metaphor is used, etc., into account when understanding any metaphor identified. The meaning of a metaphor can, thus, vary within any given culture (see also Morgan 2016: 1037; 2017: xxiii). While these two approaches/​theories are quite different and have quite different implications for studies of metaphors, there are also aspects of them that make them seem not that divergent after all. For instance, proponents of the conceptual metaphor theory approach also acknowledge the importance of the context in which things are said:

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    15 In addition to sentences that have no meaning without context, there are cases where a single sentence will mean different things to different people. (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 12)

Moreover, while researchers using the metaphor-​ led discourse analysis approach are mainly occupied with finding the meaning of any identified metaphor within the discourse context, they too look for patterns between metaphors—​across discourse participants as well as between the moment of use and the participants’ lives and experiences (e.g., Cameron 2007, 2010). They even look for systematicity (see, e.g., Cameron et al. 2010), and group the identified metaphors into “super metaphors” or “systematic metaphors” (Cameron 2007: 201), although they are more careful regarding generalizing from a small number of linguistic examples than researchers employing conceptual metaphor theory plausibly would be (see, e.g., Cameron 2010; Cameron et al. 2010; Deignan 2010). There are also examples of researchers (e.g., Kövecses 2010) who mix the two approaches/​theories, or at least regard the distinction as one between two types of metaphor rather than a distinction between two types of perspective, and who thus keep the door open for the simultaneous existence of conceptual metaphors and metaphors that get their specific meaning in the discourse at stake: “context-​induced metaphors” (Kövecses 2010: 312). Accordingly, there are several reasons why we cannot trust an etymological or any other dictionary (see also Ricoeur 1974: 99; Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 115–​16) when we want to understand any particular metaphor, especially not when employing the domains-​interaction approach to metaphor and metaphor-​led discourse analysis (but when the comparison approach is used, we could get at least some more help from the dictionary). The domains-​interaction approach prescribes that the meaning of any metaphor is a result of the interaction of domains, and we could, thus, not fully make sense of the “organization member” metaphor by looking up “member” or “association” in the dictionary. We could, though, put more trust in the entry of “organization member,” when combining the domains-​interaction approach to “metaphor” and conceptual metaphor theory of the relation between metaphor and meaning. If the term “organization member” could be found in the dictionary at all, it could help us make sense of the metaphor, but only insofar as the dictionary is a recent one—​and mirrors the most up-​to-​date meaning of the metaphor—​and has been written by somebody having the same culture as those who formulated the identified metaphor that we want to make sense of. If we instead applied the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach, in combination with the domains-​interaction approach to metaphor, the dictionary would be of even less help. Accordingly, to use any dictionary, even an etymological dictionary, to find the meaning—​the single, original meaning that would be the literal one, while all later meanings would be regarded as metaphorical—​of any metaphor would be to drastically minimize both the interaction between the domains and the importance of the context in which the metaphorical expression occurs. For instance, there are cases when the term “organization member” in fact refers to organizations that are members of another organization (e.g., Internet Society 2021) and where the term, thus, is used in

16   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD a more “literal-​original” sense. (For further readings on how to judge which parts of the source domain are being referred to, see, e.g., Tsoukas 1991.)

A Brief Summary “Metaphor” can be understood as when understanding from one domain is used to understand something within another domain. It is difficult—​if not impossible—​to avoid using any metaphor whatsoever when making sense of something, or even when speaking about something. A “good” metaphor is usually thought of as existing when there is enough closeness as well as enough distance between the source domain and the target domain to give rise to a fruitful interaction between the two domains. In the traditional comparison approach, metaphors should not be taken literally. In the nowadays more acknowledged domains-​interaction approach, the source domain and target domain interact and through this interaction a new meaning is created—​a meaning that could be interpreted literally. A dead metaphor is a metaphor that is no longer understood as a metaphor, whereas it previously used to be understood as obviously being a metaphor and for that reason was alive. Researchers could use other metaphors, metonymy, or analogy to specify which particular understanding within the source domain they are referring to by using a particular metaphor. When interpreting metaphors that one has identified among organization members, the researcher could put their trust in different theories of the relation between metaphor and meaning. With the help of the conceptual metaphor theory, we can assume that the exact understanding within the source domain that the metaphor is referring to is the same, within the same culture at any given point in time. If we instead took on and applied the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach, we would have to look much more closely at the exact context in which the metaphor is being used to make sense of which exact parts of the source domain are at stake and, thus, to advise what the metaphor means. In the next section, some advice stemming from the contributions to this book is presented.

Advice Based on the Book Content The very idea behind this book is to offer a broad set of chapters that in different ways use metaphors in organizational research. The contributors to the book, therefore, may not have much more than an interest in “metaphors” and “organization” in common. For this reason, the chapters cannot easily be compared on any particular dimension, or be easily summarized in terms of a number of joint themes. Nevertheless, on the basis of the contributions, I have been able to identify a few recommendations for those who have an interest in using metaphor and metaphors in their organization studies. The list of recommendations is by no means exhaustive: I have concentrated

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    17 on those recommendations that I myself find to be the most important ones. Having said that, readers can judge for themselves by reading the remainder of the book—​all chapters definitely deserve to be read and carefully studied in their own right. Not all of the recommendations are unique, especially not those concerning empirical research (see, e.g., Cornelissen et al. 2008), but they nevertheless deserve to be repeated as well as updated. Most of the advice could be summarized as having to do with “awareness and transparency.”

Show Perspectival Awareness One piece of advice arising from the book is that any researcher who aims to use metaphor or metaphors in their studies of organizing and organizations should reflect on—​ and present transparently in their research output—​the choice of which perspective of “metaphor” is employed in the study, and especially the relation between metaphor and meaning (see, e.g., Letiche and De Loo, Chapter 27 in this volume). Cornelissen (Chapter 2 in this volume) suggests that there is a need for researchers within the area of organization and management studies to show increased awareness of the perspectives and theories they use, and suggests that they could do this through metaphor. However, the recommendation in this book for showing perspectival awareness is, more specifically, that the perspective of metaphor that the researcher embraces in their study is well thought-​through and, not least, that the choice of perspective is made explicit (see also, e.g., Cameron 1999: 17). Researchers could, for instance, choose between various definitions of what metaphor is, such as the comparison approach and the domains-​interaction approach (both dealt with by Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume). The researcher may also want to choose between the following perspectives of the relation between metaphor and meaning: conceptual metaphor theory and metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach (both of which are dealt with by Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume). The following theoretical perspectives of metaphor could also be chosen from: a critical realist view (Reed, Chapter 26 in this volume), and a rhythm-​analysis perspective (Letiche and De Loo, Chapter 27 in this volume) (see also Johnsen, Chapter 5 in this volume; Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume). The researcher could also use a list of distinctions between different types of metaphor like that which Pinto and Johnsen (Chapter 24 in this volume) start their chapter off with, and the distinction between descriptive and normative metaphor (dealt with by Bendl and Schmidt, Chapter 7 in this volume). Such distinctions can help the researcher to achieve the recommended level of perspectival awareness. To achieve a satisfactory level of awareness, one could also take inspiration from Alvesson et al.’s (Chapter 15 in this volume) suggested metaphorization of the research process for an increased level of reflexivity, as well as Czarniawska’s (Chapter 10 in this volume) reminder that not everything is “metaphor” and that one may want to bring in other tropes or linguistic artifacts (Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988), and discuss

18   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD whether any such concept more accurately describes what one is doing than does the concept of “metaphor.” For instance, Morgan (cited by Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume) suggests “metaphor as irony.”

Clarify Degree of Context-​Dependency A second recommendation is closely connected to perspectival awareness, not least to the choice between the approaches of conceptual metaphor theory (which naturally offers more room for universality) and metaphor-​led discourse analysis (which offers less room for universality) (both approaches are dealt with by Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume; see also Johnsen, Chapter 5 in this volume; Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume). Nobody—​at least none of those having contributed to this book—​believes that any metaphor can ever be “universal” in the sense that it has one fixed meaning that everyone could make sense of, irrespective of space, time, and culture. This, of course, has implications both for the metaphors that researchers themselves suggest and for the metaphors they study (i.e., the metaphors of the field). Thus, it is a question of to what degree metaphors are context-​dependent, rather than whether they are context-​ dependent or not. The advice is, therefore, to explicitly address the question of degree of context-​dependency in any work within organization studies that involves metaphor or metaphors. As Dell et al. (Chapter 6 in this volume) claim, there is a tendency in organization studies to assume that knowledge first suggested in the so-​called Western or Northern part of the world is universal as well as superior. Gaggiotti et al. (Chapter 23 in this volume) claim that no metaphor is universal. I have myself tried to teach Morgan’s metaphors in China, by using Morgan’s Images of Organization (2006), for mainly Chinese students, and experienced that these eight metaphors—​which I thought would, if taught in a relevant way, make sense to pretty much anyone on the planet—​were far from universal or graspable by the students. They told me that Chinese (they were probably referring to Mandarin) is a language that is full of metaphors, but that hardly any of Morgan’s eight metaphors made sense to them (see also Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume). On the basis of Dell et al.’s (Chapter 6 in this volume) and Gaggiotti et al.’s (Chapter 23 in this volume) chapters, researchers are recommended to at least discuss to what extent they consider the metaphors they themselves suggest to be universal (see also, e.g., Morgan 2016: 1037). By “context” we can, though, also refer to “time” (e.g., Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume). No metaphor—​or source domain, for that matter—​has a fixed, eternal meaning. For example, “machine” probably has a different meaning today, in 2023, than it had just 50 years ago, not to mention 150 years ago. An example from this book is Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman (Chapter 14 in this volume) who show how there has been a switch between “pink” and “blue” as to which of these colors is connected to “masculinity” and to “femininity,” respectively. Oswick and Grant (Chapter 3 in this volume) see a need for a perspective where we avoid seeing metaphors as “fixed” in

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    19 nature, and Ritchie (Chapter 25 in this volume) claims that metaphors are “fluid.” To “context” we could, perhaps, also count the perspective taken. If so, it would give us an opportunity to consider whether or not metaphors have valence. This question is dealt with in depth by Pinto and Johnsen (Chapter 24 in this volume; but see also, e.g., Arman and Wikström, Chapter 8 in this volume). Pinto and Johnsen proclaim that metaphors do not have a fixed intrinsic valence and, thus, that in this sense the meaning of any metaphor is open to interpretation. The importance of taking the context into account when interpreting metaphorical expressions that are identified in empirical studies is emphasized by many of the contributors to the book—​see, especially, Ritchie (Chapter 25 in this volume; see also, e.g., Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume; Dell et al., Chapter 6 in this volume; Mitterhofer and Jordan, Chapter 16 in this volume; Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume; Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume; Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume). Cornelissen (Chapter 2 in this volume) claims that cultural context matters when it comes to how metaphors resonate and are processed. For further discussion and critique of generalization of metaphorical expressions identified in empirical studies and, especially, the grouping, categorization, or coding process, see Alvesson et al. (Chapter 15 in this volume), Bruni and Biscaro (Chapter 18 in this volume), and Arnold (Chapter 19 in this volume). Among concrete, explicit recommendations regarding how to deal with context-​ dependency, Weick (Chapter 21 in this volume) suggests that instructors teaching in the area of organization and management bring into the classroom metaphors also from non-​Western cultures. (Likewise, teachers in non-​Western cultures could, of course, be recommended to bring metaphors of Western origin.) Dell et al. (Chapter 6 in this volume) claim that any metaphor could be universally spread, but that it takes a lot for the metaphor to make the same or similar sense everywhere as it has in the culture where it originated. To help with this, one needs to take assistance from people with an origin in the culture where the particular metaphor originated. Gaggiotti et al. (Chapter 23 in this volume) agree with Dell et al., and claim that one must be careful when translating metaphors and also that the success in doing so depends on the level of competence that the translators have.

Generalize Cautiously Closely associated with the above advice—​to address context-​dependency—​is the advice to be cautious when generalizing on the basis of “patterns” between one or more individuals’ metaphorical expressions. “Generalization” can even be viewed as an aspect of context-​dependency. The advice concerns being cautious both when it comes to what we can say about one single metaphorical expression, and when it comes to finding patterns between metaphorical expressions. Just like the advice above, this recommendation too relates to the approaches of conceptual metaphor theory (which naturally offers more openness for generalization) and metaphor-​led discourse analysis (which

20   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD offers less openness for generalization) (both approaches are dealt with by Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume; see also Johnsen, Chapter 5 in this volume; Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume). What can we, for instance, conclude about the manager who expresses, to one of their employees, “I have invested a lot in our relationship”? Can it be concluded that this manager regards the relationship in monetary terms and, thus, in terms of an exchange relation rather than, for example, a deeper, warmer relation? If a manager says, “We need some new blood in this company,” would it be fair to suggest that she or he views the organization at stake as an organism? Would it even be fair to suggest that the organism is the manager’s root metaphor, representing her or his basic understanding of organization (in general)? If one organization member talks about her-​or himself as a “cog” and another member of the same organization talks about her-​or himself as “oil in the machinery”—​can it then, by automaticity, be concluded that their common understanding of the organization is as a machine? Traditionally, researchers studying organization members’ metaphors have—​ explicitly or implicitly—​tended to employ conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Metaphors have been regarded as a “shortcut” to the “underlying paradigm of a given social system” (Srivastva and Barrett 1988: 60–​1). The one chapter in the present book that comes closest to the conceptual metaphor theory approach is probably Gaggiotti et al.’s (Chapter 23 in this volume), in which the authors build on the assumption that metaphors are fundamental to our experience and understanding of culture. One could also argue that any grouping of metaphorical expressions to root metaphors, or the like, is in line with such a conceptual metaphor theory, or at least is closer to it than to the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach. For instance, Bendl and Schmidt (Chapter 7 in this volume) group the explicit metaphorical expressions they identified in their review of literature on organizational diversity and discrimination, into eight “sets of metaphors.” Audrin and Davoine (Chapter 9 in this volume) categorize organization actors’ verbal expressions on digital transformation according to a set of metaphors. Bruni and Biscaro (Chapter 18 in this volume) describe how researchers can go about grouping metaphors (see also Cienki, Chapter 17 in this volume). Ritchie (Chapter 25 in this volume) is the one who best could represent a position where one is careful with drawing conclusions about people’s understandings on the basis of which words/​metaphors they use. He argues that conceptual metaphor theory focuses on metaphors as universal mappings, with little or no consideration of the context. Instead, he favors and illustrates a metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach, in which conceptual metaphor sources are resources that can be used to express general aspects of experience in thought and communication, but argues that these are not necessarily associated with any one topic. Ritchie believes that the discourse context needs to be taken into account to understand any metaphor (see also Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume), something that is as important—​or even more important—​ when analyzing visual metaphors (Mitterhofer and Jordan, Chapter 16 in this volume). Social reality, according to Ritchie, can exist only as it is represented in the minds of individual members.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    21 The advice here is not in favor of one of these two approaches as against the other—​ rather, the advice is, in conjunction with the above advice to show perspectival awareness, that any researcher who aims to study organization members’ metaphors should transparently choose a perspective and stick to it throughout their study. Researchers should generally also be cautious when drawing conclusions about organization members’ understandings based on their metaphorical expressions (see also, e.g., Inns 2002; Schmitt 2005: 373; Cornelissen et al. 2008: 16–​17). One way of doing that is, as Arnold (Chapter 19 in this volume) suggests, also to include—​in the research output—​those metaphorical expressions that fall outside of the pattern. Generalizing from metaphorical expressions to what the organization member’s understanding of something “actually” is, is so common and rarely problematized that it would be interesting to see even more exploration of and commentaries on it than this book has managed to accomplish (especially since both conceptual metaphor theory and metaphor-​led discourse analysis are occupied with searching for patterns between metaphors).

Consider Including Visual Metaphors As a source for empirical metaphor studies, researchers can also consider including visual metaphors and/​or metaphor in gesture—​the latter a special case of the former—​in the study, in addition to verbally expressed metaphors. Mitterhofer and Jordan’s whole chapter (Chapter 16 in this volume) is devoted to such studies, and Cienki (Chapter 17 in this volume) exemplifies such a study (see also Müller, Chapter 4 in this volume; Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume). Moreover, examples of metaphors in the book that could be visual (as well as verbal) are those of brightness and darkness, dealt with by Linstead (Chapter 13 in this volume) and color metaphors, considered by Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman (Chapter 14 in this volume). The study of visual metaphors cannot stand on its own, but offers an interesting complement to the study of (metaphors in) verbal language. Cienki (Chapter 17 in this volume) explicitly states that metaphors in gesture cannot be studied in a reasonable way without also studying the language in the spoken discourse; but studying metaphor in gesture can also reveal ideas that speakers are trying to communicate which may not appear in the same way, or at all, in their speech (see also, e.g., Broussine and Vince 1996; Cornelissen et al. 2008).

Employ Methodological Stringency The chapter by Bruni and Biscaro (Chapter 18 in this volume) is particularly devoted to the need for “correctness” in the identification and interpretation processes involved in empirical studies of metaphors: that is, the representativeness, reliability, and validity of metaphor studies. Among other things, Bruni and Biscaro encourage researchers

22   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD to contemplate their own impact stemming from conducting the (empirical) research and how it may have made the results less representative (Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume). Especially for elicited metaphors, Bruni and Biscaro see a need to reflect on the fact that such metaphors are not by their nature representative, and suggest measures such as exposing the interviewees to past situations. Moreover, they (but see also Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume) argue for the importance of accurately describing—​in the research report—​how the study generally was conducted and how the metaphors were identified and analyzed (see also Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). For the study of visual metaphors, Cienki (Chapter 17 in this volume) suggests taking care if using video-​recording, since being filmed may influence the organization members to use gestures other than those they might have used in its absence.

Give the Researched a Voice For Arnold (Chapter 19 in this volume), the ambition in her method-​themed chapter is to offer the researched a voice, rather than to achieve “correctness.” When it comes to the description of the researched in the research output, and their expressed metaphors, Arnold warns that what is presented in the research output may not always make sense to the researched themselves and suggests that the researcher should let the researched view and comment on the output before it is finalized and published. Arnold also suggests that researchers should take increased responsibility for problems that the researched organization actors may experience from having participated in the study and, at least, comment on this in the research report (see also Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). A measure that the researcher can take to avoid the researched being made responsible for metaphors that the researcher has come up with is, in addition to explicitly pointing out whose the metaphor is and which exact empirical material it is based upon, that the researchers show who they are, to—​so-​to-​say—​give the suggested metaphor “a face” and, preferably, also explain how the suggested metaphor came about (Letiche and De Loo, Chapter 27 in this volume; see also Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume). Another piece of advice is also to present, in the research output, those of the identified metaphorical expressions that stand in contrast to the “pattern” that one generalizes into (Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume).

Embrace Complexity The invitation, in short, is to embrace rather than deny the complexity of organizational life, and be open to the learning and action opportunities that can emerge from different and potentially contradictory points of view. (Morgan 2017: xv–​xvi)

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    23 As Morgan has pointed out, complexity needs to be embraced, not neglected. Several of the chapters in this book contain more or less explicit arguments for using sets of metaphors rather than single metaphors. Weick (Chapter 21 in this volume) suggests that management lecturers use multiple metaphors in courses. The awareness within the research process that Alvesson et al. (Chapter 15 in this volume) suggest could be increased among researchers also includes a multitude of metaphors, and so do the creativity-​related activities in organizations that—​according to Biscaro and Bruni (Chapter 20 in this volume)—​can be assisted through metaphors (even if they also acknowledge that a multiplicity of metaphors may cause problems in certain phases of the creative journey). Audrin and Davoine (Chapter 9 in this volume) use several “complementary metaphors” to study what they call the complex and multifaceted phenomenon of digital transformation, and actually suggest that additional metaphors to those they have used would increase the understanding of it even further. At least some of the metaphors suggested in this book could be said to be what Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008) call “complex metaphors.” Examples include the metaphor of “musical meaning” (suggested by Rossi, Chapter 12 in this volume), which is based on aspects of four metaphors in the area of music and dance, and the metaphor “sport paradox” (Byers and Owusu, Chapter 11 in this volume), including both dark and light sides of sports, as well as, for instance, both physical and mental levels; and levels such as individual, group, team, organization, etc. The trend to embrace complexity may (or may not) have to do with the fact that the demands on new metaphors to actually “cover everything” have increased—​“simple” images are not seen to be helpful enough anymore. Or it may be, as Cornelissen (Chapter 2 in this volume) suggests, that the world is more complex today and that for this reason there is a need for more complex and dynamic metaphorical images than previously.

Structure of the Content of the Book: A Chapter-​by-​C hapter Presentation In this section, the book is presented in the traditional, chapter-​by-​chapter way. Before turning to that presentation, I would like to follow in the footsteps of Oswick and Marshak (2011), and point out that what in this book comes under the notion of “metaphors” may not always be “metaphors,” were it closely scrutinized by a professor in linguistics—​some of the “metaphors” that occur in this volume might very well have been categorized as being (close to) similes or analogies, rather than metaphors. It is not always particularly easy to tell them apart, even for experts. Moreover, it may also be worth pointing out that even if it has become something of a norm to use the domains-​interaction approach to metaphor within organization studies, not all contributions in this book stick to that approach. The same can be said about the

24   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD other distinction between approaches to and theories of metaphor that I have made in this chapter—​while it may very well be that the conceptual metaphor theory serves as a norm among some groups of researchers, and the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach is the norm among other researcher groups, this book does not favor any particular approach and welcomes instead the use of either of them or even a mix of the two approaches.

Part I  Metaphors: Theoretical Considerations Part I of the book offers a framework as to what “metaphor” may mean and its use in organization studies. It also offers a historical odyssey of the area. In Chapter 2, “Defining the Role of Metaphor in Organization Studies,” Joep Cornelissen introduces the readers to what “metaphor” may mean and how it has been used in organization studies. The author acknowledges the metaphorical basis of knowledge on organization and argues that this was something that Gareth Morgan made us aware of. He argues that there is still room and need for even further awareness and increased intentional use of metaphors within organization studies. Cornelissen defines “metaphor” according to three dimensions (and their implications for the use of metaphor): a linguistic dimension, in which metaphor is a figure of speech; a cognitive dimension, in which metaphor is a way in which people learn to reason about abstract concepts; and a cultural dimension, in which metaphor is understood contextually in both place (i.e., culture) and time. The cognitive dimension offers two different approaches: the comparison approach, in which a metaphor is to be understood through a comparison between source and target, and the domains-​interaction approach, in which a metaphor is to be understood by understanding the correspondences, the “blend,” the new meaning that appears, between source and target. Thereafter, Cliff Oswick and David Grant offer, in Chapter 3, “Defining, Refining, and Redefining Metaphor: A Reflective and Generative Discussion with Gareth Morgan,” a section from a longer conversation with Gareth Morgan. The conversation focuses on themes such as what “metaphor” is and what it could or should be, as applied in organization studies. More traditional approaches to metaphor are touched upon, such as metaphor as partial truth, metaphor as understanding the unknown through the known, how metaphor differs from other tropes (especially irony), and benefits from involving a multiplicity of metaphors rather than a single metaphor. When it comes to how to take metaphor and metaphorization further, the chapter suggests: that anyone using metaphors in organizational studies avoids sticking only to the eight metaphors that Morgan (1986) originally suggested; that a more sociological view of metaphor is explored and developed; that a “correspondence view” of metaphor—​implying a process of conceptual blending—​should be further explored, as an alternative to the “metaphor as comparison” view; and that new metaphors in the area of organization studies involve larger dissimilarities between source and target than is often the case for metaphors in the area.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    25 In Chapter 4, “Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking Metaphors: The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse,” Cornelia Müller invites us to reconsider the spectrum of metaphor as it has been conceived by historical metaphor theories. The author discusses what metaphor may mean in general and some distinctions between various types of metaphor, such as dead–​alive, sleeping–​waking, and active–​dormant metaphors, and makes connections to metaphor-​philosophers such as Aristotle and Max Black. Müller introduces the concept of “metaphoricity,” defined as the original meaning of a metaphor, as one of three criteria determining whether a metaphor should be considered as alive or dead. She argues that metaphoricity extends beyond verbal language, and introduces readers to visual metaphors in general and gestural metaphors in particular, the latter often complementing verbal metaphors in everyday language (“foregrounding”). In public, she argues, verbal metaphors are often foregrounded, something which she illustrates by an analysis of an interview with Barack Obama. Müller suggests that such multimodality—​which she also relates to the distinction between sleeping and waking metaphors—​should be taken advantage of when studying metaphors. Focus should be shifted from metaphors as fixed units to metaphoricity as dynamic meaning-​making. In Chapter 5, “The Meaning of a Word,” Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen takes us on a philosophical odyssey, in order to answer the question of what it is that makes a metaphor different from other words. The author’s point of departure is that what we understand by “meaning” is key to answering that question and, thus, also to a deeper understanding of metaphor and the use of metaphors in organization studies. He discusses the question in relation to three schools of theories of language philosophy. The author claims that the analytical philosophy school views the meaning of a word as its reference and regards metaphors only as pseudo-​science. In the phenomenology school, meaning is how we construct the object we approach—​metaphors may be useful as a linguistic tool, but “meaning” goes beyond such tools. In the neo-​Kantian school, language means both sense and reference, and metaphors can, thus, help us to understand the meaning of words in a historical perspective. Johnsen also comments on the perspectives of Morgan, as well as Lakoff and Johnson, in relation to these three schools of thought.

Part II  Metaphors of Management and Organization The ambition for Part II of the book is mainly to offer examples of metaphors for organization or management, or for aspects thereof, within various sub-​areas of organization or management. Metaphors of a broad variety are presented, and source domains that occur are as varied as “a house with four walls,” “glass ceiling,” “life,” “wave,” “robot,” “sports,” “jazz,” “darkness,” “green,” and many more. But the chapters in Part II also make other contributions. In addition to offering suggestions of metaphors that could be used by others, the contributors also illustrate different approaches to how “metaphor” can be used to conceptualize any area within organization and management.

26   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD Part II begins with a chapter on some Indigenous metaphors that have not (yet) reached universal spread. In Chapter 6, “Do Indigenous Metaphors Have Universal Applicability? Learnings from Māori in New Zealand,” Kiri Dell, Chellie Spiller, and Nimbus Staniland present four Indigenous, Māori metaphors: Te Whare Tapa Wha (a house with four walls), whanau (kinship networks), Maui (personifying innovation), and rāranga (life as interwoven). These metaphors, Dell et al. claim, have four values in common: stewardship, reverence, shapeshifting and temporality, which the authors argue could offer inspiration for better living and organizing. They discuss both whether or not these Indigenous metaphors and their common values could be universally spread—​and, if so, how—​and also whether or not Indigenous metaphors should be universally spread. They suggest that due to political and human rights struggles and controversy associated with appropriation, Indigenous metaphors and related knowledge systems are not a “free for all.” The benefit of Indigenous metaphors requires authentic relationships with the culture they originate from. In Chapter 7, “Metaphors for Diversity and Discrimination in and by Organizations,” Regine Bendl and Angelika Schmidt present a literature review in which they searched for explicit metaphorical expressions within the areas of diversity and discrimination in an organizational context. The literature search resulted in a list of some of the most common metaphors that have been used in the areas of diversity and discrimination, in organization studies—​among them the glass ceiling metaphor—​and the authors group these into eight “sets of metaphors.” The authors discuss the insights that the metaphors offer as well as their boundaries. Bendl and Schmidt conclude that metaphors dealing with other forms of discrimination than gender-​wise discrimination are rare, that metaphors normatively pointing out a direction for improvement are far less frequent than are descriptive metaphors, and that the existing metaphors thus reproduce a heteronormative and patriarchal subtext. The authors suggest an alternative metaphor, which is normative and inclusive, and avoids such reproduction—​the “chassé-​croisé,” a community dance in which the dance partners exchange places. The next chapter deals with metaphors of life and sustainability. In Chapter 8, “Images of the Life Metaphor in Organizational Studies,” Rebecka Arman and Ewa Wikström use a few of Morgan’s eight metaphors (Morgan 1986, 1996b, 2006) to discuss the most common metaphors for “life,” as the main metaphor, and “sustainability,” as a supplementary metaphor, in organization studies. The authors claim that the life metaphor has been overshadowed by technical and calculative models in organization studies, and their chapter is thus to be regarded as a reappraisal for the life metaphor, while their explicit aim is to contribute to equality through increased metaphorical awareness. Arman and Wikström suggest five “sub-​metaphors” (i.e., sub to “life”), closely related to Morgan’s eight metaphors, through which they view, categorize, and interpret how the life and sustainability metaphors have been dealt with in organizational studies literature: evolution; death and end of life; machine versus cultural diversity; political arena; and life course. They discuss benefits and limitations of each of these sub-​metaphors when applied to the life and sustainability metaphors.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    27 The next chapter deals with a trendy theme: digitalization. In Chapter 9, “Metaphors of Digital Transformation,” Bertrand Audrin and Eric Davoine categorize organization actors’ understandings of digital organization and of the digital transformation taking place in their organizations with the help of a set of metaphors. The understandings of digital transformation and digital organization were allocated mainly through interviews with the organization actors. To categorize understandings of digital transformation, the authors use two metaphors that are closely connected to the studied expressions—​“digit” and “wave.” To categorize the organization actors’ understandings of digital transformation, they use three other metaphors—​“brain,” “machine,” and “instrument of domination” (Morgan 1986, 1996b, 2006). Audrin and Davoine discuss what the metaphors, respectively, highlight and emphasize, as well as what they neglect, when it comes to understanding digital transformation and digital organization. Moreover, they suggest for which aspects of digital transformation and digital organization the metaphors can be used, respectively. They suggest that by using complementary metaphors to understand such a complex phenomenon as digitalized organizations, one can overcome its threatening nature. The step from technology and digitalization to robotization is not that far. In Chapter 10, “ ‘Robots at Work’: A Metaphor or a Label?” Barbara Czarniawska discusses whether “robots at work” is a metaphor or instead should be considered as a label. She suggests that popular culture, media, and the social sciences generally offer four different answers: (1) “robots at work” as a label—​signalizing robotization of work; (2) “robots at work” as more a metaphor than a label—​robots will make people unemployed; (3) “robots at work” as a metaphor—​jobs are becoming robot-​like and people will be treated as machines; and (4) “robots at work” as another metaphor—​robots and/​ or humans will be treated worse than slaves. Czarniawska comments on these answers in terms of whether they are optimistic or pessimistic, thus joining the debate on whether “robotization” is something positive or negative, and speculates concerning which of the opinions will most correctly predict the future. In Chapter 11, “Metaphors for Competition within and between Organizations: The Value and Use of Sports Metaphors,” Terri Byers and Charles Owusu focus on a special case, namely the one where a particular type of metaphor, sports metaphors, is used for “competition” within and/​or between organizations. The authors offer a list of existing sports metaphors, such as “coaching,” “slam dunk,” and “fight a good fight.” They critically examine the knowledge that has been generated on competition through sports metaphors, and conclude that sports metaphors generally have been biased, in that they have seen only the bright side of sports. Byers and Owusu point out that sports must not be viewed through a “rose-​colored lens,” but that they also have a darker side, which has thrived as sports have become more commercialized. They suggest that sports instead are viewed as a “kaleidoscope,” having both bright and darker aspects. On the basis of such a kaleidoscopic view, Byers and Owusu suggest the metaphor “sport paradox,” which can help in developing more critical perspectives of competition. Paula Rossi discusses, in Chapter 12, “On Music-​and Dance-​Related Metaphors for Organization and Management,” four metaphors that are related to music and/​or dance

28   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD and that have been used in organization studies. Of these four metaphors, “jazz” is probably the most well-​known. The other three metaphors considered in the chapter are “jamband,” “symphony orchestra,” and “Tango Argentino.” Rossi analyzes which aspects of organization they highlight and hide. She concludes with her own metaphor for organization, “musical meaning.” This metaphor, Rossi claims, is a “complex metaphor” (consisting of smaller metaphorical parts) and is based on valuable aspects of each of the four metaphors analyzed in the chapter, within the areas of context, relationality, polyphony, and embodied sensemaking of organizational life. It takes into consideration the complex, chaotic, and tension-​filled nature of organizational life, shifting the focus from the rational, the linear, and the mechanistic, to the felt meanings and lived experiences of humans: “human-​centric organizational life.” Such an understanding of organization could, in turn, bring back human bodies, emotions, experiences, uncertainty, and irrationality both to research on organizations and to organizational practice. In Chapter 13, “Fifty Shades of Organization: Darkness and Light as Metaphors for Processes,” Stephen A. Linstead pleads for a greater sensibility toward shadiness in organization studies, and claims that if “organization” were stained glass, then more interest should be directed toward the staining than the glazing. He discusses the historical impact of the metaphors of lightness and darkness on thinking about organization. The chapter addresses the legacy of the Enlightenment, and the impact of Milton and Blake on the work of Burrell, order and disorder, and the suppressed. It takes up relations between light and dark, transparency, consumption, identity, and change in “organizational bedazzlement,” particularly in the work of Gabriel, who develops metaphors of glass cages, glass palaces, and a theory of “organizational miasma.” It then considers classic mainstream and critical pieces of work on the “dark side” of organization—​from the sociology of deviance perspective, from psychology and from critical management studies—​and their differences in emphasis on conscious, unconscious, and organized “misbehavior.” Linstead concludes by suggesting some future avenues for deployment of the elemental power of light and dark as a root metaphor. The final chapter in Part II of the book, Chapter 14, “On Color Metaphors in Organization Studies,” by Anders Örtenblad and Sumeyra Alpaslan-​ Danisman, acknowledges color metaphors within the area of organization and management studies. The authors focus on one group of color metaphors that may be among the most frequently used—​the variety of color-​coded versions of the collar metaphor, such as blue-​and white-​collar workers. The chapter is based on an unsystematic literature review, and identifies and discusses a set of fairly common color metaphors that have occurred in both more academic and more practitioner-​oriented writings. Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman make efforts to trace why certain colors have been given certain meanings, as they have been used as metaphors in combination with “collar.” The authors give examples of the many different meanings of any single color, discuss the universality of meaning of any particular color, and suggest that caution is exercised by any organizational researcher who wants to include color metaphors in their research.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    29

Part III  The Application of Metaphor in Research Part III of the book contains chapters on the use of metaphor and metaphors in research. These chapters deal mainly, in one way or another, with questions related to methodology: that is, how metaphors have been and best could be used in research. In Chapter 15, “Using Metaphors Critically and Reflexively in Empirical Organi­ zational Research,” Mats Alvesson, Yiannis Gabriel, and Jörgen Sandberg outline and illustrate a way to use metaphor that goes beyond being relevant for organization studies only. The authors suggest how metaphors could be used reflexively to generate increased awareness and more informed choices in the research process, in potentially any academic discipline. By putting various questions related to the research process in terms of metaphors, Alvesson et al. argue, researchers could step back and see what they do, and with the help of counter-​metaphors they could reflect on other ways to approach and conduct their research. The problem, the authors argue, is that researchers too often tend to let favorite metaphors control their work. To encourage researchers to reflect on their research process and the too often unintentional choices that are involved, Alvesson et al. suggest a set of different metaphors for various parts and aspects of the research process, such as for the literature review, the design and method, and the analysis. For example, for the identity of the researcher they suggest metaphors such as vocationist, gamesman, and intellectual craftsperson. In Chapter 16, “Using Metaphors in Research: Visual Metaphors in Organizations,” Hermann Mitterhofer and Silvia Jordan offer important insights into how researchers do not need to limit themselves, when using metaphor in organization studies, to studying and identifying metaphors in language. In accordance with a “visual turn” that has recently gained increased attention within the area of organization studies, they argue that organizational researchers could also favorably include and search for nonverbal, visual metaphors, searching material such as static images, film, body language, and architectural design. Mitterhofer and Jordan suggest and illustrate how visual metaphors that appear in organizations could best be analyzed, both in studies where visual metaphors are analyzed independently of the specific context, and where visual metaphors are analyzed in connection to specific contexts. They define “visual metaphor” and offer a review of the use of visual metaphor in organization studies. Visual metaphors, Mitterhofer and Jordan argue, depend also on verbal modalities of expression. Among the visual metaphors they use to illustrate their arguments, we find organization charts and risk matrices. Similarly, Alan Cienki shows, in Chapter 17, “Metaphor in Gesture in an Organizational Context,” how gestural metaphors—​a type of visual metaphor—​could be used in organization studies to learn about speakers’ mental simulation of actions. Cienki views the study of metaphor in gesture as a helpful complement to the analysis of verbal language, to understand how individuals envision abstract ideas and processes, but claims that such metaphors also could help gain insights into cultural

30   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD models that the speakers use. He explains what metaphor in gesture is, suggests how one can study it (both in terms of identifying such metaphors and grouping them), offers a review of some previous studies of metaphor in gesture in organizational contexts, and outlines what such research could reveal. One suggestion Cienki offers is that researchers should be careful with video-​recording, since it can make those who are filmed use certain gestures that they might not have used were it not for the video-​recording. Other advice given is that the study of metaphor in gesture should best be seen as a complement to studies of metaphor in spoken language, because of the difficulties connected with interpreting any gestural metaphor in a fair way without the accompanying speech. In Chapter 18, “Ensuring Validity and Reliability in Empirical Studies on Metaphor in Organizations,” Elena Bruni and Claudio Biscaro offer advice as to how representativeness, validity, and reliability could be upheld in empirical organization studies where metaphors “of the field” are studied: that is, either metaphors that are elicited by the researcher from the organizational actors, or metaphors that occur naturally in their language. Researchers, Bruni and Biscaro argue, need to ensure that the metaphors they elicit are representative of organization actors’ interpretations, a problem that they suggest could be overcome through measures such as exposing the organization actors to moments from the past. When studying naturally occurring metaphors, researchers need to ensure that the methods for identifying metaphors are reliable, something which could be accomplished by using a systematic metaphor identification process. When analyzing the metaphors that are either elicited or identified in natural language, researchers need to reach valid and generalizable inferences, which could be accomplished through coding and grouping metaphors according to root metaphors or the like, and by making these processes transparent, to give readers opportunities to follow the reasoning. Just like Bruni and Biscaro did in the previous chapter, Lorin Basden Arnold too offers many helpful pieces of advice for those aiming to conduct metaphor studies, in Chapter 19, “Just Like a Freefall: The Freedoms and Pitfalls of Critical Metaphor Analysis.” In contrast to Bruni and Biscaro, Arnold deals not only with metaphors of the field but also with metaphors that researchers use as colored lenses, to say something interesting about organization. The author critiques metaphor studies—​especially as it has been used in critical organization studies—​but acknowledges also a variety of benefits stemming from using metaphor in critical research, such as that it can offer space for unheard voices and highlight systems of oppression. Arnold claims that there are many problems with critical organization metaphor studies, related to distance, ignorance of multiplicity, elitism, and suppressing some (uncritical) voices. She suggests that these problems could be overcome if researchers were highlighting their own position, examining their research so that it is free from exploitation and silencing of organization actors, incorporating rarely occurring metaphorical expressions in their work, and making their work more relevant and accessible for the participants as well as others.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    31

Part IV  The Use and Abuse of Metaphors in Settings other than Research Part IV offers chapters on a diversity of other uses of (organizational) metaphor besides in research, in areas as varied as organizational creative work and teaching. Claudio Biscaro and Elena Bruni discuss, in Chapter 20, “Metaphors in the Creative Journey: Using Metaphors in Practice,” how metaphor—​as a constructive tool—​could assist in creativity-​related activities in practice. While previous literature, they argue, has focused on metaphor in the very first moments of creativity—​the generation of ideas—​this chapter deals with metaphor in the whole creative journey, from idea generation, through idea elaboration, idea championing, and idea implementation, all the way to, eventually, market entry. They argue that metaphors shape the creative journey and that, while metaphors can lead to confusion and be limiting, in that some aspects are emphasized at the expense of others, metaphors also play different roles in different stages of the creative journey, such as unlocking new interpretations of an idea, promoting a shared understanding, and persuading stakeholders, and they show-​case those effects with examples. They propose an intentional use of metaphors in practice in the creative journey and suggest that organizations find ways to stimulate the use of metaphors in such processes. Chapter 21, “Using Metaphors in the Management Classroom: Conceptualizing Complexity, Exploring Mindsets, and Driving Change,” by Cynthia Wagner Weick, offers ideas on how management educators can help students master the use of metaphors to improve understanding of complex concepts, increase self-​awareness, better understand the mindsets of others, and create new metaphors that drive organizational change. For improved understanding of complex concepts, Weick recommends that educators provide students with literature on a variety of metaphors from contexts such as art, athletics, or biology. This can serve as a basis for class discussion on more abstract concepts in management textbooks. When appropriate, source domains for the metaphors can be studied through additional research or guest speakers. As a first step toward increasing awareness of one’s own and others’ mindsets, Weick suggests that educators surface their own use of metaphors in course delivery and written course materials, and analyze the values these metaphors represent. A next step is to encourage students to reflect on what metaphors influence their own worldviews. A third step is to unearth the metaphors that dominate in organizations and consider the implications for management’s values. Weick also provides ways for prompting students to create new and better metaphors for future organizations. And in Chapter 22, “Metaphors in Action: The Seductive Quality of Metaphors and Ways to Counterbalance It,” Sonja Sackmann outlines how metaphors could be used for seductive purposes and, thus, abuse. The author describes various positive functions metaphors could have—​such as anxiety reduction—​but focuses on more questionable ways metaphors could be used. Metaphors, she argues, may mislead us and be used for seductive purposes, in that any metaphor—​by definition—​emphasizes some aspects

32   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD while ignoring others. Sackmann illustrates the seduction process by two examples from organizational life, documented in the literature: the use of the surgery metaphor during the Cuban missile crisis in 1962, and the use of the gardening metaphor in an example from the corporate world. “Seduction,” she argues, is not necessarily something negative—​the “positive” aspect of it is “being focused.” Sackmann presents a set of factors that contribute to deciding the seductive quality of metaphors, such as the level of knowledge about the target and the source and level of insecurity among the recipients of the metaphor, and suggests how negative consequences of seduction through metaphor could be avoided.

Part V  Perspective on Metaphor Part V offers chapters either that “put metaphor in perspective” through in-​depth discussion of a certain aspect in relation to metaphor—​such as “universality” or “valence”—​or that approach metaphor from a particular theoretical perspective. Chapter 23, “Translating Organizing and Organizational Metaphors: From the Universal to the Particular,” authored by Hugo Gaggiotti, Heather Marie Austin, Peter Case, Jonathan Gosling, and Mikael Holmgren Caicedo, offers a discussion on the universality of metaphors. The authors present and discuss various positions on the question of whether metaphors could be translated with fidelity to other settings (i.e., other languages and/​or other cultures) than where they originated, consider the inputs from structural, linguistic, and anthropological disciplinary perspectives, and conclude that while the meaning of any particular metaphor by itself is likely not universal (there are few, if any, metaphors whose meaning and use can be found in every human language), the act of metaphorizing, in fact, is. The prospects for translating metaphors are nevertheless good—​since the process of metaphorizing should be familiar to anyone—​ but relevant and good metaphor translation demands high translation competence among the translators and, not least, that they have an open attitude toward others’ and their own metaphorizing. Chapter 24 is entitled “Metaphors and Valence—​Do They Have It? Do They Need It?” and is authored by Jonathan Pinto and Hans Christian Garmann Johnsen. The authors discuss whether or not metaphors have valence—​that is, if any particular metaphor could be said to be, per se, negative, positive, or neutral—​and whether or not metaphors should have valence. Pinto and Johnson claim that the first of the two questions is easily answered: metaphors do not have valence. Within the pragmatic school of thought on the relationship between language and reality, which is the position they take, valence is given to the metaphor as it is being interpreted. The question that according to the authors is more difficult to answer univocally, whether or not metaphors should have valence, is discussed and illustrated in relation to various cases. They argue that there is nothing that says that metaphors necessarily need valence, but that it nevertheless might be a useful analytical tool to apply, which they illustrate by discussing the valence of each of Morgan’s (1986, 1996b, 2006) eight metaphors.

TOWARD A FLOURISHING USE OF METAPHOR/S    33 In Chapter 25, “Jobs and the Mac: Conceptual Metaphors as Cognitive and Rhetorical Resource,” David Ritchie illustrates an approach to metaphor, “metaphor-​led discourse analysis,” with a case: Steve Jobs and his design and management philosophy, which he bases on readings of metaphorical patterns as occurred in quotes attributed to Jobs and his associates in a biography of Jobs. Following the metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach, in which the discursive context around the metaphorical expressions decides the meaning of the patterns of metaphor use, the author focuses on three thematic metaphor patterns appearing in the case: physics and space; art and light; and pirates. Ritchie shows how these got their meaning either from long interaction between Jobs and his associates or from the very situation in which they occurred. He also comments on the relation between metaphorical expressions and root metaphors. On the case as backdrop, he argues for the importance of grounding metaphor analysis in the particular context, and against more traditional forms of conceptual metaphor theory and its relatively deterministic claim that we are born into a set of metaphors through which reality is created and that we cannot avoid. In Chapter 26, “Metaphors and Organization Studies: A Critical Realist View,” Michael Reed offers insights into what it would mean to apply a “critical realist” approach to metaphor analysis within organization studies. Reed offers a brief résumé of critical realism—​especially its focus on the complex interplay between structure and agency, “explanatory critique in action”—​outlines its implications for metaphorical analysis, and provides a case study of how the perspective works and which kind of results it can produce. While metaphor analysts generally tend to forget the dependency of metaphors on structures of socio-​material relations, claims Reed, a critical realist approach views socio-​material relations—​favoring certain political interests over other political interests—​as shaping both the fabrication and the interpretation of metaphors. Thus, a critical realist approach would be, Reed suggests, occupied with the structural embeddedness of metaphors, and views metaphors as a fundamental component of the conceptual toolkit for explaining—​and, simultaneously, critiquing—​how the structures shape the terms and conditions of organizational life. Chapter 27, “Research: Invitation to Metaphor,” by Hugo Letiche and Ivo De Loo, starts from the proposition that research is narrative making, and therefore finding and creating the “right” (new) metaphor(s) for the object(s) studied is crucial. Letiche and De Loo relate to philosophers such as Ricoeur, Derrida, Stiegler, and Lefebvre, all of whom have debated the function and necessity of metaphor creation in research. To always focus on creativity runs the risk that research becomes poetry; it is important to find a balance between existing language, conceptual renewal, and semantic clarity. The researcher’s choice of words is a matter of relatedness between the researcher and the researched, where expressive choices are crucial. Research is accountable for the effects that it has on the researched as well as for the effects that researcher reflexivity has on the researcher themselves. There is shared responsibility, but the researcher’s choices need to be made clear and explicit. After all, it is mostly the researcher who suggests (new) metaphors or ideation, and it is the researcher who must assume responsibility for the

34   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD metaphors that they put into play and ask themselves if they have succeeded in being sufficiently open to the circumstances studied.

Part VI  Epilogue The book ends with two “concluding” contributions. Chapter 28, “Organizational Metaphors of the Future—​Some Suggested Types of Further Research,” by Anders Örtenblad, outlines some advice for further organization studies where metaphor is used. The main part of the chapter is devoted to suggesting some types of metaphor studies in the organization and management area: suggesting overviews of metaphors for organization, either by updating Morgan’s set of eight metaphors to include other metaphors that have been suggested, or by offering an alternative overview that could make more sense to people in cultures where Morgan’s set of metaphors make less sense; offering reflection within a specific sub-​area of organization studies through “metaphors we X by”; and using a metaphor as a lens which colors “everything” about organization as well as how the researcher interprets it. In a final section of the chapter, Örtenblad suggests increased reflection around metaphor with the help of metaphors: that is, metaphorization through meta-​metaphors. The final contribution is an “Afterword: Analogy All the Way Down: Analogical Thinking Is at the Core of Understanding Organizations Interpretively” authored by Haridimos Tsoukas. Tsoukas emphasizes the role and importance of analogy for all types of work on or with metaphor within the area of organization studies. In fact, he claims that analogical thinking is a driver in both thinking—​in general—​and organizing. Metaphorical insights need to be complemented by analogy to develop into theory, something that he suggests as an area for future research. Categorizing through analogy, Tsoukas claims, helps both scholars and practitioners to specify any metaphor and to extrapolate accumulated knowledge to new situations.

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pa rt i

M E TA P HOR S

THEOR ET IC A L C ONSI DE R AT IONS

chapter 2

defining t h e rol e of m etaph or i n organiz ation st u di e s joep cornelissen

Introduction Our knowledge about organizations is interwoven with metaphor, to the extent that it is hard to see a knowledge claim, concept, or practice-​based model that does not bear the traces of a novel or taken-​for-​granted metaphor. When academics study formal organizations or processes of organizing, they generally prefigure their inquiries by thinking of organizations as, for example, communities based on shared values and beliefs or as coordinating systems around hierarchies of goals. Likewise, when practitioners develop initiatives to “align” employees behind a “strategy” or think of ways to foster human “capital” or manage the firm’s human “resources,” they presuppose metaphorical images of what an organization is like or is purported to be. The fact that our knowledge of organizations is not only shot through with, but also fundamentally made possible by metaphor is an insight that is now commonplace, although this was perhaps not always so. Classic management and organizational theories had made prominent use of metaphor: for example, by casting organizations as if they are production-​based machines that are efficiently designed to produce certain outputs and meet predefined targets (as in Frederick Winslow Taylor’s Scientific Management approach); as cognitive agents who can compute the best strategies and decisions for a given environment (as in March and Simon’s (1958) Behavioral Theory of the Firm); or as organisms who adapt and evolve their patterns of actions and structures (morphology) to the changing ecosystem of which they are a part (see Morgan 1986). But although metaphor loomed large in their thinking, most of these classic theorists (perhaps with the exception of James March later on in his career) did not discuss the underlying metaphors in any great detail and

44   JOEP CORNELISSEN were oftentimes keen to hide, conceal, or otherwise stay silent on the master trope that was structuring their thinking. It seems that they wanted to background or limit the role that metaphor had played in their thinking under the guise of a classic positivist idea of social science (Pinder and Bourgeois 1982), or otherwise claim that even if it had played a role as a heuristic, its role no longer mattered as the theoretical claims, concepts, and models that they had derived could be examined in their own right (see, e.g., Hannan and Freeman 1989, for an explicit example of this). The change came from a series of papers and books by Gareth Morgan which in one magnificent stroke brought the role of metaphor center stage (Morgan 1980, 1983, 1986). Morgan brilliantly showed that virtually all of our organizational theories rely on metaphor and that this is clearly evident in particular ways of reasoning and in the models and concepts that researchers refer to and use (e.g., organizational identity, human resources, strategies, organizational environment, etc.). He also suggested that even more fundamentally all of our knowledge is metaphorical (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Morgan 1980); our knowledge of the world is structured and conditioned by root metaphors as primary ways of framing and seeing social reality. In other words, epistemologically, our knowledge of organizations is made possible through metaphors, with any changes in our knowledge stemming from changes in our metaphoric (re)description of reality (an insight that harks back to the famous work of Mary Hesse 1966). Morgan’s work left a legacy. By making the role of metaphor salient, students of organizations have since become more aware of the metaphorical roots of their reasoning (e.g., Boxenbaum and Rouleau 2011; Ketokivi et al. 2017). Building on Morgan’s insights, they also know that they can leverage the role of metaphor to become more reflexive and creative in their thinking and theorizing—​to effectively change the metaphor through which they conceptualize a topic or phenomenon (e.g., Alvesson and Sandberg 2011). At the same time, and since Morgan’s foundational work, the subject of metaphor has not evolved into an ongoing research program or into a core concept around which a lot of research amasses. Perhaps its omnipresence at the level of epistemology, theory, and method (leaving education and practice aside for a minute) has barred that from happening; so that instead metaphor, as a subject, pops up in different discussions and literatures in the organization studies field (as also evidenced by this very Handbook). In this chapter my aim is to circumscribe the broad role of metaphor in organization studies and pinpoint the discussions that have taken place around the subject, offering some pointers toward other chapters in the book—​so that the chapter may indeed be an entry into these wider discussions.

Defining Metaphor To define metaphor and its place within organization studies, I separate out linguistic, cognitive, and cultural dimensions to metaphor. Making such a broad and crude distinction is somewhat forced and artificial, not least as these dimensions overlap and

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    45 interpenetrate in the instance of a single metaphor. Nonetheless, the distinction may for the purposes of this chapter be analytically useful to appreciate the different facets of metaphor and how metaphor has been approached as a study object within organization studies.

Linguistic Metaphor: Identifying a Master Trope At the level of our language use, it is noteworthy that much of our talk about organizations and organizational life is inherently metaphorical, as opposed to confined to literal expressions and speech (Cornelissen 2008). Linguistically, a metaphor is a “figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to something to which it is not literally applicable” (Oxford Reference 2021). The words and expressions that we use as academics, but also in our private lives, disclose conceptions of organizations as if they are machines, social structures, markets, or corporate citizens (among many other things). Organizations are, of course, not literally machines or citizens (at least, not in how we originally understand these concepts). However, by using such metaphorical language we are able to transfer such words and their meanings from their original domain to the sphere of organizations and are able to make sense of them and extend our thinking. In other words, linguistically mobilizing words from other domains enables us to cognitively frame and understand organizations in more familiar and concrete ways. It also opens up possibilities for seeing and understanding organizations that would otherwise not be there if we restricted ourselves to a set of literal words and a fixed set of categories for understanding organizations (Morgan 1980, 1983). One may in turn reasonably ask whether organizations and processes of organizing can only or only primarily be represented and reasoned about in metaphorical terms, and not in literal terms. In other words, can we represent organizations or organizational processes and phenomena without metaphorical language and without corresponding processes of metaphor-​based reasoning and thinking? The answer is, hardly. If we consciously make the enormous effort to separate out our metaphorical from nonmetaphorical language, we probably can do some very minimal and unsophisticated nonmetaphorical reasoning about the world of organizations. However, as scholars, we do not do this, and such reasoning would never capture the full inferential capacity of rich metaphorical language and thought. For example, the concept of organization can, if pushed, indeed be described and unpacked in literal terms, such as a “collective of people working together.” However, without metaphor, the literal concept of organization is relatively impoverished and has only a minimal “skeletal” structure (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). The use of metaphorical language fleshes out the skeleton in a variety of ways and adds inferential structure (Cornelissen 2005). In fact, so much of what we assume and infer in relation to organizations is metaphorical, such that if one somehow managed to eliminate metaphorical language and thought, the remaining skeletal concept would be so impoverished that none of us could do any substantial reasoning about organizations (an insight that is evidenced by the fact that virtually all

46   JOEP CORNELISSEN theories of organizations involve extensive theoretical vocabularies grounded in a core metaphor or analogy: Ketokivi et al. 2017). Given the pervasiveness of metaphorical language in talk about organizations and organizational life, past research has focused on ways of identifying metaphorical language and distinguishing it, as a “master trope,” from other tropes (such as metonym, synecdoche, and irony) (e.g., Oswick et al. 2002; Cornelissen 2008) and linguistic units (such as idioms and broader phrasal expressions) (e.g., Cornelissen et al. 2014) as well as from broader theoretical concepts such as discourse (i.e., a culturally arranged set of expressions typical of either a local or macro context in society) (Putnam and Boys 2006), vocabularies (i.e., categorically linked registers of words that define a particular social setting or area of practice) (Loewenstein et al. 2012), and framing (i.e., a package of linguistic units (keywords, metaphors) that is used strategically and politically to make a particular reading salient in a communicating speech or text) (Cornelissen and Werner 2014). To aid the process of systematically identifying linguistic words and expressions as metaphorical in a spoken or written text, work in organization studies has borrowed protocols from applied and cognitive linguistics (see Steen et al. 2010), and has mainstreamed their use in both local and specialized instances of language use (e.g., Cornelissen’s 2012 study of communication professionals making sense of unprecedented crisis scenarios in their work) as well as in broader, general (i.e., across-​ contexts) settings of language use (e.g., Cornelissen’s 2008 study of metaphorical and metonymic expressions related to organizations in the British National Corpus). Recent work in the organizational domain has furthermore paralleled developments in linguistics and semiotics, and has started to consider metaphor in a multimodal manner; as essentially expressed—​and thus identifiable—​in visual and embodied modes of communication other than the strict “linguistic” mode of spoken words or written or transcribed texts, such as in bodily gesturing (see Clarke et al. 2019, 2021), visual images and representations (Meyer et al. 2013), as well as through scent and sound in organizational contexts (Islam et al. 2016). The increasing use of such protocols, and in a multimodal manner, is a positive development as it provides a transparent report of how metaphors were identified by researchers in the context of their data (whether texts, visual images, etc.), which not only allows readers to grasp how the analysis was done but also enhances comparability across studies and across settings.

Conceptual Metaphor: Cognitive Processes and Blending The linguistic, or surface, level of a metaphor is, as already mentioned, intimately connected to the cognitive level. The cognitive dimension by itself, however, casts a complementary light on the application of metaphor to organizations. At this level, metaphors are considered as cognitively useful and essential in our sensemaking and reasoning about abstract or complex subjects such as organizations. From this cognitive perspective, metaphors point in fact to an obvious way in which people learn to reason about abstract or complex concepts (Lakoff 1987). They would notice, or have pointed

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    47 out to them, a parallel between a domain or realm that they already understand and an abstract or complex realm that they do not yet understand (Cornelissen 2005). By accessing and transferring knowledge from a known domain to an as-​yet-​unknown or difficult-​to-​know, complex, or abstract domain, people can understand otherwise inaccessible concepts. For this reason, metaphor is not considered as strictly linguistic in nature; rather, it is an essential part of thought: “Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 3). Thus, when we are primed to think of organizations, we often do so by cognitively drawing on other domains of knowledge to form an image of what an organization is like (Rai and Diermeier 2015). The metaphorical association that we draw in our minds frames our understanding of the organization in a distinctive but partial way. Metaphors tend to produce partial insights because the image that is cognitively activated highlights certain interpretations at the expense of others. The image of an organization as a machine brings aspects of efficiency and engineering into focus but ignores the human aspects. The metaphor is thus enlightening and biased or limiting at the same time (Morgan 1986). While the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of metaphor are analytically separate, they often interact and interconnect in real-​world contexts and as such have also been studied together within the organizational domain. While some work exist that focuses on metaphor primarily at the cognitive level (e.g., Hill and Levenhagen 1995), most research focuses on how thoughts are created as people are speaking and are using metaphors either to support themselves in conceptualizing new, unfamiliar areas or domains (Cornelissen and Clarke 2010; Kier and McMullen 2018), or more strategically to persuade and convince others and shape their thoughts (König et al. 2018; Clarke et al. 2019). In the latter context, studies have, for example, focused on whether a linguistic metaphor used deliberately by top managers in their communication of a change directs and guides the cognitions of employees to think about the change in similar metaphorical terms (e.g., Gioia et al. 1994). In less hierarchical settings, studies have focused on how metaphors are a key resource for teams and groups collaborating on new tasks and innovations, providing participants with a familiar linguistic reference (Seidel and O’Mahony 2014) that cuts across specialized domains and which, once established in their speech community, affords a scaffolding on which to cognitively build and create new emergent understanding (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018). Having outlined some reasons why metaphorical language and thought plays such a central role, a logical question to ask is how metaphors cognitively work. Given the prevalence of metaphor in our language about organizations and organizational life, it seems likely that they are the natural product of the way everyone’s mind works (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999). In his groundbreaking work, Morgan (1986, 1997, 2006) argued that people make sense of a metaphor by “seeing” or identifying a single dimension that relates to the combined realms. He argued that metaphor proceeds through implicit or explicit assertions that A is (or is like) B. For example, when we say “the man is a lion,” we assert that the man shares features or characteristics with the lion, such as being

48   JOEP CORNELISSEN strong and ferocious (Morgan 2006: 4–​5). Morgan’s account of metaphor follows a so-​ called comparison model of how metaphor works (Black 1962; Cornelissen 2005). In this model, which goes back to Aristotle’s earliest writings, the development and interpretation of a metaphor is assumed to involve a comparison of concepts or domains to determine what discrete properties or relations applying to the one can also apply to the other in the same or a similar sense. In short, metaphor is seen as a comparison in which the first concept A (i.e., the target) is asserted to bear a partial resemblance to the second concept B (i.e., the source). In this view, a metaphor is cognitively understood when we “see” the connection between two concepts or domains and are able to “visualize” the “ground”—​namely, those features that are shared by both. In other words, we understand metaphors when the source allows us to identify a feature (or set of features) already present in our understanding of the target, albeit that those features may initially not have been that salient to us. The productive force of metaphors, in other words, comes from making connections between domains “salient” or “visible.” The key limitation of the comparison account is that it is unable to account for how people discern such new metaphorical connections involving a set of entities that interact in particular ways. Recall that metaphors are powerful to the extent that they create new insights and new ways of analyzing and managing organizations; they do not simply uncover already existing similarities. Metaphors do not just draw out mere aspects of sameness; if they did, they would only make “the familiar more familiar” (Oswick et al. 2002: 295). Instead, this comparison account suggests that metaphorical thinking is severely constrained to picking up hackneyed metaphors that already permeate our language about organizations and capture all there is to capture about organizations (Cornelissen 2005). Metaphors, by their very nature, are creative tools of human cognition for drawing parallels between domains of knowledge in order to expand our current knowledge into previously unrecognized possibilities (Morgan 1997). A metaphor cannot be reduced to already present features or attributes because when these are specified, one does not get the metaphorical effect in question (Cornelissen 2005). This is the case because the characteristics or features of the source often cannot be applied directly to the target, as the features they “share” are often only shared metaphorically (and not literally). For example, the connection between organizations and identity (which is central to personifications that see organizations as having a character or identity and as acting in goal-​driven and more or less responsible ways) is only a metaphorical one that aids our thinking about organizations. These concepts do not literally share any features or characteristics. Prior to their metaphorical comparison, we did not even conceive of a connection between organizations and (personal) identity. Thus, a metaphor creates similarity (as a correspondence is constructed) instead of simply emphasizing and visualizing preexisting (but previously unnoticed) similarities in the features of the constituent concepts or domains. Therefore, a more useful cognitive model of metaphor is one that recognizes the creative potential of metaphor and accounts for how new insights and understandings emerge from using a metaphor. This so-​ called domains-​ interaction approach

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    49 (Cornelissen 2005) focuses on correspondences between two concepts or domains that emerge as counterpart connections that we construct between the two concepts or domains. Once a correspondence is constructed, the two concepts or domains are in turn “blended” with one another as a way of reordering our understanding of the target or creating an emergent meaning that did not exist in each of the two concepts or domains separately. For example, when we say “the man is a lion” (the classic example that Morgan uses), we reorder our understanding of the kind of bravery and ferocity that we think a man is capable of based on our understanding of lions. The metaphor, in other words, leads us to reorder and reexamine our understanding of this particular man. Similarly, when we think of organizations as machines, we completely recast our understanding of organizations. We blend the two domains to conceive of an organization as a functional unity with distinct, although interconnected, parts; to conceive of work as controlled and automated motions; and to conceive of employees as human resources or commodities. The intricate blending or mixing of these two domains into one and the same image also means that it is often difficult for people to still recognize the active metaphorical nature of the image whenever we use it to think about organizations. In other words, blending contributes to the belief that an organization is a machine; it is not just a useful way of thinking about organizations. In some cases, the blending of the two domains is cognitively elaborated by people in such a way that new meanings or insights are created that did not exist in them previously; something that has been repeatedly drawn out by studies of metaphors in the organizational domain—​ where emergent meanings arose from metaphors that came out of collective ideational processes (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018) and were used to conceptualize novel product-​related opportunities (Cornelissen and Clarke 2010) or “identities” of a firm (Cornelissen et al. 2020).

Cultural Metaphor: Context and Categorization The cultural dimension refers to the social contexts in which metaphors are used and how, as part of a speech community, a metaphor may resonate and be considered as apt. It also refers to how over time a metaphor may conventionalize and become an institutionalized, taken-​for-​granted reference for a community. For one, the variety and changing nature of our metaphorical images of organizations (from machines, to computers, to communities, to contracts, etc.) suggests that the perceived aptness and use of a metaphor depends on the extent to which a new metaphor resonates with already common and socially shared discourses and understandings in a particular community. Resonance occurs because of a similarity between the novel metaphor and existing understanding or because the metaphor offers a striking contrast with our present language and thought (Oswick et al. 2004). This cultural mechanism holds a lesson for our understanding of organizations more generally. Our language and thought tend to branch out to the extent that they are conditioned by prior, socially shared understandings. For example, images of social systems followed machine

50   JOEP CORNELISSEN images of organization, connectionist images of distributed intelligence elaborated on computational images, evolutionary images of organization were challenged by images of organizations as chaotic and complex adaptive systems, and so on. Such a stacking of metaphors is also the name of the game in academic research, in which scholars are oftentimes pressed to find contrasting images with earlier work (Boxenbaum and Rouleau 2011; Cornelissen and Durand 2014). Cultural contexts thus matter a great deal and affect the linguistic and cognitive dimensions of a metaphor: that is, whether a linguistic metaphor resonates and whether and how it is cognitively processed as a metaphor. Within the organizational domain, Powell and Colyvas (2008: 294) describe the conventionalization and institutionalization of a new idea or practice by drawing on the career-​of-​metaphor hypothesis (cf. Bowdle and Gentner 2005). This hypothesis suggests that where initially a deliberately used metaphor (at the linguistic level) is processed consciously, over time and through repeated usage it may evolve into a naturalized, taken-​for-​granted category that “render[s]‌some features of social life ‘objective’ but deflect[s] attention to other aspects” (Powell and Colyvas 2008: 294). As such, following this logic, “one may regard institutionalization as making metaphor dead” (Powell and Colyvas 2008: 294). Indeed, many studies have drawn this out empirically, conceptualizing and explaining the institutionalization of haute cuisine (Rao et al. 2003), grass-​fed beef (Weber et al. 2008), digital radio (Navis and Glynn 2010), and modern architecture (Jones et al. 2012). To give one example, when chefs were reframed as “creators” rather than “translators” of a cuisine (Rao et al. 2003), drawing on cultural images of artistic creativity, chefs and others (critics, diners) initially interpreted the provisional metaphorical framing by aligning the target and source representations, and by importing further properties and inferences from the source to the target. Considering chefs as “creators,” for example, was completed with further implications regarding the invention of new dishes and improvisation with ingredients. A particular outcome of such an alignment is that the common relational structure that forms the interpretation will increase in salience relative to nonaligned or even contrasting aspects of the domains of cooking and creativity (Bowdle and Gentner 2005). In the case of French chefs, this interpretation involved the relational structure that cast chefs in the role of creators who actively work with combinations of ingredients and invent new dishes and menus. The salience of such emerging interpretations in turn tightens the contiguous causal or relational links between parts of the induced frame, which can furthermore be reinforced through the repeated mention of the metaphor by actors and interest groups (Rao et al. 2003). In fact, when the source terminology around creativity is repeatedly aligned with the targeted context of French cuisine, the highlighted relational structure may become conventionally associated with the target as an abstracted metaphorical category (cf. Bowdle and Gentner 2005). The result of this process is that the abstracted category may become “cognitively embedded” as a schema of interpretation. In turn, this means that, for example, chefs become commonly considered as an exemplar of the category of creative agents. This process of conventionalization is characteristic of many processes of cultural and institutional change. When they first emerge, linguistic metaphors are often still

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    51 elaborated by actors as active metaphorical comparisons where they align the target context with the source domain and then interpret what it means, for example, for a chef to be a creator (following the steps of the domains-​interaction model explained above). Yet, once they are conventionalized, such metaphors become cognitively embedded as automatic categorizations; actors simply include the target context into the overarching abstract metaphoric category (Glucksberg et al. 1997). In the latter scenario, chefs are simply seen as creators; however, this categorization route requires a relatively strong degree of conventionalization, with the target context now automatically considered as a prototypical instance of the abstracted metaphorical category of “creative agents” (Glucksberg et al. 1997). Such cultural conventionalization thus implies a shift in the metaphor from being “active” and deliberate to “dormant” or “dead,” and comes with a corresponding change in cognitive processing—​from an active process of alignment and blending to one of categorization (Steen 2008).

Summary I have briefly discussed the linguistic, cognitive, and cultural dimensions to metaphor in relation to the field of organization studies and have summarized research that has taken place in relation to each of these dimensions. I have also suggested that the three dimensions intersect and interact; culture, for example, influences the resonance of a linguistic metaphor and how it is cognitively processed. Indeed, these dimensions are hard to disentangle in the context of any metaphor. Yet, at the same time, it may be useful for researchers to consider how these dimensions, alone or in combination, are salient to them and how this guides them in their research questions and methodological choices. For example, when culture is considered important alongside a linguistic focus, it may well be that researchers adopt a sociolinguistic or discourse analysis angle to study how metaphor helps shape or constitute the shared worldview and practices of a collective or community (see Oswick et al. 2004). If, alternatively, the focus is more cognitively on how individuals or groups use metaphor, as part of their language use, to make sense or to construct meaning anew (Cornelissen 2012), a cognitive linguistic, cognitive semantic, or sensemaking approach seems more likely. In other words, the three dimensions provide somewhat of a mosaic through which researchers approach the study of metaphor; with their core focus, research questions, and methods being guided by whatever combination of these dimensions they make salient and use as an anchor for their work. In other words, they choose themselves what to foreground (and what to background) as a basis for their work.

Concluding Comments Given the central role of metaphors in organization studies, one would expect a large amount of time and energy to be devoted within academic circles to understanding the

52   JOEP CORNELISSEN very processes by which they are generated and the outcomes they have for everyone involved with organizations. Yet research on the topic over the years has been scant; in many ways—​and despite this Handbook pulling together the work that exists—​it is still seen as a fringe subject compared with other more “mainstream” subjects in the field. As a result, the significance of the topic of metaphor for our understanding of organizations is not matched with a similar amount of research and attempts at a more detailed understanding. To some extent, this lack of attention reflects the usual ebb and flow of scholarly research, in which metaphor as a subject became prominent in the 1980s amid broader meta-​theoretical discussions on paradigms, methods, and theory but ebbed away in the decades afterward. Those who, in fact, were still writing about metaphor afterward were genuine enthusiasts or were heavily influenced by Morgan, with his work leaving a formative and lasting imprint on their own scholarship. This lack of attention has a wider bearing on the academic community. A direct consequence is that prominent scholars in economics, sociology, and organizational theory do not routinely reflect on the theories and the assumptions they work from as metaphors. To give one example, the economists Fama and Jensen (1985: 101) assume that organizations can be modeled as economic agents and “ ‘as if ’ they come from the maximization of an objective function—​for example, the value maximization rule of the financial economics literature.” Fama and Jensen (1985) go to great lengths to stress that they are using a “literal” analogy rather than a metaphor, arguing that their thinking involves a simple extension of the economic agency of natural persons to that of the organization, which as an agency-​bearing “individual” by law (Jensen and Meckling 1976; Ghoshal 2005) is able to engage in economic transactions and form contracting relationships. In another article, Jensen and Meckling (1976: 311) emphasize the importance of limiting the analogy so that it does not further metaphorically “personify” the organization “by thinking about organizations as if they were persons with motivations and intentions” (Jensen and Meckling 1976: 311) but simply adopt the economic analogy that the decisions and transactions of an organization can be modeled “ ‘as if ’ they follow the value maximization rule of a single economic agent” (Fama and Jensen 1985: 101). These twists and turns hide, rather than reveal, the underlying metaphor of economic utility and may be seen to “objectify” and naturalize its premise. The overall consequence is, as in this case, very little reflection within academic circles on images and models of organizations—​images that form the basis for decision making in both theory and practice. This lack of reflection is unfortunate, because our theoretical language of organi­ zations is laden with metaphors (Morgan 2006). Instead of purging them from our theories (Pinder and Bourgeois 1982), it would make more sense to devote our energies toward a more detailed understanding of how metaphors work and toward harnessing their generative potential. Without such reflection, we miss thinking about the fundamental assumptions, or grounds, upon which we reason about organizations in our research and explain individual and collective behaviors. It also limits us in our ability to be truly generative by shifting grounds or by inverting the logic of an image into a counterfactual image (Oswick et al. 2011; Cornelissen and Durand 2014). And it also means

THE ROLE OF METAPHOR IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    53 that we risk being out of step with the demands of our times, which in many ways need much more complex and dynamic metaphorical images than previous imagery. Where the contemporary global, digital, and distributed nature of organizations and organizing would require us to produce new images or new assemblages of images, academics, managers, policy-​makers, and industry analysts seem instead to have returned to old stalwarts such as the machine image (Economist 2015) or seeing an organization as a nexus of contracts (Cornelissen and Cholakova 2020). The machine image is again used for managing large (e.g., Amazon) and small organizations alike, in both manufacturing and high-​tech and service sectors. Likewise, the contracting image (Williamson 1985) is touted by platform organizations in the “gig economy” (e.g., Uber, Deliveroo, Eats) as a way of suggesting that they simply mediate in the contracting between buyers and suppliers and do not need to consider the people working for them as “employees,” who are entitled to social security and fair wages (Cornelissen and Cholakova 2020). As drawn out by these examples, it is crucial that we reflect on the metaphors that we work from and live by, and that we not only think of progressively better alternatives but also debate and discuss whatever inferences they afford and thus what consequences they may have—​and that ideally we do so, when the stakes are high for society (Cornelissen and Cholakova 2020), before a new metaphor has become institutionalized.

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chapter 3

de f ining, ref i ni ng , a nd re defining meta ph or A Reflective and Generative Discussion with Gareth Morgan cliff oswick and david grant

Introduction Gareth Morgan is widely regarded as one of the leading thinkers and writers within the field of management and organization theory. He has made a massive contribution to our understanding of “organizational metaphors” (Morgan 1980, 1981, 1983, 1986, 1996, 2011) and the application of sociological paradigms to the study of organizations and organizing (Burrell and Morgan 1979; Morgan 1984). He is particularly well known for his best-​selling book Images of Organization (see Morgan 1986 for the full reference). In this chapter we discuss the role and status of metaphor in organization theory and organizational theorizing. In particular, we reflect on how metaphor has been defined and how it might be redefined and reframed going forwards. We have known Gareth Morgan for just over 25 years. In that time, we have had many enjoyable conversations with him about metaphors and we have written extensively on metaphor ourselves (see, e.g., Grant and Oswick 1996, 2016; Oswick et al. 2002; Oswick and Jones 2006; Oswick and Grant 2016; Oswick et al. 2020; Oswick and Oswick 2020). Given our long association with Gareth Morgan, this chapter should be seen as the product of a free-​flowing conversation, rather than a formal interview. The relaxed nature of our discussion resulted in us producing a considerable amount of transcribed text. Rather than try to address all of the issues we talked about, we have chosen to focus on exploring how metaphors work in two main ways. First, we reflect upon “the way of

58    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT thinking and a way of seeing” (Morgan 1986: 12) perspective on metaphor and consider the take-​up and representation of these ideas over the past three decades. Second, we engage in a more expansive discussion of alternative ways of thinking about the role and status of metaphor use in management and organization theory. There are three main sections to this chapter. First, we review the traditional formulation of metaphor as a device involving the carrying over of properties from a concrete source domain (i.e., a metaphor) to a relatively abstract target domain (i.e., an organization). Second, we co-​construct an alternative perspective which draws attention to the provisional and transitory properties of metaphor. Finally, we explore the scope for complementing the dominant resonance-​based approaches to metaphor use (i.e., the privileging of similarity) by deploying dissonance-​based metaphorical projections (which privilege dissimilarity).

Revisiting the Role and Status of Metaphor(s) david.  It’s more than 30 years, isn’t it, since Images of Organization [Morgan 1986] came out and metaphor is still pervasive in organization studies and seen as valuable. Why is that? gareth.  Well, it’s largely because I think it’s fundamental to the way of knowing and the point . . . is that we have to distinguish between metaphor and metaphors, that’s the starting point of it all for me, because metaphor is ontological, concerned with the nature of being, in the sense that as human beings what we’re trying to do, we’re in a world and subject to all this kind of sense, experience and information and it’s a fundamental process. I believe that what goes on is a crossing of information, is a connection of information and all the rest of it, and there’s a whole discussion around how that works, and so out of this process, a crossing, trying to make sense of information, which is a metaphorical process, metaphors cross over. Metaphors emerge as a way of trying to capture best understanding of what’s happening and all metaphors, of course, are contextually based in the sense that they arise at a particular moment for a particular reason, to capture a particular situation. I’m not trying to suggest there’s a deliberate metaphorical process here, it’s much more about information, a spontaneous emergent process, but that’s why I think metaphors and metaphor are not going to go away and so . . . david.  So, it’s as if we can’t help ourselves. As human beings, we actually metaphorize, if that’s the right term. gareth.  Yes. Exactly, and I think that the . . . some of the new insights and developments in the theory of metaphor are likely to come from brain science as opposed to philosophy, for example. I honestly believe that that’s where the validation for some of this thinking is ultimately going to come from and so that’s why metaphors are so important, why they won’t go away, because they’re fundamental to the whole human way of knowing.

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    59 david.  A way of thinking,1 as you’ve said. gareth.  Yes, exactly, and that for me is one of the biggest distinctions we’ve got to make in the metaphor debate. It’s the ontological versus the epistemological: “metaphor” as a process versus “metaphors” as the theories or images that we’re using to capture the experiences to which we’re trying to relate. cliff.  I wonder as well, as a process, my kind of view on it if I think about the last 25, 30, 40 years, that a lot of the literature has been dominated by a psychological view of metaphor as a process, so an individual uses a metaphor to create greater insight. I wonder about the sociological potential of metaphors, the way in which it can be more than a purely cognitive process with an individual sitting in the dark room thinking about metaphors. They can, as it were, create their own reality, whereas if metaphors are used socially in conversation where you’re . . . again, to use your expression in your early work, applying the different lenses2 in real time and having a conversation around that, I just wonder whether we kind of miss a trick with metaphors, that we don’t look at them as multiple perspectives in real time to develop insight by simultaneously applying them. You know? I just think that dialogue has so much scope for . . . I think innovation, if we went and studied a software company down the road—​one of these kind of tech start-​ups—​they’re using generative metaphorical processes all the time and it’s like this and it’s like that, but they’re not focusing on one metaphor, they’re focusing on a number. I tend to think that with Images of Organization, one of its strengths was also one of its weaknesses. It was so persuasive, as an account, that I think people stopped thinking about metaphor use in other ways and they focused on evocative “organization as . . .” metaphors. So that’s . . . it’s a good thing, it had a massive, and still has, a massive impact. But, in one sense, people started to find it so persuasive, they homed in on that way of thinking. And, they haven’t kind of stretched and challenged it in other directions as much as they perhaps could have done. gareth.  I think there’s a lot to that, because it gets captured in the idea of . . . “Morgan’s Eight Metaphors,” right? It becomes about the metaphors rather than the process and it’s interesting, because I’ve been very clear that for me a metaphor is always about generating partial insight, partial truth, and it’s about constructive falsehoods in the sense that every metaphor is a distortion, right? Literally as we know it’s not correct, so that you’ve got partial truths, constructive falsehoods, and so you’re into a process of constant self-​organizing of knowledge. If you’re true to the nature of metaphor, you pursue the weaknesses as much as you would the strengths and so it’s this paradoxical phenomenon which pushes you into a much more “metaphor as a process,” as a basis of dialogue, as a way of self-​edification, a mode of conversation, rather than a fixed point of the metaphor, which is, I think, an interpretation sometimes put on the work. david.  Do you think there’s much in the idea that you can push a metaphor too far?

1 

The notion of metaphors being a “way of thinking” is taken from Morgan (1986). refers to the use of different metaphors as being comparable to looking at an object using different lenses (Morgan 1986). 2  This

60    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT gareth.  Or you could believe it? That’s fatal, right? In the sense that you’re forgetting the fact that there’s always going to be a downside to the metaphor and the metaphor is being evoked, as I said earlier, in a particular context for a particular purpose. Not consciously, but yes, I think, yes if you become entrapped by your metaphor, you’ve gone too far. But notice that it’s being trapped by a metaphor, it’s not about the process, and this I think is where the next line of development might be, because it will bring you very closely to the type of work that you’ve been engaged in, understanding dialogue, narrative, and the way it all unfolds.

Toward Alternative Ways of Thinking cliff.  I wonder about one of the implications [of metaphor use]—​that people often assume that metaphors are unidirectional. So, this idea of going right back to Lakoff and Johnson’s stuff [see Lakoff and Johnson 1980]—​i.e. you understand a relatively abstract phenomenon through a concrete one. I wonder whether that’s too constraining. Maybe it’s nice on occasions to have two abstract domains, or to take two relatively concrete ones and look for unusual quirky elements within . . . so I think maybe even how we select the points of reference in comparison can sometimes be kind of quite constraining. Moreover, I do wonder though that if we talk about “the process,” more recently commentators like Joep Cornelissen [see Cornelissen 2005] have started to challenge some of the conventional wisdom around metaphor. Drawing on people like Fauconnier and Turner [see Fauconnier and Turner 2002], he argues that the use of metaphor involves a process of “conceptual blending.” It’s not so much that you understand one thing through another, but rather that you juxtapose two things to create some sort of third synthetic insight. It’s a “correspondence view” of metaphor (i.e., a continual to-​ing and fro-​ing between domains), rather than a comparison view (i.e., a carrying over from one domain to another). So, if you look at an “organization as machine,” if you do that, you’re likely to find out things about the machine, as much as you do about an organization would be his kind of take. What’s your view on that? Do you buy into that or not really? gareth.  Well, obviously you can blend metaphors and move from one metaphor to another, the whole idea of the correspondence notion links into whether your theory corresponds with the world out there as opposed to being a construct to navigate the world out there and so I’m sure that you can create all kinds of different permutations of metaphor and how it should be used. The thing that always strikes me, though, is people who are always trying to find “the way,” right, trying to get a kind of definitive way of thinking about this domain, and I’m not sure that’s what it’s all about, because the whole idea of the playful nature of metaphor, and we don’t want to make it playful in the sense of just play, play, play, play, play . . . of having fun; it’s more loosening up and not being driven by the attempt to be absolutely rigorous and definitive about the way it works. So,

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    61 those ideas have some merit, but they will also miss something in the process, like critique is ultimately constructing the other, right, as a way of trying to make one’s position and so this is what happens, you offer a theory, you offer an idea, someone takes an opposite view, etc. and out of the conversation something interesting happens. cliff.  So, what you’re saying really, is that they’re just different. They’re different ways of doing things. gareth.  Exactly. david.  There is however a directional purpose, isn’t there? Conceptual blending doesn’t allow for that, because you were saying . . . admittedly, this is your interpretation of the work, but that you take two concepts and you can learn about both concepts. But, actually when people are playing with metaphor or using metaphor, there’s always a direction, they’re applying one concept to another concept, not . . . cliff.   . . . It’s purposeful. david.  Yes, that’s right. That I think is how metaphor generally is used, even in sort of everyday conversation. There’s direction to it, you’re not backtracking, if you like, to the original concept.

Metaphorical Chickens or Literal Eggs? gareth.  Can I read you something? It came out of some notes that I’d made, right, and I discovered them on the train this morning, and I don’t know if it will relate to this directly, but I think it’s an interesting idea and it’s based around “where do metaphors come from?” Because that is one of the key issues. I’m just going to read them here, because I think it may create a little bit of a conversation: “mind struggles to make sense of the world and then leaves a path of insight behind it” [this extract is recounted from paraphrased notes based on Dyson 2012]. So, in other words, the mind is creating, struggling to deal with the world, and there’s a residual pattern of understanding that comes out in the moment, comes out of the interaction or what have you. So, basically what we have here is a kind of emergent view of meaning, of where it’s coming from, and so the question, a question, comes out of this, and I may not be reproducing it accurately: “Does the brain have metaphors, analogies or simile forced on itself, because of its own cognitive limitations?” In other words, if you see metaphor as an important part of that residual pattern, has it been in any way a kind of conscious type of understanding, or has it . . . is it something that’s emerged because the brain is trying to force connections in an almost a random kind of way as opposed to a concrete purposive way? This is an important point . . . Finding answers is easier than defining questions and so if you start to look then at the digital world and everything, a random network contains solutions waiting to be discovered to

62    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT problems not yet defined and so what we’re talking about here is . . . it’s a very interesting idea, it’s a metaphor that’s coming from search engines actually, that search starts with answers, not questions and this is the way the whole search process has gone . . . So, the reason I’m reading this here, is because . . . all the time in trying to talk about metaphor we try to codify the insights that come from it, or take the example of what is the more robust way of looking at metaphor. I think it’s far more spontaneous than all that and I like that idea of the mind almost going to a solution, almost automatically, and it’s that kind of grab. If you think about the way a metaphor emerges in conversation, we’re not conceptually analyzing what’s going on, we’re going to the metaphor as the best way of capturing what we see and what we experience and what we feel, whether it’s right or wrong, whether we’re comparing or whether we are just thinking. I think it’s much more emergent as a process. cliff.  I think . . . yeah, I really buy into that. The thing for me that still remains within that and something you kind of mentioned along the way there, is how metaphor fits into the process, is it that we’re having kind of pre-​metaphorical thoughts that then get articulated or crystallized or given some sort of resonance and purchase through metaphor? Or, is it that the metaphor is the very part of the thought process? I’m not sure whether it’s a bit like thought to language, it’s almost like within the thought is there a metaphorical element right at the inception or is it that we have some thought and then we almost kind of search cognitively for the metaphor to fit it? gareth.  Yes, well it’s interesting because the brain is in a way the metaphor for the computer and the computer and search and all the rest of it feeds back and so it’s a kind of circular process. But you see the point is that what we’re seeing is this residual pattern; it’s what’s left over in terms of metaphors and embedded in language, right, and history and it’s filtered out, like some metaphors go nowhere or they’re for the moment, they’re not going to resonate in a longer frame. Others will take hold and perhaps this is what becomes the basis for the lasting metaphors—​ the ones that are really built into language, into thought, into mythology, into the way we see things. I really do believe, though, one of the fundamental points—​I talk about it in Images of Organization—​I believe, is how metaphor is about understanding the unknown through the known, right? And so, this is directly parallel to the solutions, waiting for the problems, and so basically you go to what you know to understand the unknown. It’s virtually impossible to create a metaphor of the unknown, because you’ve got no reference point. This . . . it’s very interesting. cliff.  But within that, and just to be playful, how do you know what you don’t know, to know that what you do know will fit what you don’t know? gareth.  Well, you don’t, it’s intuitive. It’s muddling through, I had to use that idea. cliff.  So, is it . . . but I’m wondering is if . . . there must be something that’s partially known about the unknown that resonates with the known to create . . . gareth.  Yes, that’s exactly it. You’ve got the word, “resonates.” cliff.  But in doing that are we kind of . . . is it in one sense therefore not entirely a kind of, a new process as much as a process of continuity rather than discontinuity?

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    63 So, in other . . . let me put it in another way, so we could actually start from the position, and you mentioned that metaphor is as much about difference as similarity and the way things . . . gareth.  Yes.

From Resonance to Dissonance cliff.  We could start from a position of dissonance. We could actually ask ourselves the way that something isn’t like something else and that might generate alternative, different types of insight. gareth.  Yes, you could. cliff.  And I wonder whether we kind of . . . I don’t know whether in our pre​ programming we’re pre disposed to look for similarities in phenomenon rather than look for differences. I’m not really sure. gareth.  Well academia’s looking for differences and you can argue that’s what propels it all, but the point is that could be a useful technique or tool, but I think that the fundamental thing is to find out what’s similar, because that’s what helps to make something sensible to oneself. david.  It makes me think about this whole issue of the difference between tame and wicked and how we go about resolving, particularly wicked problems, it’s much more about an accent on the question. So, you start with a problem, but it’s the questions that solve the problem and you have to think about. It’d be interesting to sort of overlay the metaphorical or metaphor . . . the process of metaphor on that, because of course the tame problem is just a problem, you can just apply any metaphor to that to solve it very quickly, there is a known, whereas a wicked is an unknown. It’s something you haven’t encountered before. gareth.  The tame are the technical ones, right? david.  Yeah, well they’re just ones that you’ve encountered before, so you know. gareth.  Yes, exactly. It’s fascinating, though, because . . . I don’t want to play it out too much here, but that whole idea of the modern search engine, it presents . . . the answers are there and that’s what’s encoded in the database and the questions activate the answers, right? david.  Yes. gareth.  Which is, if you go back to the whole process of metaphor, this I think is what’s happening. You’ve got a residue of experience, if I can put it that way, and you’re encountering a new experience and so you try to encounter, understand, the new through the old, through the preexisting, and this is where the crossing over is ontologically. That, I believe is in the whole nature of being a human being—​it’s basically the process that’s going on here. So, metaphors, metaphor as a process is going on in this way and then it’s resulting in all these things that we as academics will analyze and then refine.

64    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT cliff.  Yeah, yeah. gareth.  You see you come back to it, it’s this interplay of metaphor that’s important and if you go with the view that metaphor is inherently . . . it creates insight, but it’s inherently limited, inherently distorting and that it will never give you the whole picture, then automatically you should be looking for counter-​ metaphors [i.e., other alternative metaphors] as a source of overcoming the limitations of what you’re doing. So, it’s . . . Cliff, it’s this point you’ve made about paying attention to the differences, right. The limitations are the down side and I think this has huge, huge impact for science, because crudely put, science becomes driven by metaphor, elaborated through metonymical reductions and through the concepts that are given, that are then basically treated as an . . . almost an objective construct. So you look for an objective affirmation of the concept, but in the meantime, you’re then reducing and narrowing your vision and at the very same time there are these other dimensions to what you’re studying being eliminated from view. So, this is where I think the interplay of metaphor in science, for example . . . or at least awareness that what you’re doing is mining a metaphor in a reductive way. I think it’s so vital, from a philosophy of science point of view, that this be understood. cliff.  Is there . . . and I don’t know the answer to this, I’m just raising it. Is there a sense in which that reduction reaches a point at which the reduction then reverses or flips? So, in the kind of almost Kuhnian sense of paradigmatic shift [see Kuhn 1962], is it that the reduction leads to kind of a point which is reductionist to the point it no longer has meaning and it no longer works and there is a flip, or not? I’m not sure whether it’s this kind of hegemonic struggle position, or just something that becomes so stale and so well understood that something else emerges instead. gareth.  Or generates anomalies. cliff.  Yeah. gareth.  Like it just . . . that’s where the anomalies come from. What is the anomaly? It’s something that lies outside the explanation of the theory. cliff.  Yes. And the reduction has to occur for things to be outside, because if you don’t reduce it to begin with and it’s broad, the anomalies are within it. It’s only by working through to the kind of pure metonymical reduction that you can see the things outside of it. So, you almost have to . . . almost focus on reduction that then leads to a process of looking beyond and the generative process beyond that. gareth.  Exactly. So, the thesis leads to the antithesis, the driving argument and the style of research that you engage in will lead other people then to create the opposite and so going back to the critiques of your work, right. It’s inevitable, whatever you say, someone else is going to have a go and take it on in terms of the limits to what it is that you were saying. So, it’s this . . . and as academics, as scientists, we’ve got to engage in reduction, otherwise we’re just poets, right? We’re just engaging in . . . or people in the domain of literature that we’re not in the domain of science or science, in quotes, which most academics in our domain would see themselves as being engaged. I’m really taken by this. And, it’s being

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    65 expressed by this notion of the other: thesis—​antithesis. Everybody is creating a counter-​position and so in order to create that counter-​position, I’ve seen a huge . . . in a lot of critiques of my work [see critiques by Pinder and Bourgeois 1982; Bourgeois and Pinder 1983]—​you create it as almost a straw man . . . cliff.  I’ve got to be honest, though, I quite like it when people do that, because it forces me to think through in different ways the way in which I make sense of phenomena. So, it’s not that I come around to a way of thinking, it’s that I think, well this bit and that bit . . . david.  Well, you explain context . . . cliff.  Yeah, but it’s not so much that I develop a better reinforced rationale for my thinking, it’s that I think it forces me to rethink, in subtle ways at least, the way I think. So, in other words you have to go further, you have to . . . but it’s not about explanation, that’s the thing, it’s not about making it clearer. I think it forces us to shift, albeit in different ways, not to accommodate entirely the other person at all, but it forces us to think through our thinking. I’d rather talk to people that don’t agree with me, than people that do, and I’ve learnt most, I think, from people that don’t take the same perspectives on phenomena as me. gareth.  I’m 100% with you. It’s all about dialogue and it’s all about trying to refine your understanding and you refine your understanding through critique. Another thought that I’ve been working on in response to this stuff is whether metonymy sometimes is the spark for the development of metaphor. You know the way of presenting it is how a metaphor creates a mode of understanding is through the naming of the elements of the metaphor, or what you mean as you . . . for yourself, articulate what the metaphor means or you articulate for others, that naming process occurs. But, equally going back to the way the brain self-​organizes knowledge, then it wouldn’t be a one-​way street. Actually, metonymical reduction can provide the spark for another metaphor or impetus for one. So, I think it goes around and it’s linking to the importance of the point you’re making, Cliff, about “the different,” right. In making a detailed statement about something, you may provide that impetus to something else happening and that’s how it becomes open and self-​organizing.

The Scope for Other Tropes gareth.  There’s one other thing that I wanted to put on the table here. If you look at the main tropes, there’s metaphor, metonymy, there’s synecdoche and there’s irony. And, I’ve only focused on the first two, particularly the former and the interesting thing is whether there’s any legs to the others, and I’ll be provocative here, just throw it out in other words. I think in a way irony is just metaphor playing on the opposite of what you might think. You know what I mean? Organization is chaos. That’s what I think. It’s finding a metaphor that’s almost a complete deconstruction of the original idea and so, okay, I think there’s a lot that you can do with irony, but

66    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT I don’t see it as anything that’s really different from metaphor, other than . . . and I’m pushing this out for discussion. david.  That’s a hard . . . it also depends . . . and it’s a great question . . . it also depends on how you see the tropes, because some people talk about metaphor as almost a master trope, don’t they, and . . . gareth.  Yes, that’s the way I see it. david.  . . . flowing from. gareth.   Because it’s a crossing. david.   As opposed to independent . . . cliff.   I take the opposite view. The opposite view being that irony requires sophisticated processes of cognition in its own right. In order to generate metaphor, you only have to understand some points of similarity. But, in order to generate irony, you have to understand the points of difference and similarity. david.   Right. cliff.   Because in order to create irony you have to be able to say how something which is different could be folded back on itself. david.   Right. cliff.   Yeah, the “juxtaposing of opposites” is irony. gareth.   Yeah. cliff.   So take, for instance, an example provided by Dolly Parton. She said: “it takes a lot of money to look this cheap.” So, you have to understand both the kind of idea of “glamour” and “cheapness” in order to fold them back on themselves. Just like you have to understand “chaos” and “organization” to be able to then think about the points of similarity. So, I think actually it’s . . . ultimately . . . I don’t like the idea of metaphor being of higher status than irony. And, actually to go back to something you said earlier on, the processes are still metaphorical in nature. But, I think the actual phenomena, metaphor and irony, are different, but I think the process is the same process. gareth.   You’ve got it, and that’s the crossing, right, it’s the juxtaposition and that’s why . . . so that the concepts themselves are just products of this and I agree with you. So, what we’re saying then, recognize the huge role of irony as a metaphorical form . . . cliff.   And that’s the problem for me, some positions or perspectives become overused or dominant. Metaphor has tremendous value. Irony has tremendous value. The processes are both metaphorical, albeit they play out with slightly different emphasis. But, I think irony is tremendously underused. So, I’ll give you an example of something which I throw out with classes, which forces them to think. I use the expression, I say: “Management consultants are like social activists, it’s just that social activists care more and they don’t get paid.” Now that forces students to think about “similarity-​in-​difference,” and that can create new insight in the way that if you said, “A management consultant’s like a navigator,” then that’s, because . . . that’s metaphorical rather than ironic, you’re not going to necessarily generate the same insights. So, you can . . . although they’re similar processes, the slightly different emphasis can lead to different outcomes and I think they’re both valuable. But, I don’t think irony has been used as fully as a generative tool in

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    67 organizational theorizing in the way that it could have done. Probably because we haven’t had someone write Ironies of Organization in the way we’ve had somebody writing Images of Organization, so it’s back to the way you dominate the field. It’s your fault! [Laughter] gareth.   Well, that’s what people seem to accuse me of, opening up the field and closing it down simultaneously. Yes, that’s absolutely it, and that’s a take away for me for sure. It’s not used enough as a generative tool. david.   It’s never . . . no one seems to explore it. I don’t know if there’s value in it because I’ve never thought about it, if I’ve got to be honest. gareth.   It’s so confusing, you have to think it through . . . david.  It’s the poor relative of the four tropes. gareth.  Yeah, exactly, but that’s a very good point, I think. It’s pushing the boundaries. Irony is a form of metaphor, it’s the same process, so it’s not metaphor versus irony, it’s a type . . . it’s a particular use of metaphor, but it’s one that challenges and pushes the boundaries much more so than a simple metaphor would do. That’s very nice.

Concluding Thoughts The conversation with Gareth Morgan can be seen as an instance of “generative dialogue” (Gergen et al. 2004) insofar as the process of real-​time co-​construction produced insights beyond those initially held by any of the interlocutors. The unfolding discussion also had a discernible narrative and flow as it moved from initially questioning the dominant perspective on “metaphor” (as opposed to “metaphors”), to a consideration of other ways of thinking, and then proposing an alternative and potentially productive direction for future metaphorical inquiry. In terms of specific insights, three main things have arisen. First, the discussion has drawn attention to the need to complement the logic of metaphorization and the thought processes attached to it (i.e., understanding an abstract target domain through the carrying over of properties from a concrete source domain) with more provisional, “correspondence-​based forms of metaphorization” (where there is an interaction between quasi-​concrete target and source domains which generates a new synthetic domain/​construct). Second, opening up to a more tentative approach also draws attention to the emergent qualities of metaphor (i.e., “residual patterns of understanding” and “the grab of solutions which search for problems”). Engaging with this perspective requires us to relax the extent to which we see metaphors as being relatively “fixed” and “concrete” in nature. Finally, the formulation of “irony-​based metaphorization” highlights the need to consider points of dissimilarity and dissonance with regard to target and source

68    CLIFF OSWICK AND DAVID GRANT domains. Moreover, counterbalancing the dominance and privileging of resonance-​ based metaphors with dissonance-​based forms of metaphorical inquiry offers significant potential for generating more radical organizational insights and new ways of thinking.

References Bourgeois, V. Warren, and Craig C. Pinder. 1983. “Contrasting Philosophical Perspectives in Administrative Science: A Reply to Morgan.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (4): 608–​13. Burrell, W. Gibson, and Gareth Morgan. 1979. Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. London: Heinemann. Cornelissen, Joep P. 2005. “Beyond Compare: Metaphor in Organization Theory.” Academy of Management Review 30 (4): 751–​64. Dyson, George. 2012. Turing’s Cathedral: The Origins of the Digital Universe. London: Penguin. Fauconnier, Gilles, and Mark Turner. 2002. The Way We Think: Conceptual Blending and the Mind’s Hidden Complexities. New York: Basic Books. Gergen, Kenneth J., Mary M. Gergen, and Frank J. Barrett. 2004. “Dialogue: Life and Death of the Organization.” In The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse, edited by David Grant, Cynthia Hardy, Cliff Oswick, and Linda Putnam, 39–​59. London: SAGE. Grant, David, and Cliff Oswick, eds. 1996. Metaphor and Organizations. London: SAGE. Grant, David, and Cliff Oswick. 2017. “Organization as Affect: Moving on Metaphorically.” In Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, edited by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam, 205–​16. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Kuhn, Thomas S. 1962. The Structure of Scientific Revolutions. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Morgan, Gareth. 1980. “Paradigms, Metaphors and Puzzle Solving in Organizational Theory.” Administrative Science Quarterly 25 (4): 605–​22. Morgan, Gareth. 1981. “The Schismatic Metaphor and Its Implications for Organizational Analysis.” Organization Studies 2 (1): 23–​44. Morgan, Gareth. 1983. “More on Metaphor: Why We Cannot Control Tropes in Administrative Science.” Administrative Science Quarterly 28 (4): 601–​7. Morgan, Gareth. 1984. “Opportunities Arising from Paradigm Diversity.” Administration & Society 16 (3): 306–​27. Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE. Morgan, Gareth. 1996. “Is There Anything More to Be Said about Metaphor?” In Metaphor and Organizations, edited by David Grant and Cliff Oswick, 227–​40. London: SAGE. Morgan, Gareth. 2011. “Reflections on Images of Organization and Its Implications for Organization and Environment.” Organization & Environment 24 (4): 459–​78. Oswick, Cliff, and David Grant. 2016. “Re-​imagining Images of Organization: A Conversation with Gareth Morgan.” Journal of Management Inquiry 25 (3): 338–​43.

DEFINING, REFINING, AND REDEFINING METAPHOR    69 Oswick, Cliff, David Grant, and Rosie Oswick. 2020. “Categories, Crossroads, Control, Connectedness, Continuity, and Change: A Metaphorical Exploration of COVID-​19.” Journal of Applied Behavioral Science 56 (3): 284–​8. Oswick, Cliff, and Philip Jones. 2006. “Beyond Correspondence? Metaphor in Organization Theory.” Academy of Management Review 31 (2): 483–​5. Oswick, Cliff, Tom Keenoy, and David Grant. 2002. “Metaphor and Analogical Reasoning in Organization Theory: Beyond Orthodoxy.” Academy of Management Review 27 (2): 294–​303. Oswick, Rosie, and Cliff Oswick. 2020. “‘Identity Work’: A Metaphor Taken Literally?” In The Oxford Handbook of Identities in Organizations, edited by Andrew D. Brown, 68–​83. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Pinder, Craig C., and V. Warren Bourgeois. 1982. “Controlling Tropes in Administrative Science.” Administrative Science Quarterly 27 (4): 641–​52.

chapter 4

de ad and aliv e , sl e e pi ng an d waking meta ph ors The Spectrum of Metaphor and the Multimodality of Discourse cornelia müller

Introduction The spectrum of metaphor changes when moving scholarly attention from the poetic to the prosaic (Cameron 2003: 6). This chapter is an invitation to reconsider the spectrum of metaphor as it has been conceived by historical metaphor theories in rhetoric, literature, phraseology, lexicology, and historical linguistics, and more recently by applied linguistic and cognitive theories of metaphor. The spectrum of metaphor was always characterized by a tension between highly conventional, opaque, “dead” metaphors and the novel, highly creative, “live” metaphors (cf. Müller 2008a: chap. 2). The two poles concerned different interests in language reflection: creative, novel, “alive” metaphors were the object of interest for literary criticism and rhetoric, while the highly conventional, opaque, “dead” metaphors, on the other hand, attracted the interest of historical linguistics, phraseology, and lexicology. The latter were interested in the role of metaphoric lexemes and phrasemes in language change and the former were interested in the role of metaphoric expressions as a contribution to poetics of texts. Over the past decades, the study of metaphor as a facet of the everyday, ordinary use of language has received increasing attention. Applied Linguistics and Cognitive Linguistics in particular have addressed a third dimension of the metaphoric spectrum: conventional, transparent, “dormant” (in Black’s 1993 terms) metaphors. Cognitive linguistic approaches to metaphors in everyday language

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    71 treat them as expressions of metaphoric concepts (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff and Turner 1989). Applied Linguistics, in contrast, studies the role and functions of metaphors in language as it is used in a multitude of situated contexts (Cameron and Low 1999; Cameron 2008). Applied linguists study metaphoric language use in written and spoken as well as in monomodal and multimodal forms of discourse (Cameron et al. 2009; Cameron and Maslen 2010). In this vein, and in opposition to the elevated role of novel metaphor in poetic language, Cameron (2003: 7) draws our attention to Bakhtin: The prosaic for Bakhtin is the site of linguistic creativity. Creative acts take place in ordinary events working with the raw material of the everyday, not just in the special exceptional events that are labelled “creative.”

Reflecting on metaphors as dead and alive, sleeping and waking is an invitation to consider the creativity of metaphor in the mundane forms of language usage (Müller 2008a, 2008b, 2017). In the following, this spectrum of metaphor is firstly disentangled (1), then a shift from metaphor to metaphoricity is made (including tools for documenting degrees of metaphoricity) (2), and finally (3), the temporal dynamics of metaphor in a situated multimodal face-​to-​face context is illustrated with an interview with former US president Barack Obama. The chapter concludes on some of the theoretical and methodological consequences for studying metaphor in verbal and multimodal discourses.

The Spectrum of Metaphor The four terms “dead” and “alive,” “sleeping” and “waking” describe the spectrum of metaphor. A closer look at them shows that they all address fascinating aspects of metaphor, some of which, however, have been privileged by students of metaphor over the past two millennia, ever since Aristotle’s reflections on poetics and his coining of the term “metaphor” (Aristotle 1995).

Back to the Origins of “Metaphor” In Ancient Greek metáphorá means “the transfer of something or somebody.” The verb from which the Greek noun is derived expresses the idea of moving an object from one place to another explicitly: meta-​pherro signifies “to transfer something or to move something to some other place” (Pape 1911: 156). Aristotle introduces it in his treatise Poetics (Aristotle 1995). Hence, Aristotle, by using the word metáphorá to

72   CORNELIA MÜLLER generally characterize words that are used in an unfamiliar way, employs a metaphor to characterize what metaphor is: a process where something is transferred or moved to another location. The transferred objects that Aristotle bears in mind are words (ónoma). What Aristotle adds to this idea of transfer or displacement is a specification of the kinds of objects that are transferred, an implication of the kinds of places these are moved to, an explication of the ways in which those places relate to each other, and an implication that all this takes place when people use language: the transferred objects are words, the places in play are places within language, and these places relate to each other based on four different meaning relations (genus-​species, species-​genus, species-​ species, analogy). To summarize: for Aristotle, metaphor is the transfer of words from one place in the language to another and this transfer is a form of language use. The reason why Aristotle was concerned with semantic relations is that they are a tool that writers apply in poetic texts. Aristotle’s Poetics is a treatise in which language is regarded as a medium for depicting people, their characters, and fates. Language is conceived as a mimetic medium, a tool that poets use differently in different genres such as epic, tragedy, and comedy. This is why Aristotle devotes a long passage at the end of his reflection on tragedy to what he terms “linguistic form.” In this section he gives a condensed account of basic properties of language as such: he describes in varying detail pragmatic, phonological, morphological, and semantic properties of language, including a description of the elements of language in general from letter to sentence. Note that this is the context in which he addresses the problem of metaphor. Metaphor is one of various unfamiliar ways of using words in general. Thus, although the treatment of metaphor is included in a treatise on poetic texts, and although the examples Aristotle gives are taken from poetic uses of language, the linguistic phenomena described are not unique properties of poetic language. The opposite is the case. They are properties of language in general which are used in specific ways in different poetic genres. Aristotle explicitly characterizes metaphor as a property of ordinary everyday language, which suits a specific form of poetic text, namely verses that imitate ordinary language. For Aristotle the problem is clear: poetic language may adopt a form of language use that is typically associated with ordinary language. Ever since Aristotle’s treatment this idea has survived and it is still present in the concept of “dead metaphors”: that is, lexicalized metaphors lacking a vital use as metaphors. Metaphors are, hence, a matter of language use per se and not solely a matter of a poetic use of language. To summarize: there is a tacit agreement in the history of reflections on verbal metaphors that metaphor is a matter of using ordinary language that is also used in poetic language. The excursion to the origins of “metaphor” in Aristotle’s thinking resonates with Bakhtin’s perspective on linguistic creativity as a matter of prosaic language use. In its original Aristotelian understanding, metaphor is a form of ordinary everyday language use that can be exploited in the creation of poetic texts.

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    73

“Dead” versus “Alive”—​a Categorical Distinction of Verbal Metaphors It is common in classical approaches to metaphor to distinguish “dead” from “alive” metaphors. Black, for example, discusses this distinction in a rather ironic manner, when he says that a “dead” metaphor is no more “alive” than a “corpse” (Black 1993: 25): For the only entrenched classification is grounded in the trite opposition (itself expressed metaphorically) between “dead” and “live” metaphors. This is no more helpful than, say, treating a corpse as a special case of a person: A so-​called dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all . . . (Black 1993: 25)

Notwithstanding this critical stance, the categorical distinction of metaphors that are opaque, highly conventionalized, and those that are transparent and novel remains a given in metaphor research. It is worthwhile spending a moment on the rationale that underlies this distinction. Typically, the distinctive criterion is the so-​called “vitality” of metaphors. In the literature, vitality is often not further specified explicitly, but it turns out that implicitly three criteria are held to determine whether a metaphor is considered vital (“alive”) or not (“dead”): transparency, conventionalization, and access to an original meaning. “Dead” metaphors are opaque, they are highly conventionalized, and their metaphoricity is not accessible to an average language user. Only by turning to a historical dictionary and looking up the etymology can their metaphoricity be recognized by a contemporary speaker of a language. Metaphors that are considered “alive” must—​accordingly—​be transparent, not conventionalized, and their metaphoricity must be salient. They characterize creative language use and, in particular, the highly artistic use of poetic language. These are the type of verbal metaphors that have received longstanding interest in literature, in particular. In this tradition, “dead” metaphors are simply not metaphors at all. Yet, for historical linguistics and historical anthropology, dead metaphors have received and continue to receive interest, since they are one important aspect of language change and language evolution more generally: conventionalized metaphors (be they opaque or not) play a crucial role in processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization and they sometimes preserve historical practices that once have served as experiential source domain for a new metaphor. Here is an early historical linguistic description of this process: the uninterrupted process whereby metaphors become hackneyed during the lifetime of a language as they lose more and more of their original color and fade, and many of which completely die as pictures and degenerate into stark verbal sounds that immediately call to mind the designated thing without reminding us in the slightest of the picture. (Brinkmann 1878: 17)

Brinkmann points out that the conventionalization of a metaphoric expression naturally involves a fading of metaphoricity, a loss of vitality.

74   CORNELIA MÜLLER The spectrum of verbal metaphor

Transparency

Conventionalization

Consciousness

Vitality

Aspects of language

Dead

No

Yes

No

Low

Lexicalization Grammaticalization

Alive

Yes

No

Yes

High

Creative language use

­figure 4.1  The spectrum of verbal metaphor in metaphor theories: a categorical distinction

To summarize: the spectrum of verbal metaphor in classical accounts involves a categorical distinction between two types of metaphor: dead and alive. The distinction is based on the idea of a variable vitality of metaphoric meaning. Vitality is determined in terms of the transparency, conventionalization, and consciousness of a verbal metaphoric expression. Figure 4.1 gives an overview of this categorical distinction. This short discussion of “dead” and “alive” metaphors reveals that the distinction reflects not only different research foci on verbal metaphor, but also different “life-​ worlds” of metaphor in language—​a point that the next section elaborates.

“Dormant”/​“Entrenched” versus “Active”/​“Novel”—​a Vitality Distinction of Transparent Verbal Metaphors We have indicated above that the rather ubiquitous life-​world of verbal metaphors is the lexicon of a language. Metaphors are recognized as a major linguistic source for “filling gaps in the lexicon” (cf., e.g., Black 1962: 32–​3; Ullmann 1962/​ 1967: 213). However, these new metaphoric expressions have sometimes even been denied the status of being a metaphor at all, being termed instead as “catachresis.” See how radically Black excludes catachreses from the spectrum of phenomena described as metaphor: A so-​called dead metaphor is not a metaphor at all, but merely an expression that no longer has a pregnant metaphorical use. A competent reader is not expected to recognize such a familiar expression as “falling in love” as a metaphor, to be taken au grand sérieux. Indeed it is doubtful whether that expression was ever more than a case of catachresis (using an idiom to fill a gap in the lexicon). (Black 1993: 25, emphasis in original)

Catachreses, such as “the leg of a table,” “the foot of a mountain,” and “the arm of a chair,” are a major source of language change, but are characterized by Black as “dead” even

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    75 though their metaphorical origin is fully transparent. The motivation for this is their assumed lack of vitality for a “familiar reader.” Yet, in spite of the exclusion of dead metaphors, Black proposes a tripartite classification, which distinguishes extinct, dormant, and active metaphors. The extinct metaphors are the “dead” metaphors discussed above (opaque, highly conventional, and not conceived as metaphors by a “competent reader”). More interesting is the new category of dormant verbal metaphors: they share with dead metaphors a high degree of conventionalization, but they differ from dead or extinct metaphors in that they are transparent. They are typically not the focus of attention; they are assumed to receive little, if any conscious attention. Active metaphors are the “alive” metaphors considered above (i.e., those that are transparent, not-​conventional, consciously perceived, and hence vital). However, even though Black presents this tripartite classification, he underlines that for him: “not much is to be expected of this schema or any more finely tuned substitute” (Black 1993: 25) and continues that in his remaining reflections on metaphor he “shall be concerned hereafter only with metaphors needing no artificial respiration, recognized by speaker and hearer as authentically ‘vital’ or ‘active’ ” (Black 1993: 25). Black’s focus as a language philosopher and semanticist is on the “alive” range of the spectrum of verbal metaphors. He is thus interested in those forms that have attracted the interest of literary critics and rhetoricians over the long history of reflections on metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory put forward a counter-​position. For them, conventionalized (“entrenched”) metaphors are more powerful because they “provide basic structural frames for the organization of thought” (Müller 2008a: 10). Here is the argument formulated by Lakoff and Turner: The mistake derives from a basic confusion: it assumes that those things in our cognition that are most alive and most active are those that are conscious. On the contrary, those that are most alive and most deeply entrenched, efficient, and powerful are those that are so automatic as to be unconscious and effortless. (Lakoff and Turner 1989: 129)

We note, then, that the vitality and the consciousness of verbal metaphors are judged controversially in theories of metaphor. Figure 4.2 gives an overview of the vitality spectrum of transparent verbal metaphors under discussion. Whatever position one adopts, there are some exceptionally noteworthy aspects that the reflections on a vitality spectrum of metaphors bring to the fore: what looks like a categorical distinction of verbal metaphors can be looked at as a vitality cline of metaphoricity. Put differently, it is uncontroversial that verbal metaphors show variable degrees of metaphoricity; it is assumed that metaphorical linguistic forms participate in processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization (an essential of language change and language evolution); it is clear—​since Aristotle—​that metaphors are a matter of everyday language use.

76   CORNELIA MÜLLER The vitality spectrum of transparent verbal metaphors

Conventionalization Consciousness

Vitality

Dormant Entrenched

Yes

Little, if any

Little/High

Active Novel

No

Yes

Very high

Aspects of language

Lexicalization

Creative language use

­figure 4.2  A vitality distinction of transparent verbal metaphor in metaphor theories

From Metaphor to Metaphoricity in Multimodal Discourse When we take the Aristotelian claim seriously and study metaphors in actual discourse, specifically when we turn our attention to how people use metaphors when they talk to one another, not in written texts, but in face-​to-​face situations of language use, there is one thing that jumps out at the attentive observer: metaphoricity extends beyond verbal language. In particular, for students of gesture it is blatantly obvious that verbal metaphors are very often “gestured” (cf. Cienki and Müller 2008a, 2008b, 2014). Using language in everyday situated contexts is mostly face-​to-​face interaction. Put differently, it is multimodal interaction. Speaking is more than moving lips, speaking is embedded body-​movement. We move hands or arms to depict shapes or enact actions, we point with fingers or with a head shift, we tilt our heads and shrug our shoulders when we are doubting or lacking knowledge of something, we reject an argument by holding up the hands as if pushing something back, or embody a political battle as a boxing-​fight. In brief, spoken language is multimodal and we see that in multimodal discourse verbal metaphoricity spreads across modalities. It is this characteristic of multimodal discourse that we can utilize to empirically determine degrees of metaphoricity in multimodal discourse.

Sleeping and Waking Metaphors—​Degrees of Metaphoricity In this section, a dynamic range of metaphoricity is suggested that responds to the dynamic nature of metaphoricity in verbal metaphors and the spreading of metaphoricity

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    77 across modalities. What Black (1993) has referred to as “artificial respiration” is in fact a natural feature of the multimodal life-​worlds of metaphors in their everyday language-​ in-​use contexts: indeed, it is common that metaphoricity of dormant and entrenched verbal metaphors is foregrounded dynamically by co-​expressing metaphoricity in gesture, by elaborating it verbally, or by inserting a metaphoric gesture into a speech-​pause with a deictic marker (Müller 2008a: sect. 3.3; Müller and Tag 2010). What happens then is not “artificial respiration,” it is situated, embodied understanding of metaphoricity in the here and now of communicative interaction. In these communicative moments, metaphoricity is foregrounded to various degrees; it is moved more or less into the focus of shared attention, and the forms in which it is gesturally displayed, and verbally or pictorially elaborated, express a local, in situ, understanding of metaphoricity—​an understanding of metaphoricity that responds to the here and now of a particular situation and a specific context of use. The boxing gesture mentioned above illustrates such a specific metaphorical understanding of the verbal metaphor “political battle” that belongs to the moment of the conversation in which it emerged. Conceived in this way, the metaphoricity of verbal transparent metaphors is a dynamic aspect of meaning that responds to the requirements of local and situated pro­ cesses of meaning-​making as interactive practices. The degree of metaphoricity of a verbal metaphor depends therefore on the concrete contexts of use: metaphoricity can be backgrounded in one context and variably foregrounded in others. The vitality of metaphors conceived in this manner is bound to communicative practices and activities of foregrounding metaphoricity. One obvious way of doing this is the co-​expression of metaphoricity in speech and gesture or in text and image (Müller 2008a: chap. 3; Müller and Schmitt 2015). The terms “sleeping” and “waking” capture the dynamic range of degrees of meta­ phoricity terminologically. Sleeping metaphors correspond with Black’s term “dormant”; these metaphors are transparent, typically conventionalized, and unlikely to be attended to in a communicative interaction. Waking metaphors are transparent (conventionalized or novel), and attended to. Waking metaphors are considered as vital because they are foregrounded and therefore receive interactive attention. Metaphors are highly waking when foregrounding activities accumulate, when they are in the focus of interactive attention; they are somewhat waking when they receive some attention. Figure 4.3 gives an overview of the degrees of metaphoricity of transparent verbal metaphors. The empirical criterion used to determine the degree of activated metaphoricity is “focus of attention.” Sleeping verbal metaphors are not the focus of attention; they are not actively foregrounded. Waking verbal metaphors are attended to in variable degrees. Instead of connecting vitality of metaphors with assumptions of conscious awareness, in this account, the vitality of metaphors is bound to the empirically observable criterion of foregrounded metaphoricity and attentional focus on metaphoricity.

78   CORNELIA MÜLLER Degrees of metaphoricity of Conventionalization transparent verbal metaphors

Attention

Vitality

Aspects of language

Low Sleeping

Typically yes

No (Backgrounded)

Little, if any

Lexicalization Grammaticalization

Little Waking

Yes

Yes (Foregrounded)

High

Lexicalization Creative language use

High Waking

No

Yes (Foregrounded focus of attention)

Very high

Creative language use

­figure 4.3  From sleeping to waking: degrees of metaphoricity of transparent verbal metaphors

Foregrounding of Metaphoricity as Interactive Practice and Some Thoughts about Methodology Foregrounding of metaphoricity is a communicative practice that contributes essentially in the attempt to create mutual understanding. It is a “public” achievement, requiring communicative effort and interactive cooperation. Because it is “public,” students of metaphor can make use of those public forms and practices employed to foreground metaphoricity. The multimodality of metaphoric expression and different means to shift the attention to metaphoricity are of key importance here. The basic idea of this rationale is twofold: 1. Expressing metaphoricity in more than one modality (speech, gesture, image, etc.) foregrounds metaphoric meaning. This foregrounding practice follows the principle of iconicity: more material is more meaning. 2. The more expressive cues point toward a given metaphoric expression, the more it is foregrounded. These cues profile verbal and multimodal metaphors and use interactive, semantic, and syntactic means to increase the salience of metaphoric meaning in a given context. To conceive of foregrounding of metaphoricity as an interactive practice follows from the assumption that “a salient performance foregrounds a verbal or gestural metaphoric expression for an attending co-​participant” (Müller and Tag 2010: 95, emphasis in original). Conversational partners achieve this by employing specific (a) interactive or (b) syntactic and semantic means.

(a) Interactive Means of Foregrounding Metaphoricity Interactive means concern ways of achieving a shared focus of attention in a conversational encounter (cf. Streeck 1988, 1993, 2009; Gullberg and Kita 2009; Alibali and

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    79 Kita 2010). Two basic forms of foregrounding a metaphoric expression and of making metaphoricity a relevant object of attention for a co-​participant are distinguished (Müller and Tag 2010): 3. performing a metaphoric expression in a marked way by, for instance, enlarging a gesture so that a co-​participant cannot overlook it, or by highlighting a verbal metaphor prosodically; 4. gazing at a metaphoric gesture, which turns the gesture into a highly relevant interactive object of attention; it invites co-​participants to look at the gesture too (Goodwin 1981; Streeck 1993).

(b) Syntactic and Semantic Means of Foregrounding Metaphoricity Syntactic and semantic means concern different ways in which gestures are integrated in the unfolding of a metaphorical multimodal utterance (Müller 2008b; Müller and Tag 2010: 95; Ladewig 2021). Gesture-​speech integration is a complex issue (Ladewig 2021) but what is essential for the purpose of foregrounding of metaphoricity are particularly those forms of integration where gestural metaphors are turned into an obligatory part of an utterance. Again, we distinguish two basic forms of foregrounding metaphoricity: 5. inserting a gesture into a syntactic gap and/​or a speech-​pause; 6. indicating the semantic relevance of a gesture with a deictic expression such as “like this” (cf. Streeck 1993). In short, there are interactive, semantic, and syntactic means or resources that speakers employ and that make metaphoricity an object of shared interactive attention. These means, resources, or foregrounding practices offer a methodological grasp on the issue of metaphoric vitality. A “Metaphor Foregrounding Analysis” offers a systematic account of these means and can be used to empirically document different forms and the variable degrees of metaphoricity in multimodal discourse (Müller and Tag 2010; Müller and Schmitt 2015; Müller and Kappelhoff 2018: appendix).

Temporal Dynamics of Metaphoricity in Multimodal Discourse So far, this chapter has dealt with the dynamics of metaphoricity only in relation to single metaphoric expressions, be they verbal or verbo-​gestural. In this last section, we will briefly consider the temporal dynamics of waking multimodal metaphors as they unfold along a sequence of talk and offer some examples of how gestural enactments

80   CORNELIA MÜLLER can concretize and foreground metaphoricity of verbal metaphors (Müller and Schmitt 2015 offer accounts of Metaphor Foregrounding Analysis; Müller 2017; Müller and Kappelhoff 2018 introduce analysis and theory of multimodal metaphors; Müller forthcoming offers a survey of the Methods for Gesture analysis). The sequence is taken from a German talk-​show Marcus Lanz, broadcast in Germany in the winter of 2020, featuring former US president Barack Obama on the occasion of the publication of his biography (vimeo 2020). The interview was carried out in English with German subtitles and is available online on YouTube. In the sequence to be considered here, Obama reflects upon the current tensions and extreme polarization that American society is facing at present and puts this situation in a historical perspective: And part of the [short pause] story of America is this battle between [short pause] those who want to include more in this idea of “we the people” and broaden our democracy, and broaden our economy to give opportunity to all people and those who think that those privileges belong to a few people not to all.

Figure 4.4 shows a transcript of the flow of metaphoricity as expressed multimodally.

G1 Part of the (0.8) the story of America is this battle between (0.8)

G2

G3

G4

those who want to include more people in this idea of we the people. [...]

G5a

G5b

and those who think that those privileges belong to a few people not to all. ­figure 4.4  Foregrounding and temporal dynamics of metaphoricity in multimodal discourse

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    81 When Obama speaks of the story of America as a kind of battle, he performs a boxing movement. The term “battle” is obviously used metaphorically; it is a conventionalized and transparent verbal metaphor that is embodied gesturally as a boxing-​movement (G1). Together, word and gesture form a verbo-​gestural metaphor. Metaphoricity of the conventionalized verbal metaphor is expressed verbally and gesturally; it is fore­ grounded and hence is waking. The foregrounding practice employed here follows the iconicity principle of “more material is more meaning.” In short, this is a case of a waking metaphor. The conventional but transparent verbal metaphor “battle” is actively foregrounded in this conversational encounter and its local, situated meaning is an embodied multimodal understanding of political battle as boxing-​fight. As Obama goes on to explain the two positions clashing in this battle, he performs a series of three gestures to describe an inclusive vision of American society. All three gestures create a round space in front of his body, but they do it in a slightly different manner: G2 goes along with “those who want to include more” and molds a big round space, acting as if embracing as many people as possible; G3 follows immediately and accompanies “this idea” with a gesture that outlines an “the idea” as an ephemeral circle. Also G4 follows right away: now a circle is molded as Obama specifies the idea of the American society he is about to describe as “we the people.” All three gestures are metaphoric—​they embody and elaborate the notion of inclusion that is introduced as a conventionalized and transparent verbal metaphor: “to include more people.” In that sense, metaphoricity of the verbal metaphor is once again foregrounded by being simultaneously expressed in gestures. Metaphoricity is elaborated, because we see two further variants of the circle as a gestural idea of inclusion: an outlined and a molded round shape that extends in the center of Obama’s gesture space. We see here an elaboration and unfolding of the gestural metaphor that happens across time and with it a temporal dynamics of foregrounding of metaphoricity adding to the foregrounding qua expressing a verbal metaphor also in gesture. The metaphorical scenario that Obama is about to produce goes on and, because a detailed analysis of the entire sequence extends the scope of this chapter, we move directly to the end of it, when Obama describes that in the history of American society the opposing position to giving “opportunity to all people” is “those who think that those privileges belong to few people not to all.” While he is saying “to a few” and “not to all,” he acts as if he would place two middle-​sized objects at the opposing sides of the gesture-​space. One could also say that G5a and G5b are placed on the right and left side of the “inclusive” circle that he has just created in the center of his gesture space. Again, these are gestural metaphors; however, they are not incorporating a concomitant verbal metaphor: rather they vary the gestural idea of an inclusive society as a large, round space located in the center, by forming two smaller spaces that are located at opposing sides of the inclusive central space. The gestures thus create their own line of metaphorical meaning and notably gestures G2, G3, and G4 receive Obama’s gaze and are interactively foregrounded, as relevant objects of interactive attention. With G5

82   CORNELIA MÜLLER Obama returns his gaze to his interviewer, but both are gestured so that they still remain in the visual field of both participants in this interview. Summing up, this illustration of metaphors in their multimodal life-​worlds indicates that metaphoricity spreads across modalities, can be more or less foregrounded, and unfolds as an embodied form of thinking in a temporal dynamic of multimodal discourse.

Conclusion Revisiting the longstanding terminological reflections on the spectrum of metaphor as being dead or alive, dormant/​entrenched, or active/​novel, depending upon the theoretical framework adopted, has revealed once more that metaphors have many life-​worlds in language: ranging from linguistic processes of lexicalization and grammaticalization to artistic, poetic forms of use. Taking recourse to the origins of the notion and the term “metaphor” has reminded us that Aristotle already saw that the first and foremost life-​ world of metaphor is ordinary use of everyday language. Poets use this linguistic resource to create highly artistic metaphors, yet as the analysis of the Obama sequence has indicated, a political speaker not only employs conventional metaphors, but transforms them into situated and personal forms of lived experience (“political battle” as “boxing-​ fight,” “inclusive society” as “embracing movement and a round space”) that extend over time and evolve as creative metaphorical thinking (Müller 2008a, 2008b, 2019; Müller and Kappelhoff 2018). Looking at metaphors in this way reveals them as vital resources for meaning-​ making. It shifts focus from the idea of metaphors as fixed lexical or cognitive units to metaphoricity as dynamic meaning-​making and embodied understanding. Paying attention to metaphoricity rather than to metaphors opens up a pathway to discover the poetic creativity in the mundane forms of multimodal discourses.

References Alibali, Martha. W., and Sotaro Kita. 2010. “Gesture Highlights Perceptually Present Information for Speakers.” Gesture 10 (1): 3–​28. Aristotle. 1995. Poetics. Translated by Stephen Halliwell. Cambridge, MA, and London: Harvard University Press. Black, Max. 1962. Models and Metaphors: Studies in Language and Philosophy. Ithaca, NY: Cornell University Press. Black, Max. 1993. “More about Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., edited by Andrew Ortony, 19–​41. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Brinkmann, Friedrich. 1878. Die Metaphern: Studien über den Geist der modernen Sprachen, vol. 1: Die Thierbilder der Sprache. Bonn: Adolph Marcus.

DEAD AND ALIVE, SLEEPING AND WAKING METAPHORS    83 Cameron, Lynne. 2003. Metaphor in Educational Discourse. London and New York: Continuum. Cameron, Lynne. 2008. “Metaphor and Talk.” In Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor, edited by Raymond W. Gibbs Jr., 197–​211. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Lynne, and Graham Low, eds. 1999. Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cameron, Lynne, and Robert Maslen, eds. 2010. Metaphor Analysis: Research Practice in Applied Linguistics, Social Science and the Humanities. London: Equinox. Cameron, Lynne, Robert Maslen, Zazie Todd, John Maule, Peter Stratton, and Neil Stanley. 2009. “The Discourse Dynamics Approach to Metaphor and Metaphor-​Led Discourse Analysis.” Metaphor and Symbol 24 (2): 63–​89. Cienki, Alan, and Cornelia Müller, eds. 2008a. Metaphor and Gesture. Amsterdam and Philadelphia, PA: John Benjamins. Cienki, Alan, and Cornelia Müller. 2008b. “Metaphor, Gesture and Thought.” In Cambridge Handbook of Metaphor and Thought, edited by Raymond W. Gibbs, 483–​501. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Cienki, Alan, and Cornelia Müller. 2014. “Ways of Viewing Metaphor in Gesture.” In Body–​ Language–​ Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill, and Jana Bressem, 1766–​81. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. Goodwin, Charles. 1981. Conversational Organization: Interaction between Speakers and Hearers. New York: Academic Press. Gullberg, Marianne, and Sotaro Kita. 2009. “Modulating Addressees’ Attention to Speech-​ Accompanying Gestures: Eye Movements and Information Uptake.” Journal of Nonverbal Behavior 33 (4): 251–​77. Ladewig, Silva H. 2021. Integrating Gestures: The Dimension of Multimodality in Cognitive Grammar. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: Chicago University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Turner. 1989. More than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphors. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Müller, Cornelia. 2008a. Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking: A Dynamic View. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Müller, Cornelia. 2008b. “What Gestures Reveal about the Nature of Metaphor.” In Metaphor and Gesture, edited by Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller, 219–​ 45. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Müller, Cornelia. 2017. “Waking Metaphors: Embodied Cognition in Multimodal Discourse.” In Metaphor: Embodied Cognition in Discourse, edited by Beate Hampe, 297–​316. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Müller, Cornelia. 2019. “Metaphorizing as Embodied Interactivity: What Gesturing and Film Viewing Can Tell Us about an Ecological View on Metaphor.” Metaphor and Symbol 34 (1): 61–​79. Müller, Cornelia. “A Toolbox of Methods for Gesture Analysis.” In Handbook of Gesture Studies, edited by Alan Cienki. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press, forthcoming. Müller, Cornelia, and Hermann Kappelhoff. 2018. Cinematic Metaphor: Experience–​ Affectivity–​Temporality. In collaboration with Sarah Greifenstein, Dorothea Horst, Thomas Scherer, and Christina Schmitt. Berlin and Boston, MA: De Gruyter Mouton.

84   CORNELIA MÜLLER Müller, Cornelia, and Christina Schmitt. 2015. “Audio-​ Visual Metaphors of the Financial Crisis: Meaning Making and the Flow of Experience.” Revista Brasileira de Linguística Aplicada/​Brazilian Journal of Applied Linguistics 15 (2): 311–​41. doi: 10.1590/​ 1984-​639820156315. Müller, Cornelia, and Susanne Tag. 2010. “The Dynamics of Metaphor: Foregrounding and Activating Metaphoricity in Conversational Interaction.” Cognitive Semiotics 6 (S1): 85–​120. Pape, Wilhelm. 1911. Handwörterbuch der griechischen Sprache. Braunschweig, Germany: Vieweg. Streeck, Jürgen. 1988. “The Significance of Gesture: How It Is Achieved.” Papers in Pragmatics 2 (1–​2): 60–​83. doi: 10.1075/​iprapip.2.1–​2.03str. Streeck, Jürgen. 1993. “Gesture as Communication 1: Its Coordination with Gaze and Speech.” Communication Monographs 60 (4): 275–​99. Streeck, Jürgen. 2009. Gesturecraft: The Manufacture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Ullmann, Stephen. 1962/​ 1967. Semantics: An Introduction to the Science of Meaning. Oxford: Blackwell. vimeo. 2020. “Barack Obama zu Gast bei ‘Markus Lanz’.” Marcus Lanz interview with Barack Obama, November 11. https://​vimeo.com/​481860​345.

chapter 5

t he m eaning of a word hans christian garmann johnsen

Introduction How does a word get meaning, and how do we know that the way we understand a word is correct? These are simple and yet complicated questions, and they are central to the discussion about metaphors: if it is difficult to explain what the meaning of a word is, the particular kinds of words or phrases which we call metaphors are probably even more difficult to explain. Therefore we have to say something about words and meaning in general, before we address metaphors. We assume that it is an ambition of science to be rather precise regarding what is said and meant by the words that are used. The challenge is no smaller if science includes metaphors. What are metaphors and what do they do (Midgley 2003; Lakoff and Johnson 2008)? For a start, metaphors can be simple or concrete linguistic expressions used to denote complex or abstract phenomena. For example, we say, “It is cold outside.” If you reply, “How cold?” we can respond by saying, “It is minus 10 degrees Celsius.” Then you reply, “Yes, that’s cold.” This is a simple conversation. But what if we say, “Our relationship is cold.” There is no way that we can specify what that means in terms of concrete things like Celsius. In this case, we are using cold as a metaphor. What does it mean to say that a relationship is cold? It means that some of the things that we associate with cold temperature can be translated into things that we also apply to relationships. For instance, when it is cold, it is less lively, flowers might be dead, things do not grow, . . . and people pack themselves in lots of clothes. A cold relationship will in the same way be distant, less lively, or less mutually encouraging. To go out in the cold is unpleasant. To meet a person where the relationship is cold, is also unpleasant. So, the commonality is unpleasantness, but “unpleasant” still means two different things. Thus, metaphors are not precise; they are about transfer of meaning. Furthermore, when we use metaphors to describe abstract terms like relationships, we are in a dual challenge: using abstract means to understand abstract things. Thus, the

86    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN discussion about “meaning” is central to the discussion about how we understand and use metaphors. As we shall see, this is relevant for the study of organizations.

Metaphors and Organizations Gareth Morgan, when he describes images of organization in his 1986 book, argues that they do not cover the whole meaning of an organization, but help us to focus on one or more essential aspects. At the same time, “organization” might be seen as an abstract concept. It covers lots of things. Of course, it can also be something concrete: this organization. Therefore, using metaphors in discussing organizations is related to what we mean when we use the term. When we talk about organizations in general, as an abstract term, we might like to pinpoint aspects of what this refers to, even to essential aspects of what they are. Here metaphors can be of help, because they make us see what is often not immediately present. And with abstract concepts, they are not even present at all; they are mere imaginings. When we talk about an organization, we might meet a different challenge: using metaphors might make concrete things more abstract. Let’s say we call the leader a “tyrant.” We might intend it metaphorically, meaning that the manager is centralizing decisions, is controlling employees’ work efforts, or is unwilling to listen to advice. Still, this does not make him or her a tyrant in the form of the rulers of Athens during the Ancient period. In this concrete case, one should rather refer to the leader being insensitive to input or controlling. Using metaphors in relation to concrete things might mislead as much as it illuminates (see Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume). In fact, Gareth Morgan referred to the fact that different philosophical traditions have resulted in different ideas relating to how one sees organizations (Morgan 2016). So, metaphors are not only different images of the same organization, but different images of different conceptions of the phenomenon of organization (see Arman and Wikström, Chapter 8 in this volume). Thus, the choice is not only between metaphors, but also between different underlying ideas or paradigms related to how we perceive an organization (see Bendl and Schmidt, Chapter 7 in this volume). Building on Burrell and Morgan (1979), Morgan (1980) argues that the relevance and meaning of metaphors differ between paradigms. Subsequently, metaphors are seen both as describing the essence of organizations and also as having a formative role in what organizations are. Referring to the work of Ernst Cassirer that we discuss below, Morgan argues: Through language, science, art, and myth, for example, humans structure their world in meaningful ways. These attempts to objectify a reality embody subjective intentions in the meanings that underwrite the symbolic constructs that are used. Knowledge and understanding of the world are not given to human beings by external events; humans attempt to objectify the world through means of essentially subjective processes. As Cassirer has emphasized, all modes of symbolic understanding

THE MEANING OF A WORD    87 possess this quality. Words, names, concepts, ideas, facts, observations, etc., do not so much denote external “things,” as conceptions of things activated in the mind by a selective and meaningful form of noticing the world, which may be shared with others. They are not to be seen as a representation of a reality “out there,” but as tools for capturing and dealing with what is perceived to be “out there.” (Morgan 1980: 613)

In order to put this argument in perspective, we will contrast it with two other philosophical positions—​ analytical philosophy and phenomenology—​ through a short journey into the philosophical discussion about what the “meaning” of a word, or a metaphor, means. We will try to argue that what we understand by “meaning” is central to the discussion about the use of metaphors in organizational theory.

Splitting Language and Mind Language and “meaning of words” are themes that have probably occurred within philosophy and science from the beginning. A recurrent theme in Plato’s dialogues is Socrates’ critical examination of what a word means (Nehring 1945). As the neo-​Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer (1874–​1945) points out, Plato, even if accepting myths, also fought against the Sophists and what he saw as their use of myths for manipulation (Cassirer 1946). But Plato also reflected on the problem of understanding the essence of things through words and reasoning, and thus the limits of words and language. For example, in Greater Hippas, we find the following passage: socrates.  Oh dear! Then the chances of finding out what the beautiful really is, has slipped through our fingers and vanished, since the appropriate has proved to be something other than beautiful. hippas.  Upon my word, Socrates, I would never have thought of it! socrates.  But still, my friend, do not let us give up yet. I have a sort of hope that the nature of beauty will reveal itself. (Plato 1996: 1548)

Moving into modern science, the English philosopher John Locke (1632–​1704) sets the scene for how language would be regarded as something that connects the mind and the world. His scheme looks like the following: All knowledge is developed from sensing. The mind receives several kinds of sense data and has a capacity to reflect on its own operations. Simple ideas are acknowledgments of simple form, like shape, hardness, hot/​cold, light/​dark. Thoughts on simple things can be verified by their correspondence to facts. Words put names on things, and language organizes words. Knowledge becomes external only through communication, and since no two persons are sensing the same thing, no two persons have the exact same knowledge. Thus, internal knowledge (thoughts/​ideas) is different form external knowledge: that is, the common meaning developed through communication.

88    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN This idea of how words and language work, in relation to the mind and to reality, was taken for granted until the late 19th century. For example, John Stuart Mill (1806–​73) in his great work on the philosophy of science, A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (1843), where he developed the hypothetical-​deductive method of science, made the point that science needs precise, well-​defined language and words. It is against this background that we can understand the significance of the linguistic turn in philosophy. The linguistic turn in philosophy was initiated by the German philosopher and mathematician Gottlob Frege (1848–​1925), with two short articles from 1892, On Sense and Reference (Über Sinn und Bedeutung) and Concept and Object (Ueber Begriff und Gegenstand), reprinted in Frege (2003). The philosophical significance of his argument was the separation between mind and thought on the one hand, and language on the other: thus he was removing sense from meaning. He writes: If we found “a =​a” and “a =​b” have different cognitive values, the explanation is that for the purpose of knowledge, the sense of a sentence, vs. the thought that is expressed by it, is no less relevant than its referent, i.e. its truth value. If now a =​b, then indeed the referent of “b” is the same as that of “a,” hence the truth value of “a =​b” is the same as that of “a =​a.” In spite of this, the sense of “b” might differ from that of “a,” and thereby the sense expressed in “a =​b” differs from that of “a =​a.” In that case, the two sentences do not have the same cognitive value. If we understand by “judgement” the advance from the thought to its truth value, as in the above paper, we can also say that the judgements are different. (Frege 2003: 34)

One could thereby argue that Frege separated language as an independent phenomenon, between thinking on the one hand, and the world on the other. This is not completely accurate, because language also expresses things that do not exist. Still, it is different from thought. The citation above shows that the sense of a word (and thus its relation to thinking) is different or decoupled from its reference (the thing in the world it refers to). The relation between sense and reference might be illustrated by a story referred to in the Norwegian philosopher Hans Skjervheim’s book, Objectivism and the Study of Man (1959). It’s the story about a guest who arrives at an inn and says to the host that he has been riding over the snow-​covered plain for several hours. The host replies that in fact he has been riding over the ice-​covered Boden See. Realizing the danger of riding over the shallow ice of the Boden See, the guest falls down dead. The point here is that the two phrases “riding over the snow-​covered plain” and “riding over the ice-​covered Boden See” refer to the same thing, namely the course that the guest had actually been following. But when it comes to sense, the two phrases represent two different things. Thus, language can have references independent of sense, and we can discuss the meaning of language independently of sense. The British philosopher Bertrand Russell (1872–​1970), with his 1905 paper “On Denoting,” responded to Frege. Russell tried to show how language can be reconstructed as purely logical and analytical statements. The point is that by doing this, one distinguishes between the form of language (which is analytical) and its content (which

THE MEANING OF A WORD    89 is synthetic). The debate between Russell and Frege became the foundation for analytical philosophy, but that is not a theme we will pursue here. Nevertheless, we might mention that later developments into a more pragmatic approach to analytical philosophy (Putnam 1974; Kripke 1980) have emphasized that natural (ordinary) language can indeed handle many of the philosophical challenges in analytical philosophy. Thus, this loosens up the strict divide between sense and reference. However, more relevant for our discussion is how the student of both Russell and Frege, the Austrian philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein (1889–​1951), took these arguments forward in his dissertation Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, published in 1922 (Wittgenstein 2013). According to Wittgenstein in his early work, the reason why language gives meaning to us, and a correct picture of the world, is because the structure of language and of the world is basically the same. Or, to turn it around: the things that language can say something about are those things that have the same structure as language itself. On these things, language can say something clearly and truthfully. As he wrote: “What we cannot speak about we must pass over in silence” (Wittgenstein 2013: 75). In this way, Wittgenstein argued that he had managed to demarcate what can be described as true facts, and thereby to avoid metaphysical speculation. Note that he dismissed these views in his later work (see Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume). Following Grayling (2001), this relation between words and reality can be seen as follows: the basic connection happens at the lowest, most fundamental level, because the arrangement of names in an elementary proposition will be a picture of the arrangement of objects that constitute a state of affairs. Subsequently, there is a parallel between the structure of the world and the structure of language (Grayling 2001; Russell 2013): the world is made up of Facts which are States of affairs, and which consist of Objects. Language consists of Propositions, which are made up of Elementary propositions, and which are made up of Names (which are the basic units of language). Based on, among others, Wittgenstein’s early work, the Vienna Circle tried to find a foundation for science that rules out metaphysical speculation and superstition. Thus, science should relate to facts of the world, and the language of science should be so precise that it only denotes facts. For this reason, Otto Neurath (1882–​1945) suggested that only physicalized language was acceptable for science (Neurath 1959). Increasingly, logical positivists would argue that the logic of language is the same for all sciences. Furthermore, this new perspective on science as unified science would rule out the discussion of epistemology in the form of theory of knowledge and phenomenology. The focus should be on language and the logical structure of propositions. As Neurath argued: The physicalistic language, unified language, is the Alfa and Omega of all science. There is no “phenomenal language” besides the “physical language,” no methodological solipsism besides some other possible position, no “philosophy,” no “theory of knowledge,” no new “Weltanshauung” beside the others: there is only Unified Science, with its laws and prediction. (Neurath 1959: 293)

90    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN Thus, logical positivists went a long way in trying to develop a totally new beginning for science. In this new beginning, only physicalized, clearly defined, logically structured propositions, based on atomic facts, would count as scientific. By this means, they hoped to avoid metaphysical speculation, as we will try to exemplify below. The problem with metaphysics, understood as our assumptions about the meaning of the world, is that it is inherent in our everyday language. If I say that “In Norway [or England, or France] there is a strong feeling of identity,” this is a sentence full of inherent metaphysics and ambiguity. While it could be argued that the word “Norway” (or “England” or “France”) points toward something existing and irreducible, although this can be questioned, the rest of the sentence would have large problems in meeting this criterion. Let’s say the sentence instead reads like this: “The Norwegian people have a strong feeling of identity.” We now want to make this sentence less metaphysical. To start with, who are the Norwegian people: everybody living within the territory of Norway, Norwegian citizens? What is “feeling”? Could we replace it with something physical, like emotional reactions in the form of an increased heartbeat? What about identity? Does it mean that one has feelings toward one another, or feelings toward national symbols like the flag, or hopes that Norway’s national male team will beat Sweden in football? Should all Norwegian citizens show these emotions, or should we remove children from this group, and limit ourselves to adults? Would, for instance, the following sentence be less metaphysical? “Adults living within the territory of Norway get an increased heartbeat if Norway scores against Sweden in football.” Of course, this example is deliberately made slightly funny, including the unlikely event that Norway will score against Sweden in football. The intention of the example is to illustrate both how difficult it is to represent a metaphysical and metaphorical language with words that point to more tangible or observable and physical facts, and that when we try to do so, we reduce the potential that was inherent in the original sentence. At the same time, one reduces ambiguity. Reducing the elusive term feeling of identity to the more factual term increased heartbeat can illustrate the logical positivists’ claim about physicalist language. The metaphor identity is thereby reduced to something physical and observable. Furthermore, the metaphysical assumption inherent in a word like “identity”—​that is, our assumption that there is a reality where identity plays a role, even if we cannot directly point to it—​is thereby overcome. Critics of logical positivism would claim that the physicalizing of terms erases so much of the meaning content of language that language becomes completely useless. Analytical philosophy, even while acknowledging this limit, still has as a program that what you say should be as exact or true as possible. Therefore, analytical philosophers could demarcate a distinction between science and non-​science, which Rudolf Carnap called pseudo-​science (Carnap 2003). The intention of analytical philosophy has been to investigate the conditions for forming true propositions. These can be true in two ways: either theoretically or empirically. A self-​evident truth is of the form: “All bachelors are unmarried.” This is true without any reference to empirical cases. On the other hand, the sentence “All swans are white” needs empirical verification. What Wittgenstein claimed in his early work was that, independently of this, we must assume

THE MEANING OF A WORD    91 that the reason why language can say something truthful about the world is because the structure of language corresponds with the structure of the world. What about a “cold relationship”? As a name (word) points to an object and elementary propositions point to a state of affairs, the proposition “This relationship is cold” would be true if the state of affairs were such that in fact this relationship is cold.

Bringing the Mind Back In In contrast to analytical philosophy, the philosophical position known as phenomenology disregards that idea of a mind-​independent reality, and thus, the ambition of science to say something exact about the world, independently of the mind. We can say that phenomenology integrates both sense and reference in “meaning.” It is probably this position that mostly inspired George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in their 1980 book, Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson 2008; Zlatev 2010). However, phenomenology does not mean by the term “reference” that the mind reproduces the state of affairs in the world. Phenomenology as a philosophy was based on the work of the Czech/​Austrian/​ German philosopher Edmund Husserl (1859–​1938). Even in his early work, Philosophy of Arithmetic (1891), he was already discussing logic and mathematics. Husserl had before this been inspired by the psychology of Franz Brentano (1838–​1917) and his concept of intentionality (Moran 2002). Intentionality implies that when we see something, or hear it or dream it, we direct our “attention” to the thing (the picture, the sound, or the dream). The reason why we see a certain thing is that we intend to see it, we direct our intention to it. This opens a new way of understanding how our mind works, and why it selects some information rather than other information. For Husserl, this idea of intentionality and directedness inspired his thinking (Moran 2002). Combining the idea of intentionality with the neo-​Kantian idea that even logic is synthetic knowledge, we can overcome the problems that are connected to the split between mind and reality. Husserl’s argument was interpreted by Gottlob Frege as psychologism, meaning that it explains mathematics as a psychological process (Barnouw 1979; Smith 2013). That is, mathematics is seen as something the mind invents that has no relevance outside the mind. A late reply by Husserl to Frege was published as part of his posthumous book Crisis of European Science (Husserl 1970), in the chapter “The Origin of Geometry.” As we shall explain below, the argument by Frege and the reply by Husserl illustrate the core divide between phenomenology and analytical philosophy. As we have seen, Frege had argued for the distinction between sense and reference. The terms “morning star” and “evening star” are often used as an illustration: both refer to Venus, so the reference is one and the same, but the two concepts of morning star and evening star give different senses. Thus, sense is decoupled from reference. We have seen that Frege used this to argue that we can analyze the references of a concept independently of its sense. It is this that Husserl objects to, and Frege calls his objection

92    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN psychologism, because Husserl assumes that the only alternative to his theory is that references have links to the human mind. One might argue that phenomenology was born when Husserl embarked on the task of showing that you cannot erase the mind from language, logic, and mathematics, while still arguing that this does not mean that everything is reduced to psychology. How can logic, language, and mathematics be mind-​dependent and still not subjective? Or, to phrase it differently, phenomenology might be seen as a generalization of the following question: how can things be mind-​dependent and still objective? An indication of how Husserl tries to solve this dilemma occurs in the following citation from Husserl’s chapter “The Origin of Geometry”: the primally establishing geometer can obviously also express his internal structure. But questions arise again: How does the latter, in its “ideality,” thereby become objective? To be sure, something psychic which can be understood by others (nachverstandbar) and is communicable, as something psychic belonging to this man, is eo ipso objective. (Husserl 1970: 359, emphases in original)

Husserl makes two claims. One claim is that geometry has an origin; the second claim is that it is a process of history. The French philosopher Jacques Derrida (1930–​2004), in a lengthy comment to Husserl (Derrida 1989), questions both claims. Husserl’s argument is that geometry at one time, in a prescientific time, originated as a human invention. It was invented to solve problems. Over time, this invention has become an objective fact. With this kind of objectivization, the thing has become abstract and lost its connection to its origination. The problem is that this raises the possibility of manipulation, in the sense that one uses geometry without reference to how it originated, and modern science has come into this kind of manipulative stage. It might be instructive, in order to position Husserl’s argument, to compare him to the thinking of the French philosopher Henri Bergson (1859–​1941). Bergson saw metaphors and intuitions as important elements in the processes of understanding the essence of things (Bergson 1998). For Bergson, intuition is a capacity to know “things in themselves,” while Husserl, who also was concerned with intuition, rejected both Kant’s and Bergson’s use of the term: Most generally stated, unlike Husserl, Bergson does not aim to provide a description of the essence of acts of consciousness; and unlike Bergson, Husserl is not at all interested in developing a metaphysics that would penetrate more deeply into the interior of matter, of life, or reality in general. (Jacobs and Perri 2010: 101)

What about a “cold relationship”? When we make the proposition, “This relationship is cold,” we direct our attention to a phenomenon: the relationship. By saying it is cold, we give meaning to the phenomenon we direct out attention to. Thus, the claim is true in the sense that this is how we receive the phenomenon we are directed toward. It is not necessarily a true description of the mind-​independent essence of the phenomenon. To

THE MEANING OF A WORD    93 find such an essence about how things are, as we have seen, is not the intention of phenomenology. Thus, such metaphysical speculation is beyond its intention. As we shall see later in the chapter, there are arguments in support of acknowledging metaphysical assumptions in science.

Challenging the Limits of Language The German, neo-​Kantian philosopher Ernst Cassirer argues for a perspective on language in opposition to both analytic philosophy and phenomenology. In a small book, Sprache und Mythos from 1925, translated as Language and Myth in 1946, Cassirer goes directly into the discussion with analytical philosophy and claims that we cannot remove myth and metaphors from language. As a neo-​Kantian, Cassirer was critical of some of Kant’s ideas. His argument against Kant’s intuition can be illustrated by the discussion about non-​Euclidean geometry. As he writes: Thus the belief in the immediate certainty and persuasiveness of geometrical “evidence” was profoundly shaken within the confines of classical rationalism itself, not to be reinstated even by Kant’s theory of a priori forms of pure intuition. . . . (Cassirer 1978: 28)

However, Cassirer maintains that our capacity to understand the world is essential to the discussion about the nature of the world. Thus, even if the world is shaped by the way we see it, our way of seeing is subject to improvement. Cassirer saw this as a development and learning process, maintaining a positive perspective on Kant’s Enlightenment project. Thus, he moderates and defends Kant’s project, as shown in the following citation: And in fact, Kant’s transcendental idealism does not aim to eliminate the special nature of empirical knowledge; instead, its essential merit is to be sought in its affirmation of its nature. Kant’s saying that his field is the “fertile lowland of experience” is well known. But his general counsel holds also for the new critical determination of the concept of experience itself: that here as well we have to begin, not with observation of objects, but with the analysis of knowledge. (Cassirer 1982: 162)

Kantianism is here in line with phenomenology by arguing for a mind-​dependent reality. That is, reality is as much shaped by our mind (our way of seeing it) as it is something “in itself.” Husserl criticized Kant for formulating the idea of a “thing in itself ” that we cannot know. It presupposes a divide between mind and reality. This is the divide that Husserl and phenomenology wanted to overcome, and argued that in fact they had done so. To explain in common language: if there is a split between mind and reality, and words are in the middle, analytical philosophers might be right in saying that what

94    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN words point to in our mind, and what they point to in reality are two different things. But if there is no split between the mind and reality, this problem disappears. It is not clear how far Cassirer would follow Husserl here; the citation above indicates that he is relying on a Kantian perspective. Still, we might see him moving a long way in the direction of a mind-​dependent reality. It is against this background that we have to understand his argument. The point here is that language and myth are interrelated, as they relate both to the origin of things and to our conception of the world. As Cassirer writes in Language and Myth: The notion that name and essence bear a necessary and internal relation to each other, that the name does not merely denote but actually is the essence of its object, that the potency of the real thing is contained in the name—​that is one of the fundamental assumptions of mythmaking consciousness itself. (Cassirer 1946: 3)

For a neo-​Kantian, there is a transcendental element in the forming of our mind. Even if intuition turned out to be less universal than Kant anticipated, our understanding of it was not invented by our mind. Rather, our mind has inherited concepts and perspectives. Furthermore, language forms our mind: Before the intellectual work of conceiving and understanding of phenomenon can set in, the work of naming must have preceded it, and have reached a certain point of elaboration. For it is this process which transforms the world of sense impressions, which animals also possess, into a mental world, a world of ides and meanings. All theoretical cognition takes as its departure from a world already performed by language; the scientist, the historian, even the philosopher, lives with his objects only as language present them to him. (Cassirer 1946: 28, emphasis in original)

In the landscape of language, myth and verbal utterance go hand in hand. They are interwoven in the language we inherit, and they are central to how we conceive meaning. Thus, metaphors may have the role of mediating these meanings: for, no matter how widely the content of the myth and language may differ, yet the same form of mental conception is operating in both. It is the form which one may denote as metaphorical thinking; the nature and meaning of the metaphor is what we must start with if we want to find, on the one hand, the unity of verbal and mythical worlds and, on the other, their difference. (Cassirer 1946: 84)

Thus, metaphors play an essential role in mediating sense and reference, we might say. They convey meaning understood as helping us conceive what is intended in language: But if this is indeed the case—​if metaphor, taken in this general sense, is not just a certain development of speech, but must be regarded as one of its essential conditions—​then any effort to understand its function leads us back, once more, to the fundamental form of verbal conceiving. Such conceiving stems ultimately from

THE MEANING OF A WORD    95 the same process of concentration, the compression of the given sense experiences, which originally initiates every single verbal concept. (Cassirer 1946: 95, emphasis in original)

The point here is that language is not something we construct, but something we inherit. What about our example with a “cold relationship”? One might argue that it would be too narrow an analysis to focus only on the word “cold.” Saying that cold is used here as a metaphor misses the point. In order to understand what is meant by the proposition “this relationship is cold,” we need to start by asking why we talk about a relationship; what is it, what kind of social phenomenon is it, and where did our thinking on relationship come from? Language is not a neutral device between mind and the world, or a medium to translate pictures in the mind to names of objects. Rather, it is a reservoir of meanings developed through history, what Mary Midgley in her 2003 book called The Myths We Live By. Thus, myths and metaphors are part of our mental process to understand the world, and to understand the meaning of language.

Metaphors and the Study of Organizations We have in this chapter taken Gareth Morgan’s discussion in his 1980 article “Paradigms, Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory,” as a point of departure. We have tried to go beyond Morgan’s observation: Words, names, concepts, ideas, facts, observations, etc., do not so much denote external “things,” as conceptions of things activated in the mind by a selective and meaningful form of noticing the world, which may be shared with others. (Morgan 1980: 613)

We have tried to discuss what in this argument is meant by “meaning.” In order to do this, we have presented three perspectives on language with different conceptions of the meaning of words. As regards their differences, we might have exaggerated and simplified, but with the intention of pointing to some implications for social science that we find relevant. (It might be added that the three positions we have presented here are not a complete list—​see Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume.) Roughly speaking, logical positivism defines the meaning of a word as its reference. Thus, the word “apple” is the name of an object that is an apple. A proposition like “This is a red apple I am holding in my hand” can be tested against whether the thing in my hand is indeed a red apple. Basically, there is no room for metaphors here. However, there is room for debate about “redness.” Thus, arguing that “relationships are cold” would probably, following Carnap (2003), belong to pseudo-​science.

96    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN For phenomenology, meaning is sense and directedness. Meaning is how we construct the object we approach. Thus, the truth of the sentence “This is a red apple I am holding in my hand” relates to the fact that this is how we have come to describe the thing I am holding in my hand. Why not “This is a red round thing I am holding in my hand” or “This is a red fruit I am holding in my hand”? Even if this is an extreme simplification, phenomenology would argue that the sentence “This is a red apple I am holding in my hand” comes closer to the truth than the other options. The reason is that more knowledge and insight go into saying that “It is an apple” than into saying that “It is a red thing.” What about metaphors? Phenomenologists would probably argue that for many things we denote, and that we want to get a deeper insight into, metaphors might be useful. If we talk about a “cold relationship,” we are expressing a perception we have. A language where we express things by use of metaphors will help us get a deeper insight into the sense of what we mean, how we perceive things. However, Husserl’s project was to develop some strict rules for the phenomenological process and he probably had no tolerance for terms as ambiguous as metaphors. His phenomenological reduction was not about physicalizing language or reducing things to their atomic form (as was the case with logical positivism); rather, his ambition was to come to a deeper knowledge about things, even beyond language. Metaphors might be useful as a linguistic tool, but “meaning” goes beyond these tools. Thus, phenomenology will have no problem in trying to develop deeper insights into the discussion we had earlier about national identity. Instead of avoiding the word “identity,” phenomenology would rather try to understand what it is. A phenomenological process might reveal what people have in mind when they talk about identity. For neo-​ Kantians, the meaning of language means both sense and reference. Language forms our mind, and therefore it is important, in order for us to understand ourselves, to have insight into what language is, what words mean, and how our spoken words structure the way we see the world. The meaning of the sentence, “This is a red apple I am holding in my hand” relates the historical fact that the thing I am holding in my hand is indeed an apple. None of us might be able to explain why the thing is called “apple.” The truthfulness of the sentence relates to the fact that the way we use it is appropriate to the way the sentence is supposed to be used. What about metaphors? As explained above, probably a whole range of basic propositions and words have a mythical origin. Language is not something we invent, but something we inherit, and often we do not know why we came to use a certain word. We might use words today in very different forms compared with their initial meanings. If we want to have deeper insight into what they mean, we will have to confront this history, and we will, as argued above, have to approach these meanings through metaphors. The issue of national identity might be instructive; if we want to understand what it is, we need to understand its origin, and its history. Given that social science takes place in an “endless” tension between explaining and understanding, metaphors are still relevant. Obviously, they have a stronger role related to understanding than to explaining. If we want to study national identity, we can

THE MEANING OF A WORD    97 obviously get a lot of knowledge from following a logical positivist procedure. It might tell us about the percentage distribution of different opinions about national identity. If, however, we want to know why we talk about national identity at all, we probably need to relate to a whole range of myths and metaphors. This chapter has taken the argument by Gareth Morgan (1980) as a point of departure. His argument is that metaphors play an important role in comprehending the phenomenon of organization: why are we talking about organizations at all, what is an organization, where do our mental ideas about organizations come from? We have tried to add to Morgan’s argument by elaborating on the “meaning” of words in general and thus of metaphors. We have argued that the discussion about this relates to different fundamental philosophical positions. We have tried to emphasize the argument that these different positions are not only about how we interpret the meaning of words and metaphors, but also about what we mean when we say that a word has “meaning.” To summarize, we have argued that “meaning” in analytical philosophy, and thus in logical positivism, refers to reference. The meaning of a word is defined by the object it refers to. Metaphors have meaning to the extent that they can tell us something about the object. For phenomenology, which probably inspired the important work of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphors are mainly mental constructions, part of how we perceive the world. “Meaning” is here something beyond words. It is about our deeper insight into reality, and it is partly beyond the verbal world. The neo-​Kantian position that we have emphasized with reference to Gareth Morgan’s 1980 article sees “meaning” as both sense and reference, but beyond that argues that there is a historical and cultural dimension to how words get meaning, and it also argues that myths and metaphors are interrelated with the ordinary words we use. Thus, meaning is partly something we interpret and partly something we attach to objects. As for the relevance of using metaphors in the study of organizations, these three perspectives relate to how we perceive the nature of organizations: as real objects external to our perception, or as formed by our perception and cognition. In the latter case, metaphors can play a decisive role.

References Barnouw, Jeffrey. 1979. “Edmund Husserl’s ‘Origin of Geometry’: An Introduction.” Review of Metaphysics 33 (1): 168–​72. Bergson, Henri. 1998. Creative Evolution. Mineola, NY: Dover Publications. Burrell, Gibson, and Gareth Morgan. 1979. Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis. London and Exeter, NH: Heineman. Carnap, Rudolf. 2003. The Logical Structure of the World. Chicago: Open Court. Cassirer, Ernst. 1946. Language and Myth. New York: Harper & Brothers. Cassirer, Ernst. 1978. The Problem of Knowledge. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Cassirer, Ernst. 1982. Kant’s Life and Thought. New Haven, CT: Yale University Press. Derrida, Jacques. 1989. Edmund Husserl’s Origin of Geometry: An Introduction. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press.

98    HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN Frege, Gottlob. 2003. “On Sense and Reference.” Translated by Max Black. In Semantics: Critical Concepts in Linguistics, vol. 1, edited by Javier Guitérrez-​Rexach, 7–​25. London: Routledge. Grayling, Anthony Clifford. 2001. Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Husserl, Edmund. 1970. The Crisis of European Sciences and Transcendental Philosophy. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Jacobs, Hanne, and Trevor Perri. 2010. “Intuition and Freedom: Bergson, Husserl and the Movement of Philosophy.” In Bergson and Phenomenology, edited by Michael R. Kelly, 101–​ 17. London: Palgrave Macmillan. Kripke, Saul A. 1980. Naming and Necessity. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2008. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago press. Midgley, Mary. 2003. The Myths We Live By. London: Taylor & Francis. Mill, John Stuart. 1843. A System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive. London: Forgotten Books. Moran, Dermot. 2002. Introduction to Phenomenology. London: Routledge. Morgan, Gareth. 1980. “Paradigms, Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory.” Administrative Science Quarterly 12 (1): 605–​22. Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE. Morgan, Gareth. 2016. “Commentary: Beyond Morgan’s Eight Metaphors.” Human Relations 69 (4): 1029–​42. Nehring, Alfons. 1945. “Plato and the Theory of Language.” Traditio 3: 13–​48. Neurath, Otto. 1959. “Sociology and Physicalism.” In Logical Positivism, edited by Alfred Jules Ayer, 282–​317. New York: The Free Press. Plato. 1996. The Collected Dialogues. Princeton, NJ: Princeton University Press. Putnam, Hilary. 1974. “Meaning and Reference.” Journal of Philosophy 70 (19): 699–​7 11. Russell, Bertrand. 1905. “On Denoting.” Mind 14 (56): 479–​93. Russell, Bertrand. 2013. “Introduction.” In Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus, authored by Ludwig Wittgenstein, vi–​ix. London: Routledge. Skjervheim, Hans. 1959. Objectivism and the Study of Man. Oslo: Universitetsforlaget. Smith, David Woodruff. 2013. Husserl. London: Routledge. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2014. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus. Abingdon, UK: Routledge. Zlatev, Jordan. 2010. “Phenomenology and Cognitive Linguistics.” In Handbook of Phenomenology and Cognitive Science, edited by Shaun Gallagher and Daniel Schmicking, 415–​43. Dordrecht, Netherlands: Springer.

pa rt i i

M E TA P HOR S OF M A NAG E M E N T A N D ORG A N I Z AT ION

chapter 6

d o indigenous meta ph ors have u niv e rs a l applicab i l i t y? Learnings from Māori in New Zealand kiri dell, chellie spiller, and nimbus staniland

Introduction Certainly, there is a groundswell of support for becoming better stewards of the planet. Some view Indigenous wisdom as an essential contributor to this mission (Marsden 2003; Cajete 2016; Rout and Reid 2020; Spiller 2021a), which can help to solve some of the world’s most pressing issues, such as climate change and environmental degradation. Indigenous knowledge and conceptions of the social world are often recognized as being synchronistic with land, cosmos, and natural relationships (Cajete 2016). Because of these synergies, Indigenous embedded images of the world, and their role in ordering social life, could be an important avenue for contributing to the world’s sustainability. If we take these assertions to be true, then questions that follow include: How universally applicable are Indigenous metaphors? To what degree are they generalizable to other contexts? If they were lifted and transferred to different parts of the world, would they still hold the same meaning? Or do they have to be translated—​or even replaced—​by “local” metaphors to make sense in new contexts? Metaphors play a pivotal role in how organizations are shaped, and are critical to the way people “engage, organize and understand their world” (Morgan 1986: 601). Taking a holistic view, Van Engen (2008: 39) notes the physical, mental, emotional, and spiritual dimensions that metaphors can evoke, thus enriching and complementing organizational culture such as language, story, memory, history, values and relationships.

102    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND Consequently, metaphors are considered significant building-​blocks in organizational theory (Colquitt and Zapata-​Phelan 2007). Morgan’s (1986) landmark text, Images of Organization, showed how metaphors represent different views of realities. Over time, metaphorical images embed institutionally through the establishment of policies and procedures that further influence organizational practices. People’s behavior then conforms to the dominant metaphors in their cognitive schema, until they become a naturalized and taken-​for-​granted way of seeing the world and doing things (Morgan 1986). Morgan identified eight dominant metaphors of the organization: machine, organism, brain, culture, political system, psychic prison, instruments of domination, flux, and transformation. The machine metaphor, for example, has given rise to seeing division of labor in a mechanistic worldview, where organizational life is akin to a factory (Morgan 1986). The metaphor of the brain privileges rationalism and logic, and decisions based on numbers and calculations, proposing that humans are akin to computers and objectifying the human condition (Morgan 1986). In this chapter, we draw on our experience in Aotearoa New Zealand (Aotearoa is the Indigenous name for New Zealand) to question the “travelability” of Indigenous metaphors and understand how the benefits of Indigenous metaphors might be used in alternative contexts. We begin this chapter by defining Indigenous Peoples, with a brief introduction to the Māori cultural landscape in Aotearoa New Zealand. This leads to a discussion of Māori knowledge, metaphors, and the philosophical themes that underpin them. We draw on four Māori metaphors: Te Whare Tapa Wha (a house with four walls), whanau (kinship networks), Maui (personifying innovation), and rāranga (life as interwoven). We utilize three existing frameworks, Hall’s (1976) framing of low and high context, Cornelissen’s (2004) typology of metaphors, and Case et al.’s (2017) work, to elucidate transference issues of metaphors between cultures and formulate potential explanations regarding the degree to which metaphors may transcend their native contexts. We finalize our chapter by providing some guidance for other nations when considering the metaphorical incorporation of Indigenous imagery into their organizational landscapes.

Defining Indigenous Peoples There is increasing recognition globally regarding diversity issues that include gender inequality, racial discrimination, and the marginalization and silencing of minority groups. Decolonizing, postcolonial, and indigenizing discourses and research interrogating these topics are increasingly in vogue, in response to a world that has overtly privileged a Eurocentric patriarchy. While it is easy to lump these “Othered” groups into one category, each requires its own focused attention, rules of engagement, and policy considerations. Indigenous Peoples represent a unique and distinctive global community, made up of diverse groups. Their histories are characterized by displacement and attempts at systematic eradication. Dispersed over 90 countries, estimated

APPLICABILITY OF INDIGENOUS METAPHORS    103 population figures of Indigenous Peoples worldwide are believed to be between 370 and 500 million. Making up just 5% of the global population, they account for about 15% of the extreme poor and have life expectancies up to 20 years lower than non-​Indigenous people worldwide (Vereinte Nationen, Hochkommissariat für Menschenrechte, and United Nations 2013). Putting negative social-​wellbeing determinant figures aside, Indigenous Peoples continue to survive and, in a lot of cases, thrive. The Indigenous rights cause has moved the struggle into public attention through formal recognition with international instruments such as the United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous Issues (Vereinte Nationen, Hochkommissariat für Menschenrechte, and United Nations 2013). Indigenous Peoples often rely on their socially constructed world, to find strength, resilience, resistance, and peace residing within their teachings of ancient knowledge passed down to them through many generations. Other non-​Indigenous communities also see the benefit of adopting or taking on Indigenous metaphors to counteract environmentally and spiritually disconnected societies. However, although sharing similar histories of colonization and imperialism, Indigenous Peoples are not a homogeneous group. They represent around 5,000 distinct communities.

The Māori Context and Their Metaphors Māori is the label given to the Indigenous Peoples of Aotearoa New Zealand. Māori were the original inhabitants of New Zealand, thought to have settled in Aotearoa around 1200. Through sophisticated navigation techniques, they landed in New Zealand via a multitude of migrations, with cultural origins and knowledge stemming from Pacific roots, such as Tahiti, Cook Islands, Rapanui, and Hawaii. Over time, faced with a new and much harsher landscape—​both climatically and in physically rough terrain—​ they adapted and produced new bodies of knowledge to suit the new surroundings. Thus, Māori formed their own distinct cultural body of knowledge separate from, but still connected to, their original homelands. This body of knowledge is now known as Mātauranga Māori (Henare 2001; Marsden 2003; Hikuroa 2017). Mātauranga Māori arises from the intergenerational experiences of Māori living in the environment of Aotearoa New Zealand. Although it retains scientific knowledge of rivers, plants, astronomy, and horticulture, it also holds teachings regarding the socially constructed world of the Māori reflected through their metaphorical imagery of life. Many racial policies, such as colonization, extermination, amalgamation, and assimilation, have shaped New Zealand and consequently Māori representation within the nation. The journey to reach racial fairness means that Māori society has been flooded with (mostly negative) metaphorical imagery, seeking ways to portray them that fit with the nation’s policy narrative of the time. Most depictions of Māori, up until

104    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND recently, involved representing them as “the noble savage,” barbaric and violent, “once-​ were warriors,” or “happy-​go-​lucky lads” unable to cope with the demands of capitalism. However, Māori have experienced some gains in recognition within policy. The country has entered a biculturalist era, turning to strong advocacy at political levels for Māori to be treated as an equal partner in the governing of New Zealand. These efforts draw heavily on Te Tiriti o Waitangi, a document which formalized the relationship between Māori and the Crown, signed in 1840 by British settlers and approximately 500 Māori chiefs (Orange 2010). Te Tiriti o Waitangi promised governance of New Zealand to the Crown, while retaining Māori sovereignty, the protection of items of value to Māori, and equal rights of Māori with British citizens (Orange 2010). Thus, Māori economic life in New Zealand is complex and nuanced. The Māori economy was recently valued at $62.7 billion (BERL 2018). Many cultural practices of Māori still remain intact. In organizational contexts, for example, we see the integration of traditional welcoming ceremonies and time allowances for traditional bereavement processes. However, due to mass urbanization of Māori from the 1930s to the 1980s, many Māori reside now outside of their tribal areas and cultural spaces, and have adjusted to New Zealand’s dominant organizing style. In this complex context, there exist hybridized spaces that give rise to new metaphors and conceptualize new realities and phenomena taking place. We now discuss four metaphors in use within New Zealand’s organizational landscape.

Health and Wellbeing: Te Whare Tapa Whā Te Whare Tapa Whā translates literally as “a house with four walls.” Introduced by Sir Professor Mason Durie during an era when holistic health was still considered scientifically unsubstantiated and novel, this metaphor for health and wellbeing has seen widespread usage and uptake in mainstream New Zealand policy and practice. The house depicts the importance of balancing four walls to maintain overall wellbeing: Taha tinana (physical wellbeing), Taha wairua (spiritual wellbeing), Taha whānau (family wellbeing), and Taha hinengaro (mental wellbeing) (Durie 1994). Te Whare Tapa Whā was groundbreaking, having a transformational impact in many sectors of New Zealand organizational life, especially, health, education, public service, and business. The new conceptualization acknowledges humans as more than a piece of machinery at work. It allowed areas of employment to consider more multifaceted dimensions of human wellbeing, previously not thought to be the domain of employers. For example, this manager working for a major government ministry spoke to the influence of Te Whare Tapa Whā on employee wellbeing: We created a pou ārahi position if you’re just not in the right frame of mind . . . we brought into the team someone that can just be . . . that wise old fella that can take you into a room, have a bit of a karakia [prayer] with you. If you’re emotionally and spiritually not feeling right, you can have some time out. (Spiller et al. 2017: 11)

APPLICABILITY OF INDIGENOUS METAPHORS    105 Formerly, the wellbeing of employees was strictly siloed to the domain of doctors and psychologists, and segregated from a person’s place of employment.

Familial Relationships: Whānau Another well-​travelled metaphor in New Zealand organizations is whānau. Considered a basic building block, whānau was the main working unit of traditional Māori society. Within this structure, food was grown, hunted, caught, and distributed. It was the pivotal social unit necessary for survival in the harsh environment of early New Zealand settlement. Hence, much emphasis went toward maintaining the integrity and unification of the unit. Whānau also crossed generational boundaries to include ancestors passed and those yet to be born. Over time, with the influence of colonization, contemporary understandings of whānau have morphed and broadened. Today, the whānau concept within many New Zealand organizations includes collectives of people who share common values and goals. Modern conceptions of whānau emerge through mutual objectives, rather than relying on kinship ties (Cunningham et al. 2005). The adoption of whānau into New Zealand’s organizational life allowed for broader sets of work relationship to be considered. For example, elders are now employed by mainstream institutions, valued for their wisdom and ability to connect to the spiritual dimension of life. Similarly, supportive older/​younger sibling-​like relationships are encouraged for framing mentoring roles. The whānau metaphor points to creating family-​oriented environments in organizations that encourage people to stay connected and committed to the workplace, and recognize that humans are connected to communities and ecologies. Family (in the Western sense) is already a commonly used metaphor for organizations. Families are networks of people, with levels of hierarchy and power, who must interact and resolve and balance tensions to achieve objectives. Scholars have demonstrated how conceptualizing the organization as a family can evoke caring organizational personas that invite employees to “join the family” to achieve a sense of belonging (Casey 1999; Brotheridge and Lee 2006).

Entrepreneurial Roots: Maui Maui is a recently emerging metaphor representing Māori entrepreneurial vigor. Springing to global fame in Disney’s Moana, Maui refers to a mythological hero whose legends are deeply embedded in ancient Polynesian culture. For Māori, his cunning, trickery, and disruptive thinking led to mythical accomplishments such as fishing up the North Island of New Zealand, slowing down the sun to enjoy longer days, and presenting humanity with fire. This particular metaphor has been used to exemplify innovative and entrepreneurial behaviors among Māori (Tapsell and Woods 2008; Dell and Houkamau 2016). In this context, Maui made his first scholarly appearance through

106    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND the concept “Mauipreneur” (Keelan and Woods 2006). The metaphor aptly resounded with Māori and picked up in usage among several Māori economic development institutions. The metaphor was used to name a purpose-​built Māori innovation hub, Te Whare a Maui (The House of Maui) (Callaghan Innovation 2015), and well-​known Māori entrepreneurs started to draw from the metaphor: I definitely see myself as a Maui-​preneur. Maui went out and challenged the status quo. For a lot of my upbringing my entrepreneurial skills weren’t recognized by any system, and I was a square peg in a round hole, so it’s great to have these skills recognized, alongside other incredible Māori business leaders. (Chapman Tripp 2017)

A Woven Life: Rāranga Rāranga or weaving as a traditional practice provided clothing and daily items necessary for capturing food. Knowledge of rāranga practices and customs meant the difference between being warm and fed as opposed to being cold and hungry. Rāranga involves rituals and ceremonies, gathering and returning processes, identifying exceptional resources and materials, and developing discipline, exactness, and expert ways to work. As a metaphor for organization, rāranga depicts organizational complexity, encompassing many strands which come together, layered upon each other to form an organization (Spiller 2021b). At the center of workplace life, a sense of belonging is fostered by the Māori web of metaphorical imagery that fosters mutual responsibility to other people. As Royal (2011: 7) has described: We dwell within “the woven universe,” within the web of existence and no part of the whole is comprehensively autonomous. The purpose of life is to live within this intricate web of relationships and to become a conduit for the energies of life, to enable these energies to rise and fall within us.

The notion of weaving complexity together is an important feature of Māori life. The past is woven into the present and into the future. Relationships between the physical and the spiritual, between people and the environment, are also seen to make up the woven universe.

Philosophy Underpinning Māori Metaphors Four common themes cut across Māori metaphors of the social world, representing their philosophical values and ideologies: stewardship, reverence, shapeshifting, and temporality (Rout and Reid 2020). Stewardship emphasizes communal welfare over self-​interest and highlights the responsibility of decision-​makers to ensure

APPLICABILITY OF INDIGENOUS METAPHORS    107 positive impacts for future generations. To be a steward from a Māori perspective means avoiding a “domination” approach where humans unceasingly interfere with the Earth’s life systems. A steward approach is one that honors equality with all aspects of creation, to ensure the wellbeing of all with respect and reciprocity. The steward role is to move gently and respectfully to ensure that which already exists can thrive according to its own life force. Organizations, as constellations of human endeavor, are part of the quest to ensure Earth’s systems are life sustaining. Reverence connects closely to stewardship, encouraging the spiritual connection between people and place, and the linking of the material and spiritual worlds. Reverent metaphors acknowledge the sacredness that exists in all life, and point to a deep belief in an interconnected world where humans are not separate from the Earth but are in kinship with all of creation (Spiller 2021a). Māori hold a belief in the spiritual dimensions of life where everything is imbued with a life force that requires a deep respect. Māori have a highly sophisticated ordering system which endows all aspects of creation with a genealogy (e.g., rocks, insects, birds, humans) that takes us all back to a single, shared point of connection (Rito 2007; Roberts 2013). The ability to adapt and be dynamic is represented through the theme of shape­ shifting. The ability to shapeshift reflects the significance for people, communities, and organizations to embrace the unknown, go on journeys of discovery, challenge the status quo, and adapt to meet a changing world. Shapeshifting metaphors have helped guide Māori toward new futures and helped them to adapt to fluctuating circumstances. Lastly, Māori metaphorical imagery reflects Indigenous perceptions of temporality. The Western notion of time is linear: time flows as a straight line. On a continuum, the past is to the left, and the future is to the right. Events are chronologically recorded, where one follows the other. Once an event has occurred, a Western perspective may discredit the ability of the past to influence the present. The past is relegated to the past. In traditional Māori culture, time is circular. The present time can only be understood in its relationship to the past (Lo and Houkamau 2012). The past, the present, and the future are linked. The past is given much stronger time orientations, and past and future generations are all interwoven into a perpetual present. Tightly allied is an intergenerational outlook whereby the legacies of tupuna (ancestors) and the needs of future generations are taken into consideration for present-​day managing, organizing, and decision making.

Theorizing the Universal Applicability of Indigenous Metaphors We now turn to answering our driving question: to what extent can Indigenous metaphors be adopted, incorporated, and utilized outside of their originating contexts? To do so, we leverage three important scholarly contributions to our understanding of

108    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND metaphors. First, Hall’s (1976) depiction of high-​and low-​context cultures helps to illustrate if metaphors can travel through and across varied cultural contexts. Second, Cornelissen’s (2004) typology of metaphors enables us to assess which metaphors take in alternative contexts. Third, Case et al.’s (2017) work describes what metaphor transference issues might occur between cultures. Hall’s (1976) conceptualization of high-​and low-​ context cultures offers a communi­cation-​oriented perspective on culture that emphasizes the interdependence and inseparability of both culture and communication (Kittler et al. 2011). Typically assessing national cultures, Hall (1976) identified different cultures to be sitting along a continuum from high to low context. These contexts differentially assign meaning to communication. High-​context cultures, such as Japan and China, are primarily collectively orientated and individuals may be taught to prioritize entire groups in their decision making (Hofstede 2001). High-​context cultures tend to rely heavily on preexisting, preprogrammed understandings in the communicator and the receiver to transmit meaning. Intentions and meaning may be communicated beyond vocabulary, through body language or tone. Due to their close connections to each other and contextual familiarity created over long periods of time, communication does not entirely need to rely on words to convey meaning (Kittler et al. 2011). Māori culture, like many Indigenous cultures, aligns with what Hall (1976) describes as a high-​context culture. These cultures place high value on symbolism, metaphor, and storytelling. Indigenous communication can be laden with meaning, requiring reading between the lines and poetic nuance. Oral transmission is valued, and knowledge tends to be carried internally and is highly contextual, situational, and relational. In high-​context cultures, relationships tend to be long term, and center around belonging. Face-​to-​face connection is cherished, and relationships are prioritized above tasks. Yunkaporta (2019) further highlights, from an Aboriginal Australian standpoint, that Indigenous cultures are oriented toward patterns, holism, and relationality, and are field-​dependent. Decision making favors group consensus, and dialogue abounds with nonverbal communication. Low-​context cultures, such as the UK, USA, Germany, and the Netherlands, tend toward individualistic cultures (Hofstede 2001), because they rely on clear-​cut messaging, which favors written communication to convey ideas (Hall 1976). Low context tends to have explicit communication without nuance or ambiguity, and with little inference. In a low-​context approach, relationships are characterized as short term and compartmentalized. As a settler-​colonial society, Aotearoa New Zealand has strong Western orientations, and would thus be considered a low-​context culture in Hall’s (1976) framework. Although criticized for its oversimplification (Kittler et al. 2011), Hall’s (1976) framework provides a useful representation for our purpose of trying to consider how metaphors might travel through and across varied cultural contexts. With regard to the value of metaphors and their uptake, Oswick et al. (2002: 295) have previously argued that the focus on similarity merely makes “the familiar more familiar,” where dissimilarities and tensions tend to get overlooked and the interactive meaning-​making process represents a lost opportunity (Oswick et al. 2002; Cornelissen

APPLICABILITY OF INDIGENOUS METAPHORS    109 2004). Metaphors create novel insights by transferring conceptual elements from the source domain to reconfigure new understandings of an existing area, referred to as the target domain (Lakoff and Johnson 2008). Cornelissen’s (2004) typology of metaphors provides a suite of four frames, assessing their usefulness according to the similarity and distance between domains. Type 1 metaphors have similarity but to the point of being banal. The exact correspondence between the concepts and low distance between the domains render the metaphor low in heuristic value. The metaphor “fails to shock us into conceiving of a subject in a completely new way” (Cornelissen 2004: 718–​19). This simple comparison tends to create an isomorphic similarity, yielding lackluster creative insights (Oswick et al. 2002; Cornelissen 2004). Type 2 metaphors are similarly weak due to the conjoining of domains that are close with the confounding addition of inexact, nonsensical imagery. Type 4 metaphors, while having potential heuristic value, are separated by too much distance to be relatable and conjoined in an interactive, meaningful way. The metaphorical holy grail is the type 3 metaphor, according to Cornelissen’s (2004) schema. These metaphors combine aptness with heuristic value because of the right blend between domain distance and similarity between the concepts. Type 3 metaphors are the most powerful type from the vantage point of organizational theorizing, as they provide conceptual advances and clarifications, and startling new insights that were inconceivable before. However, transference to other cultural contexts may bring issues to the surface. As experienced by Case et al. (2017), when metaphors are adopted outside of their original context, they are interpreted through the lens of the receiving culture, which can dilute or distort the original meaning. According to Case et al. (2017: 232), the danger is that unchecked and misappropriated metaphors have “the capacity to colonize subjectivities and shape organizational acts.” Cultural context is vital when interpreting how a metaphor is understood and used in situ—​bringing a sociological consideration alongside cognitive understanding (Cornelissen et al. 2008). Case et al. (2017) have highlighted the pitfalls of ethnocentrism, homogenization, separation from context, reification, and colonization notable in early metaphor literature. Bringing an explicit reflexive position to work on metaphors is essential to ensure ethnocentric filters are acknowledged and, ideally, mitigated through greater cultural sensitivity, appreciation of context, and inquiry into the deeper layers of metaphor. We doubt that anything using the mechanism of language can be wholly adopted within another culture with its essence completely intact. Different mental images and experiences color the receiver’s interpretation.

Discussion Western metaphor and imagery have often been disseminated globally, laden with assumptions of universality and superiority. In settler-​colonial contexts, this is an element of ongoing colonization in spaces once governed by Indigenous Peoples (Pihema

110    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND et al. 2002). We caution that the uptake of Indigenous metaphors by non-​Indigenous people comes with sensitivities, and that such metaphors cannot be extracted from their political reality. Therefore, before we address whether Indigenous metaphors can and—​if so—​how they travel, we first address the issue of whether they should travel. Historically (and in some contemporary circumstances), Indigenous Peoples were punished and faced extreme abuse in order to rid them of their cultural and spiritual practices. In some cases, to outwardly express your indigeneity could mean death. In the attempt to remedy injustices by encouraging the use of Indigenous language, symbolism, and other renaissance practices, well-​intentioned (and not so well-​intentioned) non-​Indigenous supporters risk becoming cultural appropriators. Cultural appropriation refers to the exploitation of elements of another’s culture or identity by members who are not from or part of that culture, such as their religion, traditions, dance, fashion, symbols, language, and music (Young and Brunk 2012). The controversy arises when dominant colonizing cultures cherry-​pick and copy fashionable elements from usually a minority culture to represent them outside of the original culture’s context. Furthermore, Indigenous Peoples have often been denigrated for the same expressions of culture. We do not advocate the lifting of Indigenous metaphors, unless Indigenous Peoples are assisting with and condone their integration. Only then should Indigenous metaphors be adopted outside of their context of origin. For example, partnering with Indigenous People, organizations, or communities, and/​or the creation of Indigenous-​specific positions to support employee spirituality or to oversee the use of Indigenous knowledge in organizations, are good foundational steps to enable the uptake of Indigenous organizational imagery. Indigenous metaphors need to be culturally, spiritually, and environmentally grounded within the socially constructed worldview they come from. Again, that requires two sides of a relationship, where a willful and intentional giver (the Indigenous People) offers teaching to an authentic receiver, the learner. The second question pertains to, can Indigenous metaphors travel? Metaphors of whānau and Te Whare Tapa Wha have been captured into New Zealand’s mainstream usage, demonstrating that Indigenous metaphors can move from high to low cultural contexts, despite Māori and the majority of New Zealand (non-​Māori) cultures having quite antithetical value systems (collectivist and individualistic, respectively) (Hofstede 2001). Whānau and Te Whare Tapa Wha according to Cornelissen’s (2004) framework are classed as high-​utility type 3 metaphors, which both are apt and fit meaningfully because sufficient similarity and distance exists between the target and source domains. The heuristic value is compromised when not enough difference exists to provide new conceptual leaps or too much distance occurs and the connective elements are too weak. However, whānau has relatable concepts to notions of Western families and Te Whare Tapa Wha similarly provides easily accessible conceptual elements relatable to wellbeing. Therefore, enough distance and similarity between the two exists to provide heuristic value that creates a new lens through which to view organizations, and enables new conceptual insights and advances.

APPLICABILITY OF INDIGENOUS METAPHORS    111 However, new metaphors that emerge in Māori communities often fail to transport into New Zealand society. Rāranga and Maui have both aptness and heuristic value in a Māori context, again representing the high-​functioning type 3 metaphor. However, when crossed into mainstream New Zealand, the metaphors cease to be as meaningful, diverging to a type 4 metaphor classification when applied outside of the originating context. Maui as a representation of entrepreneurial traits and rāranga as an expression of organizational complexity suit the Indigenous context from which they arise. Maui has deep contextual roots and it requires access to cultural interpretations to appreciate the meaning he brings to innovation and entrepreneurial spaces. Mainstream New Zealand does not have the same kinship affinity for the character. Similarly, the weaving metaphor, when considered as a type 4 metaphor, tends to hold aptness for Māori but fails to generate much heuristic value or many theoretical advances outside of that contextual setting. The metaphors are too remote for conceptual connection, preventing any meaningful interaction for New Zealanders and consequently beyond creating relatable imagery. Lastly we answer, how do Indigenous metaphors travel? Due to the bicultural agenda in Aotearoa New Zealand, the uptake of Māori metaphors in mainstream organizations is both deductively “imposed” or “projected” onto an organizational reality (Cornelissen et al. 2008), and inductively, naturally “surfaces” from within the organization through discursive sensemaking. National policies advocate for the inclusion of Māori epistemologies throughout the country. Based on our experience as bicultural citizens, we want to point out a couple of practices that help to honor the essence of a metaphor in the transference process. The transference process should maintain as much as possible the original language and associated context of the concept. For example, Te Whare Tapa Wha does not get translated as the “house of four walls” when used, the Indigenous terminology remains, and this pattern occurs with other metaphorical images adopted by New Zealanders. Whare, although translated as a house, has significantly different cultural connotations from its English translation. Only through intimate experiences of traditional houses of Māori can these nuances be felt. Importantly, Case et al. (2017) impress the need for communities themselves to be involved in the construction and use of metaphors, bringing their cultural reflexive selves and myriad interpretations. Understanding a cultural context from an embodied perspective requires effort, often an investment of personal resources and energy by the receiving culture to understand, learn, and absorb the native context from which the metaphor arises. The integration and uptake of Māori imagery and metaphorical use into mainstream New Zealand has mostly been achieved through consulting, critiquing, challenging, and working alongside the Indigenous population. Passing useful imagery over into mainstream acceptance and integration occurs when multiple giving and receiving interactions occur to resolve differing perspectives of each other. For example, the term whānau has broader and more permeable boundaries than English notions of the nuclear family. However, non-​Māori New Zealanders may unconsciously resort back to these more tightly bound images in their interpretation of whānau.

112    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND

Conclusion Māori metaphors contain valuable knowledge for relating to people, the world, and organizations. Their underpinning values—​ shapeshifting, reverence, stewardship, temporality—​can be used to inspire better living and organizing. We do believe in the utility of transferring Indigenous metaphors; however, this cannot be separated from creating intimate and authentically based relationships with Indigenous Peoples. Indigenous metaphors are not a “free for all” to take and utilize. Although they bring beautiful new interpretations to the world, they are tied to wider political struggles that come with commitments and obligations for those who want to partner with Indigenous communities in order to benefit from them. Are Indigenous metaphors universally applicable? We believe so, but conditions apply.

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114    KIRI DELL, CHELLIE SPILLER, NIMBUS STANILAND Spiller, Chellie, Gareth Craze, Kiri Dell, and Matthew Mudford. 2017. “Kokiri Whakamua: Fast-​ Tracking Māori Management.” Auckland: University of Auckland. https://​che​llie​spil​ler. com/​atta​chme​nts/​docs/​2017-​spil​ler-​et-​al-​kok​iri-​whaka​mua-​Maori-​man-​2.pdf. Tapsell, Paul, and Christine Woods. 2008. “Potikitanga: Indigenous Entrepreneurship in a Maori Context.” Journal of Enterprising Communities: People and Places in the Global Economy 2 (3): 192–​203. Tripp, Chapman. 2017. “Chapman Tripp Celebrates Māori Business Leaders.” Scoop Auckland, May 16. http://​auckl​and.scoop.co.nz/​2017/​05/​chap​man-​tripp-​cel​ebra​tes-​Maori-​busin​ess-​ lead​ers/​. Van Engen, Robert B. 2008. “Metaphor: A Multifaceted Literary Device Used by Morgan and Weick to Describe Organizations.” Emerging Leadership Journeys 1 (1): 39–​51. Vereinte Nationen, Hochkommissariat für Menschenrechte, and United Nations. 2013. The United Nations Declaration on the Rights of Indigenous Peoples: A Manual for National Rights Institutions. New York: United Nations. Young, James O., and Conrad G. Brunk, eds. 2012. The Ethics of Cultural Appropriation. Chichester, UK: John Wiley & Sons. Yunkaporta, Tyson. 2019. Sand Talk: How Indigenous Thinking Can Save the World. Melbourne: The Text Publishing Company.

chapter 7

m eta phors for di v e rsi t y and discrim i nat i on i n and by organi z at i ons regine bendl and angelika schmidt

Introduction Since the introduction of the most prominent metaphor on gender diversity, namely the glass ceiling, by Marilyn Loden at a Women’s Exposition in New York in 1978 (Loden 2017), many metaphors have been suggested to reflect not only women’s progress and experience in management but also diversity in organizations. Two decades later, Meyerson and Fletcher (2000: 136) believed that “it is time for new metaphors to capture the subtle, systemic forms of discrimination that still linger.” And today, another 20 years on, it is no longer a glass ceiling that is holding back women, those of different ethnicities, and disabled persons, or more generally, persons who do not meet the male able-​bodied, white, heteronormative norms; rather, it is the entire heteronormative structure of organizations, encompassing its foundations, beams, walls, and its very air. The barriers to inclusion and advancement are not just ceilings above women, persons of color, the disabled, or LGBTQIA (lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual, and asexual) persons; the barriers are all around them (see, e.g., Erskine et al. 2021). While metaphors are frequently regarded merely as a device for embellishing discourse, their significance is actually much greater (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Weick 1997; Cornelissen et al. 2008; Schoeneborn et al. 2019). In particular, they play an important role in opening up new avenues for understanding and enquiry in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) (see Morgan 1997). This chapter, therefore, offers a stocktaking of the diversity and discrimination metaphors applied in MOS since Staines et al. (1973) introduced the queen bee and Marilyn Loden (Loden 2017) originally talked about the glass ceiling. We aim to map the character of existing metaphors, to discuss the insights they present into discrimination and inclusion, as well as to consider their

116    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT limitations. In the first section below, we give an overview of our literature search in order to locate the diversity and discrimination metaphors discussed in MOS literature. In the second section, we explore sets of metaphors with regard to their generic insights into diversity and discrimination. In the third section, we offer suggestions for possible new metaphors for diversity and discrimination based on our discussion of the generic structure of the presented metaphors.

Searching for Metaphors in MOS Literature—​Where, When, and What In order to collect the metaphors for diversity and discrimination in and by organizations, we conducted our literature search in two steps. In the first step, with a focus on journal articles, our search criteria were “metaphor +​gender” and “metaphor +​diversity” in “all text” of the EBSCO database. We chose texts published in mainstream and top-​tier MOS journals between January 1986 and February 2021 (note: on March 21, 1986, the term “glass ceiling” was used for the first time in the media in the Wall Street Journal; see Hymowitz and Schellhardt 1986). This search resulted in a total of 312 texts: 151 texts on “metaphor +​gender” and 261 texts on “metaphor +​diversity.” However, examining these texts more closely, we found that only seven had a substantial focus on metaphor dealing with our specific diversity and (anti)discrimination perspective. These texts displayed the following metaphors on gender and diversity: body without organs (Thanem 2004), fruit salad and fruit cake (Dudau and McAllister 2010), glass slipper (Ashcraft 2013), glass walls (Hunt et al. 2020), phantasmagoria (Schwabenland and Tomlinson 2015), and phallus (Linstead and Maréchal 2015). However, based on our previous research on metaphors (Bendl and Schmidt 2010, 2013) and our work in the field of gender and diversity in organizations, we knew that there exist many more metaphors related to diversity and (anti)discrimination. Therefore, in a second step, a search outside the top-​tier MOS journals uncovered more than 70 texts featuring the following 18 metaphors for diversity and (anti)discrimination: black ceiling, firewall, glass ceiling, glass chains, glass cliff, glass escalator, Teflon effect, hurdles in the pipeline, kaleidoscope careers, leaky pipeline, man as warrior/​ woman as caretaker, maternal wall, melting pot/​tossed salad, mosaic, mommy track, nightmares/​demons/​slaves, queen bee, and quilt. Table 7.1 gives an overview of all the detected 25 metaphors along with their classification to a particular set of metaphors, the metaphors’ vehicles and their targets with regard to discrimination, their author(s), year of publishing—​starting with the earliest contributions in each group—​and the journal they were published in. The table also includes the origin of the metaphor, and we distinguish between research texts starting in metaphor with theoretical considerations and those starting in the object of the study with data provided for the phenomenon termed by the metaphor. In particular, in the

Material

Set of metaphors

Glass ceiling

Vehicle

Gender (hindering career and progress in organizations; constraints on promotion decisions; lack of career opportunities)

Target (discrimination)

Metaphor Researchers’ theoretical construction

X

Researchers’ sensemaking of empirical material

Origin

Women in Management Review Human Resource Development International Journal of Occupational and Organizational Psychology Human Relations Sex Roles Women in Management Review Journal of Women´s Health

Coyne (2002) van Vianen and Fischer (2002) Dreher (2003) Masser and Abrams (2004) Mattis (2004) Carnes et al. (2008)

(continued)

Gender, Work and Organization

Journal of Management Inquiry

Corsun and Costen (2001)

Simpson and Holley (2001)

Harvard Business Review

Meyerson and Fletcher (2000)

Liff and Ward (2001)

Gender, Work and Organization

Forster (1999)

Women in Management Review

Journal of Vocational Behavior

Stroh et al. (1996)

Cooper Jackson (2001)

Wall Street Journal

Journal

Hymowitz and Schellhardt (1986)

Authors (year)

Table 7.1 Metaphors for diversity and (anti)discrimination based on the literature search

Set of metaphors

X

X

X

Gender (imbalance in terms of women’s choices)

Gender (exposure of women in high-​profile positions)

Glass escalator

Maternal wall

Glass cliff

Researchers’ sensemaking of empirical material

Gender (advantages for men in promotion, e.g., in female professions)

Researchers’ theoretical construction

Origin

X

Target (discrimination)

Metaphor

Gender, race (constraints on promotion)

Vehicle

Table 7.1  Continued

Leadership Quarterly British Journal of Management

Haslam and Ryan (2008) Ryan and Haslam (2009)

British Journal of Management

Gender and Society Williams (2013)

Ryan and Haslam (2005)

Gender and Society Wingfield (2009)

Journal of Social Issues

Journal of Business Ethics

Crosby et al. (2004)

Social Problems

Ng and Wiesner (2007)

Journal of Socio-​Economics

Tang (1997)

Williams (1992)

Administrative Science Quarterly

Mung and Jung (2018)

Equal Opportunities International

Journal of Organizational Effectiveness

Powell and Butterfield (2015)

Mitra (2003)

Research in Higher Education

Journal

Jackson and O’Callaghan (2009)

Authors (year)

Gender (maternity as employment and career obstacle)

Gender (women’s career in technology)

Gender (career shifts of women)

Gender (women’s representation and inclusion in science and engineering disciplines)

Gender (women and merit in management)

Mommy track

Hurdles in the pipeline

Kaleidoscope

Leaky pipeline

Teflon effect

Technical

Gender (hindering career and progress in organizations)

X

X

X

X

X

X

Black ceiling

Firewall

Gender, ethnicity (lack of career opportunities)

Glass chain

Digital

X

Gender, ethnicity (negotiating a balance between faith and personal ambition)

Glass walls

X

X

Gender (gender-​based pay disparities)

Glass slipper

X

Gender (capturing occupational identity; alignment with social identity of workers)

Simpson and Kumra (2015)

Bilimora et al. (2008)

Maniero and Sullivan (2005)

Kekelis et al. (2005)

Schwartz (1989)

Bendl and Schmidt (2010)

Erskine et al. (2021)

Arifeen and Gatrell (2020)

Gender in Management

(continued)

Human Resource Management

Academy of Management Executive

Frontiers

Women in Management Review

Gender, Work and Organization

Business Horizons

British Journal of Management

Public Personnel Management

Gender in Management

Simpson and Kumra (2015) Hunt et al. (2020)

Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Academy of Management Review

Adamson (2015)

Ashcraft (2013)

Corpus

Mixing /​ blending

Set of metaphors

Gender (parts of the male body for thinking about masculinity in social and organizational contexts)

Phallus

Diversity (collaboration within organizational partnership)

Fruit salad /​ fruit cake

Gender (role of metaphor for gender and sexual orientation in therapy)

Gender (women and leadership)

Quilt

Man as warrior and woman as caretaker

Diversity (multicultural workgroup)

Tossed salad

Gender (turn to nonorganizational embodiment and desire)

Diversity (multicultural workgroup)

Melting pot

Body without organs

Diversity (collage of multiple cultural identities)

Target (discrimination)

Metaphor

Mosaic

Vehicle

Table 7.1  Continued

X

X

X

X

X

X

Researchers’ theoretical construction

X

X

Researchers’ sensemaking of empirical material

Origin

Linstead and Maréchal (2015)

Pseekos and Lyddon (2009)

Thanem (2004)

Dudau and McAllister (2010)

Rippin (2007)

Bachmann (2006)

Bachmann (2006)

Chao and Moon (2005)

Authors (year)

Human Relations

Women and Therapy

Culture and Organization

Public Management Review

Journal of Organizational Change

Management International Review

Management International Review

Journal of Applied Psychology

Journal

Diversity (workplace bullying)

Nightmares, demons, and slaves

Danger

Gender (solidarity behavior; underrepresentation and advancement of women in leadership positions)

Diversity (dark sides of experiences with diversity management)

Queen bee

Imagination Phantasmagoria

Nature

X

X

X

British Journal of Management

Mavin (2008)

Tracy et al. (2006)

Management Communication Quarterly

Human Relations

Women in Management Review

Mavin (2006)

Schwabenland and Tomlinson (2015)

British Journal of Social Psychology

Ellemers et al. (2004)

122    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT largest group of papers dealing with the glass ceiling metaphor, we made a selection of the central papers. Historically, the glass ceiling metaphor was not the first to be published in journals in the context of women, careers, and discrimination. In fact, the queen bee metaphor, which refers to successful women in male-​dominated work settings striving to prevent other women from developing and gaining promotion (see Staines et al. 1973), was mentioned as early as 1973. Yet it took more than 30 years for anyone to question whether this metaphor reflects both the context and the way in which organizations, rooted in a gendered subtext, enable women to become “natural allies” (see Ellemers et al. 2004; Mavin 2006, 2008). The switch in focus from the individual person to the structures and processes which prevent women from climbing the career ladder was accompanied by the coining of the glass ceiling metaphor in 1986, followed by the mommy track (Schwartz 1989) metaphor in 1989. As can be seen in Table 7.1, the metaphor of the glass ceiling has subsequently metamorphosed into the glass cliff, glass chains, glass escalator, or glass slipper, while the notion of a ceiling has been transformed into a glass wall, mommy wall, and firewall, or even into a pipeline that may be leaky or (to mix metaphors) contain hurdles. While the focus of these earlier metaphors was largely on gender diversity, later metaphors which have appeared over the past two decades, such as mosaic, pots, salads, and cakes, have highlighted diversity aspects in organizations. In particular, these metaphors describe how differences may either merge or melt together to shape or form entirely new circumstances, relations, and cultures. The most recent example is the black ceiling metaphor for racial discrimination (Erskine at al. 2021). Table 7.1 also illustrates if the metaphor originates in the researchers’ theoretical construction or their sensemaking of empirical material. For example, Bendl and Schmidt (2010) introduced the firewall metaphor without data collection based on an evaluation of the generic structure of the glass ceiling metaphor. Schwabenland and Tomlinson (2015) collected data in an action research project that involved diversity practitioners from within the UK voluntary sector and applied the phantasmagoria metaphor as a means to investigate representations such as fear, anxiety, and the inability to act among the practitioners. Four interesting points can be made regarding our 25 distilled metaphors in terms of how they reflect the discourse on metaphors for diversity and discrimination. First, most of the texts analyzed were published outside the major MOS journals (e.g., in Frontiers; Gender & Society; Journal of Social Issues; Social Problems; Women & Therapy). Accordingly, we can assume that metaphor discourse on discrimination and diversity mainly takes place outside the mainstream MOS journals. Thus, second, the comprehensive glass ceiling discussion and corresponding metaphors (glass chain, glass slipper, glass escalator, glass walls) also made it only seldom into the top-​tier management journals. Our main assumption about this absence is the domination of masculinity or (in other words) a gender subtext (Benschop and Doorewaard 1998; Bendl 2008) in MOS studies and journals. The term “gender subtext” refers to a “set of often concealed, power-​based gendering processes, that is, organizational and individual arrangements

METAPHORS FOR DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION    123 (objectives, measures and habits) systematically (re)producing gender distinctions” (Benschop and Doorewaard 1998: 787). Third, in terms of diversity dimensions, most of the metaphors refer to gender discrimination (e.g., glass metaphors, leaky pipeline, mommy track), while only one out of the 25 metaphors, namely black ceiling (Erskine at al. 2021), focuses explicitly on ethnic/​racial issues. In fact, metaphors on other dimensions of diversity, such as age or sexual orientation, are completely absent in our literature search. Fourth, and finally, only around one fifth of the metaphors found, namely those subsumed under the headings “mixing/​blending” and “imagination,” deal with diversity issues in general. Considering this multiplicity of identified metaphors, the question arises: what generic meaning structure (encoded terms, similarities, and frames for further transfer and projection of meanings) do these metaphors display? Therefore, in the next section we will discuss the insights into diversity and discrimination offered by the metaphors by exploring how they address human and material arrangements (e.g., physiological body, space, and material) and meaning (in terms of social construction).

Exploring Metaphors for Diversity and Discrimination in and by Organizations Metaphors make meanings visible by generating gestalt-​like insights and/​or providing discursive embellishment. They also crystallize a particular view and/​or dissemination of preexisting knowledge and can be seen as a mechanism for paradigm reinforcement (Oswick et al. 2004). As metaphors possess paradoxical qualities, they simultaneously create a way of seeing and non-​seeing, and thus a range of complementary and competing insights into the nature of the object/​theme/​organization. By exploring the meaning and operationality of organizational metaphors from a linguistic perspective (Rorty 1967), we can discern how organizational metaphors are constructed and reproduced via language. In this linguistic sense, where language represents the “basic vehicle by which we construct the reality of our shared world” (Thatchenkery 2001: 114), organizational metaphors work as representations or indeed constructions of reality (see Shotter 1993). From a poststructuralist perspective, namely assuming that meaning is produced within language (Fauconnier 1994), without any relation to an external reality (“Il n’ya pas de hors-​texte”—​in English: there is nothing outside the text; Derrida 1976), organizational metaphors do not reflect reality. According to this ontological basis, metaphors produce and reinforce an organizational reality created by their own assumptions. In other words, organizational metaphors do not describe organizational reality but rather (re)produce the organizational phenomena that they are trying to describe. This provokes us to ask: do the metaphors identified address human material arrangements (as physiological body, space, and material) and,

124    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT if so, what notions do they reproduce and what meaning-​making concerning diversity and discrimination? Furthermore: which (non)obvious reasons do the displayed materiality and meaning-​making serve and what perspectives can be addressed with these metaphors for enacting diversity and antidiscrimination? For this exploration, we will work with selected metaphors in order to give a first exemplary insight into the generic structure and limitations of the metaphor discourse on diversity and discrimination. Specifically, we have chosen the “material and digital walls” and “technical” metaphors, which focus on gender diversity, as well as the “mixing/​blending” and “imagination” metaphors, which highlight diversity issues.

Material and Digital Walls The material glass is common to all of the following metaphors: the glass ceiling (e.g., Powell and Butterfield 2015), the glass box (e.g., Ellison 2001; Gabriel 2005), the glass chain (Arifeen and Gatrell 2020), the glass cliff (e.g., Ryan and Haslam 2005), the glass escalator (Williams 2013), and the glass slipper (Ashcraft 2013). The New Oxford Dictionary in English defines the term “glass” literally as follows: Hard brittle substance, typically transparent or translucent, made by fusing sand with soda, lime and sometimes other ingredients and cooling rapidly. It is used to make windows, drinking containers and other articles; a thing made from or partly from glass, in particular: a container to drink from, greenhouses, glass ware, mirror, hourglass; a lens or an optical instrument containing a lens or lenses, in particular a monocle or a magnifying lens. (The New Oxford Dictionary in English 1998: 778)

The definition refers to the knowledge of how to make glass, on the one hand, and to containment, on the other. Glass is a stable material, whose strength is dependent on its thickness—​the thicker, the stronger. All the metaphors mentioned refer to the transparent or translucent character of glass, with the exception of the glass slipper, which stresses fragility. Glass enables us to see what is behind the wall, outside the box, below the cliff or the escalator. It should be noted that all of these notions represent boundaries in material space. The glass chain metaphor (Arifeen and Gatrell 2020) also takes the idea of glass’s transparency and hardness, using it to refer to being bound metaphorically through invisible chains to faith and family customs based on institutionalized moral codes. Such glass barriers present an additional difficulty to those striving to overcome them—​namely that they are transparent, and thus not always easy to identify. In accordance with The New Oxford Dictionary in English (1998) definition of glass given above, it could even be said that the ingredients constituting the glass walls, ceilings, boxes, etc. represent the basis for meaning-​creation, derived through the discursive interaction of those who have already overcome the barriers, namely individuals who have met the expectations of “the system.” This system—​at least in the Western

METAPHORS FOR DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION    125 context—​ is usually determined by mainstream norms serving dominant gender identities, heteronormativity, whiteness, certain constructions of “able-​bodied,” and “accepted” religious beliefs. From such an embodied perspective, the implication is that individuals trapped in the boxes, below the ceilings, etc. may never meet the system’s expectations as they do not appear to match certain contextual (Western-​oriented) dominant constructions of gender heteronormativity, whiteness, and being able-​ bodied, as well as common religious beliefs. From this perspective, it can be said that what lies behind the glass may only be seen by those standing outside; and further, the glass must be cracked with force as the ceilings, walls, escalators, and boxes will never open automatically. In fact, all these glass and wall metaphors suggest an inherent stability of the invisible boundaries, which can be overcome only by violently shattering the glass or changing the constituent elements of the glass structure. Yet knowledge of the ingredients will never be given voluntarily to those peering through the ceiling, or who are enclosed between the walls or trapped in the box. In particular, these glass metaphors, with their insistence on the invisibility of appropriate knowledge and knowledge-​holders, essentially deny the notion that new spaces can be created or gender discrimination overcome. While the glass metaphors represent a strictness, the firewall metaphor (Bendl and Schmidt 2010) introduces (by means of codes) a sense of immateriality/​virtuality and additional flexibility to the wall metaphors on gender diversity. The invisible material boundaries become virtual boundaries, implying a heightened form of invisibility as there is now no possibility of grasping or feeling the boundaries physically. The underlying ingredients—​in this case, codes—​can be changed even more quickly than the ingredients involved in glass production which are captured by the glass metaphors. Knowing the codes and enacting them in this firewall metaphor is a much greater challenge than that presented by the glass metaphors, as everything takes place virtually. It is much more difficult to know who is a member of the system as well as who participates in decision-​making processes or is allowed to become a participant in a particular context/​time. The codes can also be switched from one moment to the next, thereby blocking access. This makes it all but impossible to enter or stay in the system if you are not very near to the access-​and knowledge-​holder, which again means “having” the “right” mainstream prerequisites. In summary, the glass metaphors and the firewall metaphor suggest that those who do not serve the above-​mentioned dominant (Western) mainstream constructions will never make it through the walls. Consequently, these wall metaphors do not paint a positive picture for action: that is, they do not provide perspectives on how to challenge or transgress the boundaries. For those seeking a pathway toward antidiscrimination, diversity, and inclusion, the enacting perspective of these metaphors is to keep the system stable and closed to those outside, below, or between the invisible material and virtual boundaries. In conclusion, we can say that while such metaphors may help us to recognize and understand what is going on in terms of discrimination and exclusion, they do not open up the system for those outside.

126    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT

Technical Metaphors While the wall metaphors highlight a space at a clearly defined location, the pipeline and track metaphors introduce the notions of (extended) length and a certain cross-​section, along with a highly circumscribed space. According to The New Oxford Dictionary in English (1998: 1410) a pipeline is a long pipe, typically underground, for conveying oil, gas, etc. over long distances; a channel supplying goods or information; (in surfing) the hollow formed by the breaking of a very large wave; a linear sequence of specialized modules used for pipelining.

The literal meaning of track is a rough path or minor road, typically one beaten by use rather than constructed, a continuous line of rails or railway, a section of a record, compact disk, or cassette tape containing one song or piece of music, the transverse between a vehicle’s wheel. (The New Oxford Dictionary in English 1998: 1962–​3)

In terms of materiality, pipelines are generally made of steel or a similar hard, highly stable material that is complex to process and requires large inputs of energy. The social meaning of a pipeline highlights its function of transporting liquids or gas from one end of the line to the other, separated by (potentially) thousands of kilometers and monitored via sensors. To put it very simply: what goes in one end should come out the other. Basically, the track metaphor works in the same way in terms of expressing the notion of length and hard material, and also suggests that change can happen only with a great deal of effort. In contrast to this, the metaphor of the path conveys a more open perspective and gives the (false) hope that one could enter the track from the side. In fact, the pipeline and the track have no embodied perspective: they merely refer to pipes, liquids/​gas, and building material. The liquid/​gas should successfully pass through unless there is a leak along the way. As the metaphor applies to people, the idea is that, while individuals will also pass through, the resulting quality is unknown and the individual is more or less merged with the group. And, of course, the type of person who may enter the pipeline is decided at the beginning. We proceed from the assumption that, like the wall metaphors, those who run the pipeline or are in charge of the track decide and enact which liquid/​gas is used and, metaphorically, who is allowed to pass through or must stay outside the pipeline/​track. The pipeline and the track metaphor promote the view that there is no assumption of responsibility if liquid/​gas or persons are lost. The leaky pipeline metaphor constructs a framework, which basically represents an undesired emergency in the pipeline business. However, this metaphor does not refer to those who are responsible for the leak. Even if the leak is discovered, the liquid/​gas and persons involved are irrevocably

METAPHORS FOR DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION    127 lost and cannot flow back into the pipeline. The hurdles in the pipeline metaphor seem to refer to some blockage, which, however, in the end allows liquid/​gas or persons to pass and come out the other end. In this case, those responsible for the pipeline intervene in order to continue processing the liquid/​gas or persons in the pipeline in order to make them fit the system in such a way that they can complete the journey. Even though these metaphors address the problem of individuals being unable to reach top positions, they are too generic to offer any perspectives on what is necessary to enter the system, why some persons are forced to leave the pipeline or the track, or what is required to overcome the hurdles. In fact, through their strict materiality, these technical metaphors re-​inscribe separation and division with regard to gender diversity. This re-​inscription also applies to other diversity dimensions.

Mixing/​Blending Metaphors The diversity and inclusion metaphors referring to pots, salads, cakes, and quilts have two main shared perspectives: even though they refer to different materials, the ingredients are mixed as in the fruit salad or quilt, or the ingredients are merged as in the pot and the cake. In both cases, new structures come into being; yet in the former, the ingredients can be separated after mixing, while in the latter, the ingredients are blended to create a new form that cannot then be uncombined after the merging process. The New Oxford Dictionary in English (1998: 1154) confirms this view in its definition of the melting pot as a pot in which metals or other materials are melted and mixed, a place where different peoples, styles, theories etc. are mixed together; a situation in which things are constantly changing and the outcome is uncertain.

In contrast to this, the quilt is made up of different layers which can be separated. Here the definition is: a warm bed covering made of padding enclosed between layers of fabric and kept in place by lines of stitching, typically applied in a decorative design, a knighted or fabric bedspread with decorative stitching, a layer of padding used for insulation. (The New Oxford Dictionary in English 1998: 1521)

Individuals must know the recipes or stitches, otherwise the merger or mixture will not play out. The recipes and the stitching know-​how may be given from generation to generation; any changes will either improve or worsen the taste or quality of the new structure. In fact, these metaphors offer two perspectives: first, to stick to the traditional recipes and stitching, a view which corresponds to reproducing given structures; and second, to reform or modernize the given recipes or stitching—​for example, by using a new kind of vinegar for the salad, choosing a different set of ingredients for the cake,

128    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT or applying a novel stitching pattern for the quilt. These recipes represent a kind of knowing perspective and enacting is given through constant repetition. In the context of diversity, these metaphors highlight the fact that a mixture or a merger can create a new collective with new norms. More specifically, in the case of a mixture, the persons/​systems stick to their roots and norms and adjust to the new situation, while in the case of a merger, a new substance will develop and eradicate the given roots and norms depending on the proportions of the ingredients and their “chemical ability” to merge. In both cases the result is unclear. Even though all metaphors portray innovation in a positive light, the processes of adjustment or complete abandonment of existing norms and structures (which also accompany these metaphors) are left out of the picture. Therefore, as with the previously discussed sets of metaphors, while these diversity metaphors offer avenues to better understand the phenomenon of diversity, they do not provide knowledge about ways of overcoming the problems arising from mixture and/​or merger.

Imagination Metaphors In referring to the imagination, the phantasmagoria metaphor introduced by Schwabenland and Tomlinson (2015) is based on an analysis for diversity management. According to Warner (2006: 148), a phantasmagoria was a “theatre of shadows” popular in the late 18th and 19th centuries in which light effects were projected onto a screen, in the manner of a magic lantern. Although any image could be projected, the actual subject matter of the phantasmagoria tended to draw on contemporary symbols of the uncanny: “spectral illusion, morbid, frequently macabre, supernatural, fit to inspire terror and dread” (Schwabenland and Tomlinson 2015: 1917). A phantasmagoria works with bodily shadows representing different emotions, such as fear, joy, and laughter, produced in the shadow theater by the embodied actors. This interplay between the performers producing the shadows and the spectators was crucial; in particular, the actors had to know how best to entertain their audience. In terms of metaphorical meaning, the actors have the power to choose and present those perspectives with which they want to entertain their audience. The performer can decide what they want to show, depending on the audience’s decision as to what they want to see. The enactment by the players can be very hugely diverse—​deferring diversity dimensions such as age, ethnicity, embodied norms, and cultural perspectives, on the one hand, and even extending beyond heteronormativity to include a queer perspective, on the other. Shadows, of course, have various connotations. A shadow can be seen as a kind of relative darkness, especially as caused by the interruption of light. The relativeness and mutability of shadow is a central element of Plato’s Cave, one of the most important parables in ancient philosophy (Peterson 2017). Central to this parable is the path from the shadows of the dark cave to the light of knowledge. Contemporary constructivist thinking, however, suggests that knowledge is diverse, manifold, and contextual. Under

METAPHORS FOR DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION    129 such a conceptual lens, the interplay of light and shade in the shadow theater may also provide a mirror for intellectual reflection on different diversity perspectives. In conclusion, the phantasmagoria metaphor enables us to overcome social construction based on duality and hierarchy, and thereby to enact various perspectives with regard to diversity and discrimination. As such, in contrast to the stability-​conserving wall and technical metaphors, it suggests ways of opening and changing the system for those on the outside or at the margins as well as for those already in the system. From the foregoing discussion of these various metaphors, we see that—​based on their material perspectives—​they offer diverse perspectives on diversity and discrimination. They have the potential to describe perspectives of the social, although strictly within their literal realm. According to their generic space, the explored metaphors do not refer to persons, with the exception of the phantasmagoria metaphor. In general, while the wall, technical, and mixing/​blending metaphors offer insightful perspectives, they do not outline any potential pathways for changing patterns of discrimination and exclusion. Therefore, metaphors which embrace a perspective of change and include the embodied perspectives (facets missing in the explored metaphors) could be more helpful in the struggle to overcome discrimination and exclusion.

Describing/​C onstituting/​ (Re)producing Diversity and Discrimination It is important to remember that metaphors are not independent entities in the world, things to be found and described; instead, they can exist only within a specific context. In this text, our heuristic approach, guided by feminist, gender, and queer studies, is to investigate metaphors of diversity and discrimination so as to identify typical features that serve to reveal their inherent construction and possibilities of problem identification. In so doing, we aim to open up a metaphorical perspective which avoids merely reproducing perspectives of discrimination and exclusion. Here several points can be addressed. First, the definitions of diversity and discrimination encompass a state of being as well as processual components. In fact, all metaphors presented in this chapter focus more on the being than on the process by describing how the materials (in terms of glass and pipelines) keep people outside or inside the system. Similarly, the merging metaphors (e.g., fruit cake) do not really describe the processual aspect, namely how this inclusion or exclusion is achieved; in general, they only highlight the mixture or merger. Generally speaking, practically all the metaphors discussed offer little or no insight into how to work against discrimination and how exclusion can be eliminated: the system remains a “black box.” In other words, the metaphors as social practices do not offer concrete solutions for opening the system; instead they merely reproduce the status quo based on

130    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT the explored data. On the one hand, this means that the explored metaphors for diversity and inclusion support a critical evaluation of the social, as the particular vocabulary and images used bring certain features into focus (Putnam et al. 2017: 4). On the other hand, they must also be challenged, critically assessed, and deeply reflected upon so as to reveal likely pathways out of the phenomena which they address. Second, the procedural component of metaphors relates to how metaphors are used in terms of linguistic reproduction. Our findings indicate that metaphors represent a powerful means to catch our attention and direct it toward important issues (Maasen and Weingart 2000) of diversity and discrimination. As descriptive metaphors can capture aspects of the world that are difficult to describe using more conventional language (e.g., Yanow 2005), they function to make the less familiar more familiar, and, thus ease our comprehension of complex topics. According to our analysis, the walls and technical metaphors are descriptive in nature. As such, they make the already familiar form of discrimination even more recognizable. To overcome the identified problem that the practice of metaphorical description may actually reproduce the phenomena addressed, we suggest focusing more on generative metaphors, which are used to make the familiar more unfamiliar (Örtenblad 2017: 57–​8). In this case, the source domain is more dissimilar to the chosen target domain, thereby potentially helping us escape the trap of phenomena reinforcement through metaphors. For example, the discussed metaphors of pots, salads, cake, and quilts as well as phantasmagoria fulfill the purpose of making the familiar unfamiliar; therefore, they stimulate an exchange of meaning and the development of standard interpretations, which form the basis for more common inclusive values. Third, in order to enable diversity and overcome discrimination, it is necessary to establish a metaphor discourse which encompasses multiplicities, not as parts of a greater whole that have been fragmented, but rather as the basis for new formations of inclusive organizational practice. Such a new perspective also calls for novel, more inclusive metaphors, which not only picture these inclusive circumstances but also make a reference to those in power. By not openly addressing those in positions of authority, the metaphors serve to maintain hierarchical structures and thus discursively reinforce and reproduce discrimination and exclusion. In other words, the given metaphors for diversity and discrimination reproduce a heteronormative and patriarchal subtext. As such, they act as signifiers to bolster discrimination and exclusion. With the aim of revealing new perspectives, alternative sets of metaphors should consider paradoxical and counter-​rotating perspectives, abandoning the conceptual linearity of the escalator, wall, ceiling, and pipeline metaphors or the control function of recipes or stitching patterns. Only by adopting new perspectives with metaphors—​for example, rooted in queering, embodiment, and compassion—​will the metaphor discourse move toward more antidiscrimination and inclusivity. After this exploration and discussion, the reader may ask: “What could a generative metaphor offering perspectives for transgressing mainstream constructions actually look like?” In the process of writing this text, we thought a great deal

METAPHORS FOR DIVERSITY AND DISCRIMINATION    131 about this question. To be honest, we frequently came up with material metaphors which only serve to re-​inscribe the phenomena already addressed in the existing metaphors. One way, however, to advance the metaphor discourse of discrimination and exclusion is to depart from a vision of organizations burdened by these negative phenomena, and instead to start a thought process that rejects potential discrimination and exclusion rather than thinking with and along it. In Stengers’ (2008) words regarding speculative constructivism, this means speculating against the world as it appears in order to promote a fresh way of thinking that makes new and inclusive operations feasible in an open future. This perspective helps us to think differently and escape the trap of negativity in terms of discrimination. At this point, therefore, we would like to introduce the metaphor of the “chassé-​croisé,” a community dance in which partners exchange places by means of chassé (Merriam-​ Webster 2021) or the metaphor of intergenerational dance (see Prichard 2022). We are aware of the fact that this dance metaphor may also support the reproduction of dominant constructions, depending on who directs the dance, who selects the dancers, and who is invited. However, it has the great advantage of allowing us to see, if not the director, then at least all the individual dancers as well as how and with whom they interact, in which context, and at what time. Second, it offers the possibility of observing the individual and collective steps in the process. Third, by presenting a degree of openness, this dance metaphor enables us to introduce new forms of steps and enact new inclusive figures. It even allows us to take steps against the probable instead of continuing with and along it. Precisely such dancing against the probable opens new perspectives of organizational reality and operations that are directed beyond discrimination and exclusion. One first step to approach this chassé-​croisé metaphor is to watch the video “Chassé-​Croisé.m4v” (YouTube 2011). While recognizing that the Chassé-​Croisé clip could be more diverse racially, bodily, and in terms of gender, the Intergenerational Dance Project shows with clarity how to overcome diversity, the identified stability and the disembodied nature of the explored metaphors for diversity and discrimination.

Conclusion Our stocktaking of metaphors for diversity and discrimination has shown the need for alternative metaphors which adopt inclusive and intersectional perspectives and go beyond gender diversity. Over recent decades, metaphor research has primarily been related to gender diversity. Even though such gender-​diversity metaphors may be applied to other diversity dimensions, it is necessary to make a next step in metaphor research in MOS by introducing new and more general metaphors for diversity. Such novel metaphors may already be out there, as a large body of data on different diversity dimensions has already been collected and published in recent years. However,

132    REGINE BENDL AND ANGELIKA SCHMIDT no journal paper has yet proposed new metaphors for diversity and discrimination in MOS—​even though it is already acknowledged that “all thinking and all acting relating to that thinking” is shaped by metaphors (Morgan 2017: xv).

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chapter 8

im ages of t h e life metaph or i n organiz ationa l st u di e s rebecka arman and ewa wikström

Introduction Researchers in organizational studies sometimes use life as a metaphor to describe changes that follow a common pattern that we know from biological life: birth, childhood, youth, maturation, aging, and death. Such changes refer to individual organizations which are newly created as well as those passing through developmental stages that lead to growth and maturation until the end of the organization’s life. Such images of life often contain a birth and youth phase of learning, a maturity phase of productivity, an aging phase that may involve decline, restricted ability, and restricted function, and finally a death such as a closure, merger into another organization, or bankruptcy. The life metaphor can also refer to changes in fields of multiple organizations which are related to one another, such as the textile industry in the West, which went through several phases after it emerged and which eventually “died out” through competition with countries with lower wages. Images of individuals’ journeys within organizations sometimes also make use of life metaphors. For example, career paths can be described in terms of beginning as junior members with the possibility or expectation of developing through gradual maturation to seniority until eventual “exit.” This process of aging within the organization is metaphorical in the sense that it is independent of the individual’s actual youth, biological aging, and death. Death as a metaphor for organizations has, for example, been used by Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008) to describe how species are made extinct. Other examples of when death metaphors are used are Wolfram Cox (1997) who describes mergers and the loss of organizational

138    REBECKA ARMAN AND EWA WIKSTRÖM identity, Cunningham (1997) who writes about career death, and Frishammar (2006) who writes about strategic management and how organizations adapt sustainably to their environment through changes that are perceived as organizational death. The life metaphor is also related to sustainability through issues of ethics and morality, which have an important role in organizational studies, according to Reedy and Learmonth (2011), among others. Such theoretical frameworks involve, for example, ethical possibilities for change and existential and political considerations related to the organization’s life. Reedy and Learmonth claim that death, including death metaphors, reformulates all our projects because death causes life to be limited. Relationships with others and the world around us become the most important considerations when making choices about how to spend the always limited time at our disposal. Consequently, such ethical dimensions revolve around questions about what our lives are for, how they should be lived, how we relate to others, and how we can together create institutions that support life in organizations and organizational life rather than hindering them. In this way, metaphors of life are thus closely linked to metaphors about sustainability in organizational studies. Besides the social sustainability concerns, since the 1980s, a clear trend in organizational studies has been to see organizations from a technical and calculative business-​oriented perspective. This trend has meant that what supports sustainable organizational life has been overshadowed by technical and calculative organizational models with a narrow efficiency approach—​for example, lean models for organization (Radnor et al. 2012). Ethical dimensions related to images of life and death have been given a less prominent role in this perspective on sustainability. However, this trend in organizational studies has been questioned on the basis of its consequences for environmental and social sustainability (Jackson 2003). Thus, the life and sustainability metaphor has been found useful, sometimes even taken for granted, as an image of linear change which follows a predetermined path of developmental stages within the organization (micro), for the organization itself (meso), as well as in fields of organizations such as industries (macro). In this chapter, we review a selection of the literature in organizational theory which we interpret as making use of the metaphor of life and sustainability. We take responsibility for the interpretation of how life and sustainability is a metaphor for the studies reviewed, since the authors of the work we cite are rarely explicit in their use of metaphor. We thus rely on a method of interpretive metaphor analysis, searching for underlying metaphorical images, so-​called root metaphors (see Örtenblad 2017). We have selected five sub-​metaphors which are all related to Morgan’s (2006) images of the organization: (1) evolution (related to the organism image), (2) death and the end of life (related to the flux image), (3) machine versus cultural diversity (related to the machine and culture images); (4) political arena (related to the political system image), and (5) life course (related to the organism and flux images). These sub-​categories form a group and are related to each other through either similarity or contrast, as

IMAGES OF THE LIFE METAPHOR    139 demonstrated in the remainder of the chapter. As a recurring empirical theme, we make use of our own and others’ research on older workers and retirement as well as factory closure and death metaphors. Our review shows the variation in root images, all related to life and sustainability, and reflects on benefits as well as possible limitations of the sub-​metaphors, ending by suggesting ways to avoid the pitfall of linear determinism.

Images of Evolution Evolution theories of organizations make implicit use of the life as well as the sustainability metaphor with a focus on the cyclical nature of organizations, as if they were living organisms. It describes one stage leading to the next according to a predetermined logic within which “change is imminent” (van de Ven and Poole 1995: 513–​15). The life metaphor is used on two levels of analysis: each organization within a studied population of related organizations, such as within a niche, has its own life and struggles for survival; at the same time, the larger population follows a life cycle that is partly independent of the individual organizations. Although one cannot predict which entity will survive or fail, the overall population persists and evolves through time, according to the specified population dynamics. (van de Ven and Poole 1995: 518)

The dynamics within the field of organizations as well as in the broader macro-​level context thus determine the health and sustainability of the organizational field as if it were an entity, in accordance with a biological life metaphor (e.g., “the survival of the fittest”). Even if the individuals in a population die, the system and population itself can win the struggle for survival through evolution of the correct characteristics that fit with the environment. The metaphor of sustainability thus has its root in the idea of systems being able to find balance and equilibrium—​the need for resources and growth existing in harmony. It is likely that the idea also has religious roots, stemming from the image of a benevolent God granting eternal life to those who believe in him and live a righteous life (Jackson 2003). Similarly, the metaphorical concept of path dependency has been used to explain the tendency of organizational institutions to “survive” and be sustained despite social change (Djelic and Quack 2007). This indicates a form of “immortality,” seen from a life metaphor perspective. Macro-​level institutions outlive the individual organizations and individuals that brought them to life, such as the system of professions. Predetermined evolutionary paths are used to explain why decisions today are limited by decisions made earlier, even though the conditions that led to the previous decision are no longer applicable or relevant (Verbruggen et al. 2015). This argument is similar to the way

140    REBECKA ARMAN AND EWA WIKSTRÖM decisions and conditions in early life contribute to the evolution of adult or later life in biological organisms. However, in the path dependency branch of organizational theory, the idea of life stages and a sustainability norm is questioned. Researchers highlight negative consequences, since path-​bound institutions and organizational practices which develop based on historic patterns can fit poorly with the current context (Djelic and Quack 2007; Åberg 2015). The dark side of path dependency indicates one of the limitations of the life and sustainability metaphor for organizational theory. Overall, survival of organizations is signified as being of “vital” importance through the life and sustainability metaphor. This is despite the fact that when an organization dies, it is nothing like the complete and final loss of a biological organism. What is lost only involves material resources and financial stability, while the individuals involved and the possibilities of creating new organizations continue—​in organizations, there is life after death or the possibility of immortality.

Images of Death and the End of Life Studies show how organization members visualize and communicate how life and sustainability are connected meaningfully, and that this is done in relation to images of a past and present as well as the future (Bell 2012). Within the future-​oriented narratives, images of organizational life and sustainability are notably characterized by an awareness of and uncertainty about when death—​the end of the organization—​will occur (Willmott 2001). Willmott (2001) highlights how organizations are affected by the image that life and death are connected, which determines the importance we place on the time-​bound activities that we invest in. Images of life and sustainability thus play a central role, for example, in relation to the construction of a common future, organizational identity, and meaning structures (cf. Alvesson 2010). In other words, when life is an image of the quest for survival and sustainability, the counter-​metaphor of death is ever present and important. This metaphor counters the image of life, by staying within the same “domain” but invoking the polar opposite of the target image (see Örtenblad 2017). In this vein, Bell (2012) argues that the images and dominant visual narratives of organizational life are always also constructing an alternative narrative of death. Death narratives are about expressing collective suffering and losses as well as creating organizational memories. The same could be applicable to the life and sustainability metaphor as a “visual” image for dramatization of existential conditions in organizations. Such visualizations can be seen as expressions of continuity and a method by which the members of an organization create an understanding of how the past, present, and future are connected.

IMAGES OF THE LIFE METAPHOR    141 In organizational studies, theoretical traditions differ when it comes to which images are used to describe the difference between life and death. In a functionalist theoretical tradition, unambiguous and definite images of the difference between life and death are used when an organization ends—​it has once and for all ceased to function (see, e.g., Reedy and Learmonth 2011). This is perhaps less metaphorical in the case of, for example, factory closures (Gandolfi and Hanson 2011). However, in this line of literature, organizational members involved in downsizing are called victims, survivors, and executioners even if they are all living and could be prospering as individuals. Again, this choice of description indicates the life and death metaphor as a sensemaking tool for the downsizing and closure of organizations. In contrast, in the social constructivist theoretical tradition, images of life and death are observed as indicating a gradual process of development or change. In this tradition, the organization members’ interpretations of what is the continued life or death of the organization—​for example, in a merger or fusion between organizations—​are central (see, e.g., Bell and Taylor 2011). Two studies, Bell (2012) and Arman (2014), highlight the role of death metaphors in the context of a factory closure. Arman interpreted three root metaphors of different kinds of death: murder, sacrificial killing, and palliative death. The metaphors explain and help to analyze how the different actors’ enactments of the closure were changing over time. The murder metaphor was an image for managers as responsible and the decision as illegitimate and deliberate. The sacrificial killing metaphor illustrates how managers and others described the decision as strategic and inevitable. And, finally, the palliative death metaphor visualizes a contextualized, process-​oriented, and agentic understanding of the closure. Thus, in some cases, the “fear of death” is unwarranted, when it comes to organizations as organisms. They might give room for new ones, if we stick with the biological image of life in an ecosystem. Thus, different sub-​metaphors for life and sustainability of organizations highlight how life evolves and how to achieve sustainability through an ongoing process of continuity and change. This can be done in order to avoid or postpone death: that is, the ending of an organization and the material losses it implies.

Images of Aging Life In this section we discuss aging as part of the life metaphor, where efficiency in organizations is related to literal financial survival. We contrast three root images in order to clarify the characteristics of each: machine-​like efficiency, and biological survival versus culture and social diversity. First, survival and warding off organizational death in capitalist society often involve images of machine-​like efficiency and

142    REBECKA ARMAN AND EWA WIKSTRÖM predictability, mainly in the financial arena. Being “lean” and highly standardized, with clear structures in order to achieve maximum efficiency, is often promoted in organizational consulting (Radnor et al. 2012). In line with this, studies of organizations show a dominance of the “business case” narrative: in other words, calculations of financial profitability and efficiency are the main motive for action. This has been shown to be particularly true in times of change (Flynn 2010). Organizational actors often proclaim that a business case is the strongest argument for change because it guarantees the sustainability of the organization: the organization’s health, blossoming, and survival. Changes in organizations should, according to this logic, be made only if they are proven in advance by calculations to increase efficiency. The efficiency mantra can be depicted both in line with machine images but also using biological metaphors related to life and vitality, where financial resources are seen as the heart or blood of the organization (see also Riach and Kelly 2015). To illustrate, this quote is from a finance course at a business school in India: “It would not be an overstatement to say that finance is the lifeblood of all organizations” (VIT Bhopal 2020). A company that helps companies outsource has a similar statement on its website: “A finance function is the lifeline of a business” (Newgen CFO Outsourcing 2021). In this area of business case narrative research, an important question is: which members are constructed as productive and useful in keeping the organizational machinery or body alive and well? One example of such queries comes from research on organizational capability for delayed retirement (Liff and Wikström 2020; Arman et al. 2021; Wikström et al. 2022). A quote from a human resources (HR) employee illustrates this: Older workers lose some of their drive to participate in developments, changes and things like that—​they come here and do their job and perform a function, but maybe not the way that we want them to: being a part of a work group that drives the work forward. (Arman et al. 2021: 16)

As seen in the quote, aging workers are often devalued by managers, because managers are trying to balance operational budgets. As organizations seek to remain responsive to changing market demands, employers conflate “potential” with “youthfulness” (embodying competitiveness) and assume that performance shares a negative correlation with age. The “business case” is thus constructed as negative for extending working life, despite the literal fact that many older workers are more physically fit and qualified than younger colleagues (Taylor et al. 2010; Taylor and Earl 2016; Earl et al. 2018). Generally, negative age stereotypes cast older workers as narrative villains and less productive (Arman et al. 2021). The common narrative of aging portrays the process as solely one of decline and loss of functions or lack of development, and thus lowered productivity. This kind of narrative places the responsibility on the individual to resist physical aging. Those within the organization who successfully self-​discipline to avoid signs of aging can still be viewed by the employer as productive and as contributing to sustainability. According

IMAGES OF THE LIFE METAPHOR    143 to a narrative analysis, employers who select specific “productive older workers” and then allow and encourage them to continue working beyond retirement fit with the machine metaphor of viewing employees as cogs in the life of the organization (Arman et al. 2021). The metaphorical life of the organization must be upheld with images of “youthfulness.” In this respect, organizations are viewed rather as robots or androids, with manufactured lives. The literal as well as imaginary aging of individuals inside organizations is avoided or devalued, in order to maintain the metaphorical youthful image of the organization. Through age discrimination this happens irrespective of the actual, literal productivity of older individuals in organizations. If they are unable or unwilling to resist the aging narrative and metaphor, older employees on this view should retire to avoid being perceived as a burden to the organization, in line with the end of life metaphor (see also Trethewey 2001; Riach and Kelly 2015). However, if the individual retires, s(he) is instead considered a burden on the nation’s welfare system. This double whammy found in our study is part of the increasing uncertainty and precarity for individuals nearing the end of their working life, as described by Phillipson et al. (2019). It also confirms the conclusions from earlier studies of the influence of neoliberal ideas on business case organizing, and life-​course and retirement narratives (Rudman and Molke 2009). The critique of the machine metaphor is that it may in fact be harmful in organizations (Earl et al. 2018), and we claim that this is because it is competing with the sustainability metaphor. Keeping the robot machine organization alive is less likely to fit with the image of sustainability and more prone to breakdowns, compared to biological and social images. Hence, other researchers suggest the use of the diversity metaphor as more useful in organizational life and theory (Duncan 2003). For example, researchers Backes-​Gellner and Veen (2013) highlight that age diversity may have a positive effect on company productivity for organizations engaged in creative tasks. Accordingly, the image of “cultural diversity” highlights the inclusion of differences supporting both continuity and change within organizations. This fits with the image of a blossoming of all flowers and thriving of a variety of life forms, dependent upon and complementing each other, as in ecological biodiversity. This garden of Eden reverberates with the religious connotations of the sustainability metaphor, celebrating the goodness inherent in an (eternal) life granted by the creator (Jackson 2003). This divine diversity stands in sharp contrast to the image of the standardized and constantly failing machine-​like organization created by humans.

Images of the Political Arena As an alternative to organization metaphors based on images of biological organisms and machines, critical management studies have addressed the question of life and sustainability from the viewpoint of the image of politics or instrument of domination. For whom is the organization’s life and sustainability important? Who stands to gain?

144    REBECKA ARMAN AND EWA WIKSTRÖM A critical view of the metaphor of life and sustainability of organizations leads to a metaphor for interaction between stakeholders: the political system (Morgan 2006) or the political market square (Larson and Wikström 2001). This counter-​metaphor highlights actors in organizations with different interests and definitions of sustainability. Some actors are central (i.e., have more power), whereas others are peripheral in the political arena (Langley and Denis 2011). The actors interact in order to further their own interests. An example is Riach and Kelly’s (2015) study of how sustainability in organizations could be achieved using the vampire metaphor. In this study, it is shown that employers and HR professionals are powerful and are acting in order to make younger employees central and older employees peripheral. This is built on the rationale that the younger employees are needed for the sustainability of the organization. They are seen as technologically savvy, though less experienced (Pritchard and Whiting 2014). Organizations and employers perpetuate the norm of a constant need for “fresh blood” that becomes food for the organization, according to the metaphor analysis in the study (Riach and Kelly 2015). If we continue the metaphor analysis started by Riach and Kelly (2015), the vampire organization is bleeding through a major wound: that is, making older workers peripheral, losing the skills and labor of those who exit working life and retire. Yet, the organization is still insisting on fresh blood (i.e., recruiting new and younger employees), ignoring the possibility of repairing the wound. As shown above, blood is also used in the biological images of organizations, but stemming from a different root metaphor. By retiring older workers, the employer gains resources to employ new “blood” and a more up-​to-​date generation. The study shows how the interest of the younger employees is furthered at the expense of the older, in line with the political arena image. Studies also show that older workers are retained only in the face of problems with labor supply and where employees have outstanding performance records (Taylor et al. 2016). Using the image of organizations as political arenas, the sustainable life of organizations is based on a political redefinition of the “performance” of organizational members. For example, improving the job performance of older workers is not considered to be in the purview of the employer; instead, performance is seen as reflecting the moral character of older workers. The image of interactions in a political arena in and around organizations thus questions for whom life and sustainability are afforded, when applying the life and sustainability metaphor.

Images of a Life Course The life-​course sub-​metaphor in organizational studies highlights the individual’s working life. A life-​course perspective is used in order to describe life and sustainability

IMAGES OF THE LIFE METAPHOR    145 in organizations as a development process that spans over a large part of working life. Again, here the life course in the organization is metaphorical, separated from the literal life course of the individual. Being “born” into organizational life and “exiting” in a similar way to death has nothing to do with the literal birth, growth, and death of the individual. However, the life-​course perspective results in researchers’ interest in longitudinal studies that reflect the opportunities and limitations that the individual encounters in different phases of their working life (Fisher et al. 2016). The life-​course image has emerged from sociology and demography, and highlights the changes that humans undergo during their life (Komp and Johansson 2016; Lekkas et al. 2017). This image of life and sustainability has successfully demonstrated the complexity of factors that affect an individual facing such life-​changing decisions as hiring, promotion, and retiring. Two concepts are central to the life-​course theory and image: transitions and trajectories. Transitions, such as starting school, having children, and retiring, are always embedded in an individual’s trajectory (the “path” or “line” that an individual’s life has taken), which gives the transition its meaning and form. The assumption is thus that we can understand individuals’ preferences, values, and choices through the trajectory that the individual has taken through life. Trajectories refer to long-​term behavioral patterns and researchers distinguish them by how the individual has handled various important transitions in life (Dirlam and Zheng 2017). This sub-​metaphor is yet to be used more broadly to make sense of transitions for organizations as a whole. It would fit well with the sub-​metaphor of evolution, yet allow for a more accepting view of organizations that come to an end. Instead of being a failure in the struggle for existence, it is the natural continuation of a trajectory. The life-​course image has developed from focusing unilaterally on turning points in people’s lives linked to, for example, different educational stages, parenting, and retirement, to include broader transition periods. The demographic changes that we can see in the postindustrial society have made “trajectories” (individuals’ life paths) less uniform and more diversified. In the middle class, for example, the age at which one has one’s first child has been postponed in favor of studies and career. Furthermore, middle-​ aged and older people are increasingly choosing to return to studying—​something that was previously strongly linked to the phase of young adulthood (e.g., Kridahl and Silverstein 2020). This has effects on their organizational membership (e.g., Moynihan and Landuyt 2008; Jiang and Shen 2018; Kridahl and Silverstein 2020). A postindustrial understanding of the life course must thus be seen as less standardized, with gendering, maturation, and aging taking place within the framework of a historical context, which for the individual results in unique life experiences and less predictable career paths. For this reason, transitions such as retirement can be viewed as processes that need to be studied over a longer period (Wikström et al. 2022). What organizational members’ close relationships look like, such as their relationships with parents, spouse, children, and significant others, is also significant in the life-​ course perspective. Individuals are involved in filtering and creating meaning around

146    REBECKA ARMAN AND EWA WIKSTRÖM the social relationships that they experience through life (Zanasi et al. 2020)—​not least those relationships that take place within the framework of their working life. An important argument is thus that work and the family sphere are closely intertwined. How this is expressed often differs between women and men, which leads to differences for these groups when it comes to organizational life. This impacts the life of the organization because of the life-​course transitions that are embedded in it. The life course of the individual is related to the metaphorical life and sustainability of the organization because organizations adapt to the careers of the members.

Reflections and Summary This chapter has highlighted five of Morgan’s original images, relating them to the life and sustainability metaphor in organizations: (1) organism image, (2) flux and transformation image, (3) machine image, (4) political system image, and (5) culture image. It has been shown how the variation of root images reflects the benefits as well as the possible limitations of the metaphor. First, the life metaphor involves viewing organizations in the same terms as biological organisms, as in the case of the evolution theories of organizations and the life-​course perspective on life inside organizations. Second, the life course of organizations as well of organizational members is in flux and going through transformational transitions. Third, life is equally related to keeping the machine going, with a dominant narrative of the business case. Fourth, the life of and inside organizations is negotiated in a political arena representing a system of negotiated interests. Here the fifth image, of diversity and organizations as cultural systems, paints a hopeful image of the positive consequences of inclusion of many or all types of actors. All of the metaphors are cast with different values, ranging from negative to positive, as Örtenblad et al. (2016) point out. Life and sustainability are inherently positive images, thus carrying normative connotations. A long, or even eternal, life is equal to sustainability, and vice versa. Both images point to the strong necessity to avoid or postpone the negatively charged metaphor of death and demise. However, when we examine the metaphors of life and sustainability from the perspective of Morgan’s (2006) remaining metaphors (psychic prison, instrument of domination, and brain), the positive charge can be called into question. The constant fluxing battle for life and survival, of the machine, organism, or political system of organizations, is in itself a psychic prison. The images of the individuals are of path dependency, life balance, and life puzzle, thus showing representations of being trapped in predetermined patterns or tracks. In the reviewed literature, the political systems-​oriented metaphors and instrument of domination mainly highlight the managers’ and employers’ perspective, in contrast

IMAGES OF THE LIFE METAPHOR    147 to that of the employees and other stakeholders. The life and sustainability of the organization is often pitted against that of the individuals inhabiting or surrounding it. This raises critical questions such as: life and sustainability, for whom? In this image, the lives of both the organization and the individuals in it benefit from increased sustainability through diversity. We have pointed out the research showing that even biological life development in modernity is currently following a less predictable course, offering more variation and flux. This is similar to research on the flux metaphor as containing a sub-​ category of becoming (Schoeneborn et al. 2016). The longing for constant youth, for and inside the organization, thus also becomes an instrument of managerial domination, as seen in our reviewed research on ageism or age discrimination. Our hope is that our exposition of the metaphor of life in organizational theory can contribute to the brain and cultural system qualities of organizations. By referring to these two images, all actors in organizations are cast as active in (re) creating cultural patterns, and can apply a brain-​like analytical wisdom to bring more equality. Thus, we are breaking free from the psychic prisons of unexamined metaphorical use.

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chapter 9

m etaphors of di g i ta l transform at i on bertrand audrin and eric davoine

Introduction Digital transformation represents major challenges for society, organizations, and their members. The concept of digital transformation emerged at the beginning of the 2010s and has since spread in public media, in academic literature, and in organizational discourses. The reality of digital transformation is multifaceted by nature: numerous phenomena are more or less directly associated with digital transformation, with various impacts on organizational and individual experiences. According to Brynjolfsson and McAfee (2011), digital transformation aims to bring organizations to a more connected world. This definition of digital transformation remains relatively vague—​mainly highlighting its major societal impact—​but has the advantage of being all-​encompassing, allowing it to take into account the variety of phenomena associated with digital transformation. The literature identifies numerous phenomena as “digital” phenomena, be it Industry 4.0 (Rojko 2017; Schneider and Sting 2020), New Ways of Working (Jemine et al. 2019; Kingma 2019), Artificial Intelligence (Ågerfalk 2020), or Big Data (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2012; De Mauro et al. 2014). Even though digital transformation has been identified as a societal phenomenon for about a decade, the multiplicity of organizational and technological phenomena as well as the buzzword and catch-​all concept dimension of digital transformation make it something still loosely defined. This chapter aims at categorizing different forms and understandings of digital transformation and digitalized organizations, following what Örtenblad (2017)

152    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE defines as a “pigeon-​holing approach.” This approach relies on actors’ discourse (and the metaphorical expressions or behaviors they display) to draw conclusions about organizational members’ deep-​down understandings of the phenomena they are experiencing (Örtenblad 2017). It aims thus at identifying the root metaphors organizational members build their understanding on. Root metaphors are the metaphors that lie “underneath the understanding of something” (Örtenblad 2017: 58), in this case underneath the understanding of digital transformation and digitalized organizations. Metaphors are very useful when it comes to presenting novel phenomena, like digital transformation, as metaphors allow us to make the connection between a familiar situation and a situation that is not fully understood (Schultze and Orlikowski 2001). Metaphors offer an important sensemaking lever (see Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume) to represent and analyze an emerging technological and organizational phenomenon (Cornelissen 2002; Bruskin and Mikkelsen 2020). Using metaphors makes it possible to formalize through well-​known or recognizable images a future that is still uncertain (Sackmann 1989). Thus, thinking about digital transformation in terms of metaphors should allow us to “deal with this world a bit faster than we might otherwise would, particularly as academics” (Oswick and Grant 2016: 341). Using several metaphors as categories can help us identify differences between various phenomena associated with digital transformation and digitalized organizations, and offer an overview of organizational actors’ understandings of these phenomena (Örtenblad 2017). This chapter is mostly based on the analysis of organizational actors’ interviews from eight case studies of organizations that have undergone a process of digital transformation (Audrin 2019a, 2019b; Davoine and Audrin 2019; Audrin et al. 2021). The digital transformation phenomena differed between the case studies, ranging from digital automation (i.e., self-​service technologies implementation in retail) and New Ways of Working (flexible time and space working environments), to assisted decision-​making applications. Each case study consists of six to 13 interviews with different categories of organizational actors (executives, employees, IT managers, HR managers, customers). The interview guide was based on Sonenshein (2010) and focused on the sensemaking and sensegiving elements associated with digital transformation. The interview guide also integrated questions on the context, content, and process of change (Pettigrew 1987; Jemine et al. 2019). The interviews aimed at understanding the challenges of digital transformation as well as its results, and offered a detailed description of the characteristics of the digital transformation phenomena that organizational actors were involved in. The purpose of this chapter is to categorize different organizational actors’ perspectives on different forms of digital transformation and digitally transformed organizations by using a set of metaphors to develop our understanding of this multifaceted concept. Metaphors are here used as a set of “pigeon-​holes” (Örtenblad 2017) that help categorize

METAPHORS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION    153 different understandings or different types of digital transformation and digitalized organizations. A first set of two metaphors is used to categorize actors’ understandings of digital transformation, namely the metaphor of the digit and the metaphor of the wave. A second set of three metaphors—​based on Morgan’s metaphors (Morgan 1986)—​ is used to categorize actors’ understandings of digitalized organizations, namely the machine, the brain, and the instrument of domination. We initially screened our body of interviews looking for metaphors, which led us to identify five metaphors as central in our corpus. We then led a content analysis on our interviews using these five metaphors as categories and identified multiple examples through our cases of elements that were representative of each metaphor (see Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume). We present these metaphors and explain how they help us categorize different forms and understandings of digital transformation. We provide quotes from our cases to illustrate the different understandings of digitalized organizations that these metaphors help identify.

Metaphors of Digital Transformation In this section, we focus on two metaphors of digital transformation as a change phenomenon. The first metaphor is the metaphor of the digit. Stricto sensu, digital transformation means “transforming into digits.” As such, digital transformation represents a radical change in terms of data management and communication practices. Digital transformation appears in our cases as a transformation of data, communication signals, commands, and—​by extension—​all types of data-​driven processes into digits. Digital transformation thus involves encoding every unit of data in all organizational practices and processes, including all human forms of organizational communication, whether verbal or nonverbal. The digit metaphor helps organizational actors perceive the radicality of the change and links data transformation to organizational transformation. On one hand, the digit metaphor is associated with transforming physical documents into digital ones: “we’re digitizing to reduce paper and to work online” (HR manager, insurance company). On the other hand, the digit metaphor is associated with the transformation of the whole organization: “we’re currently setting up the digital workplace” (HR manager, insurance company), which is associated with a major transformation of organizational practices and organizational culture. Digital transformation can therefore be perceived, metaphorically, as a radical and ontological transformation of organizational practices into digits. The second metaphor is that of the wave. This metaphor is often used by practitioners and researchers (Porter and Heppelmann 2014), also mentioned as a digital wave (Gibson et al. 2014). The metaphor of the wave gives the impression that digital transformation is inevitable, thus creating a feeling of urgency and a form of fear of missing

154    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE out for the organizations and their members. The metaphor of the wave, also used to describe management fashion phenomena which hold wave-​like properties (Abrahamson and Fairchild 1999), is used to present digital transformation as an opportunity and as an external phenomenon (a change in the way we communicate, work, and do business) that impacts all organizations. Some authors will extend the metaphor and talk about “surfing the wave” (Wiesmüller 2014) or “chasing the wave” (Gibson et al. 2014). The wave metaphor associates digital transformation with both opportunities and challenges. First, as a wave that can be surfed, the metaphor highlights that digital transformation represents positive opportunities for organizations. This appeared in the discourse of organizational actors referring to the opportunity that needs to be seized: “We want to go in that direction of modernity” (Cashier, retail company). Second, it emphasizes its inexorable reality as an external, potentially overwhelming, phenomenon. The inexorability of digital transformation was also frequently mentioned by organizational actors: “Anyway, you can’t go against progress. . . . You see . . . it’s a bit of a rearguard reaction” (Store manager, retail company). The wave represents an environmental phenomenon, a natural dynamic, a potential source of athletic fun, which reinforces the need for organizations to be proactive and agile when it comes to digital transformation. The metaphor of the wave also sheds light on the threat that digital transformation represents. Employees who endure the change perceive the wave as more threatening. For some employees, digital transformation is a surging phenomenon that is difficult to control, a wave that carries away everything in its path—​organizations and their members—​or drastically transforms the organization. Some authors would use the term “digital tsunami” (Evans 2016; Lacasse et al. 2016). This appeared in our cases with the expression of a form of helplessness from employees and workers who endured digital change. It was the case when digital transformation was profoundly transforming employees’ work environment and work content—​for example, with cashiers in retail or repairers in industrial services. This metaphor of the digital tsunami that carries jobs away in its path also appears in the stream of research that focuses on the impact of digital transformation on jobs (Autor 2015) and has been associated with the COVID-​19 pandemic (Wallace-​Stephens and Morgante 2020). Both metaphors of digital transformation highlight the perception of radical change, with internal (the digit) and external (the wave) dynamics. With the wave metaphor, we could also identify two different understandings of digital waves, depending on the positions of actors perceiving positive or negative implications of the change process (see also Czarniawska, Chapter 10 in this volume). In the next sections, we rely on three of Morgan’s metaphors (Morgan 1986), namely machines, brains, and instruments of domination, to categorize different organizational actors’ perspectives on different forms of digitally transformed organizations. Using a set of metaphors as “pigeon-​holes” (Örtenblad 2017) helps point out differences between different forms of digitalized organizations and the way organizational actors perceive them. In the following section, we will discuss the different categories that the three metaphors shed light on. An overview of these metaphors and their implications is given in Table 9.1.

METAPHORS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION    155 Table 9.1 Overview of the metaphors of digitalized organizations Metaphor

Definition

Emphasizes

Neglects

Associated concepts

Digitalized organizations as machines

Machines that rely on digital tools and data to operate rationally and autonomously

Rationality; autonomy of the machine; efficiency

Humans in organizations

Digital automation (Sundararajan 2017)

Digitalized organizations as brains

Brains that rely on digital tools and data to make decisions and predictions

Global connectivity; data processing; virtuality

Power and conflicts in organization; social dimension of organizations

Digitalized organizations as instruments of domination

Instruments of domination that rely on digital tools and data to monitor and control human behaviors of employees and customers

Surveillance Nondomination and control forms of through data; organizations constant monitoring

Industry 4.0 (Rojko 2017; Schneider and Sting 2020) Artificial Intelligence (Ågerfalk 2020) New Ways of Working (Jemine et al. 2019; Kingma 2019) Big Data (McAfee and Brynjolfsson 2012; De Mauro et al. 2014) Quantified self (Lupton 2016; Moore and Robinson 2016)

Digitalized Organizations as Machines The metaphor of the machine can be used to categorize the understanding that organizational actors have of digital automation. The metaphor of the machine is the most classic organizational metaphor identified and described by Morgan (1986), which has an important resonance in the information systems literature (see Walsham 1991; Fischer et al. 1993; Kamm 1995). This metaphor puts the emphasis on efficiency and on the mechanical and rational way of functioning of organizations (Kendall and Kendall 1994; Örtenblad et al. 2016). Kamm (1995) associates the machine metaphor with the use of information as a resource for solving problems or for finding solutions in a rational way, following a logic of quasi-​“mechanical” rules. Walsham (1991) associates the metaphor of the machine to discrete-​entity models that adopt a formal and rational perspective on information technology and the configurations in which it has been used. The metaphor of the machine presents digital organizations as places where digital tools—​digital machines—​play a prominent role in the organization’s operations and in

156    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE the process of value creation. The machine metaphor is related to key phenomena that are associated with digital transformation, such as digital automation (Sundararajan 2017) and Industry 4.0 (Rojko 2017; Schneider and Sting 2020). Automation makes it possible to redefine and optimize processes, in a machine-​like way (Melão and Pidd 2000; Lindsay et al. 2003). This metaphor can also be found in the titles of seminal works on the topic of digital transformation by Brynjolfsson and McAfee respectively titled “The second machine age” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2014) and “Race against the machine” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee 2011). The machine represents a mechanical rationality of organizational operations, in which rationality of action is pure and perfect (Morgan 1986). With this metaphor, digital transformation is represented as the transformation of the organization into a superhuman hyper-​rational machine. The metaphor of the machine highlights the rationality of digitalized organizations and the extent to which they function autonomously and efficiently with little human intervention. This appeared in our cases of self-​service technologies implementation in retail. The implementation of self-​service technologies has allowed automation of a great part of the checkout process, by distributing tasks both to customers and to technological artefacts (self-​checkouts). Self-​checkouts interact autonomously with customers and lead their way of action through pre​programmed steps: scanning articles, validating different types of item, scanning fidelity cards, completing payment, etc. The checkout process is now optimized and controlled through an automated process that does not seem to leave room for mistakes or even for human decision making that could potentially lead to mistakes. For both employees and customers, “the machine does everything” (Cashier, retail company). The machine seems to actually do and control every aspect of the process: it registers, records, and gives step-​by-​step instructions to customers who follow them. Frontline employees have been assigned new roles of hosting, supporting, and troubleshooting, and of giving a sporadic human face to a deliberately dehumanized process. The actual machine symbolizes the whole organization that tends to rely more and more on technology and to automatize its processes: It’s the evolution of the business, it’s the evolution of retail. There is some [digital technology] at the cash register, but there is also some in the way we order when we work on the shelf. So more and more, we see that technology is being integrated into our business. To sum up, I would say: let technology do the tasks we don’t like to do. (HR manager, retail company)

The metaphor of the digitalized organization as a machine also emphasizes the issue of interactions between humans and digital technology. For some actors, working in a machine-​like digitalized organization represents challenges in terms of roles and interactions: “We are still human beings even if we work with machines” (Cashier, retail company). The metaphor of the machine puts the emphasis on automation, rationality, and the preeminent role of digital technology in machine-​like digitalized organizations. It is also useful to highlight the dehumanization of digitalized organizations. It allows

METAPHORS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION    157 us to imagine the pure and perfect rationality and the pure and perfect objectivity toward which these processes tend to be geared—​making us forget that these very same processes were developed by humans. The digital process is presented as a hyper-​ rational and flawless process, as superhuman as it is dehumanized. In this metaphorical vision of digital transformation as a machine, humans are often reduced to a source of error and waste of time, or as a smiling face that serves service quality purposes.

Digitalized Organizations as Brains The metaphor of the brain can be used to categorize the understanding that organizational actors have of New Ways of Working and assisted decision-​making applications. The metaphor of organizations as brains (Morgan 1986) is another classic organizational metaphor. This metaphor puts the emphasis on the cognitive dimension of organizations, referring to their abilities in terms of information management and learning capacity, as well as their cybernetic dimension (Morgan 1986; Walsham 1991; Örtenblad et al. 2016). Scholars using this metaphor as a prescriptive lens traditionally focus on the development of information technology in organizations, as well as the learning processes associated with it (Oates and Fitzgerald 2007; Jackson 2016). In the context of digitalized organizations, the metaphor of the brain is associated with the concept of Artificial Intelligence in the academic literature (Carbonell et al. 2016; Fuller 2019; Natale and Ballatore 2020), as it is about presenting a technology that metaphorically works like a human brain (Carbonell et al. 2016). Digital technology will process information, and make recommendations and decisions, in the same way a human brain would (Carrier 1990). The metaphor of the brain puts the emphasis on the information exchange within organizations and presents data as key resources of digital organizations, a new form of artificial resource which organizations will tap into (Ossewaarde 2019). By putting the emphasis on the information and its transmission, the brain metaphor also creates the stage for virtual organizations; digital transformation changes organizations from those embodied by brick-​and-​mortar buildings into virtual networks where actors exchange and process information through a multitude of possible connections (Schultze and Orlikowski 2001). The brain metaphor highlights data processing and connectivity as a core dimension of the digitalized organization. In New Ways of Working, organizational actors emphasize their connectedness thanks to digital communication tools, in the same way as neurons are in a brain: Managers who are on the road all the time and who can flexibly use all means of communication from home, from the office, from a restaurant, who use all these platforms to get information, to connect with colleagues who can teach them something, those are the ones who have a blast I would say, with [our corporate concept of New Ways of Working]. (HR manager, telecommunications company)

158    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE Digital communication tools also create a space for exchange and learning in the form of platforms where organizational members can share their knowledge: There is this online or self-​service principle with the community. This starts with “the Brain” and our knowledge management tool, so that information can be looked up and that the community helps itself. (Manager, telecommunications company)

In the context of New Ways of Working, the metaphor of the brain emphasizes connectivity and information sharing between organizational members, which is also particularly relevant to represent how virtual and remote working will transform the organization in a virtual, connected, collectively processing and learning community. The brain metaphor also highlights centralized information decision making in organizations, especially through algorithms and applications—​ which can be assimilated to “a centralized brain that regulates overall activity” (Morgan 1986: 77). In cases of applications that support and manage employee decision making and operations, decisions and advice are given by an application that centralizes information (in the same way a brain would). One of our cases consisted of an industrial company that had implemented one of these applications to support the work of its repairers. The application installed on repairers’ smartphones makes decisions based on different sources of information in real time, in order to coordinate the operations of a team of repairers in a specific geographical zone depending on their availability. The application combines a broad array of data (geolocation, tasks carried out, repair parts used, etc.), shares information with the employees, and formulates decisions for them. Organizational actors present the organization as a brain that centralizes information: “Basically, [the application] has allowed us to optimize our support. It changes the way we work because it allows us to be more efficient, if we know where to look for information and how to find the right information” (Repairer, industrial company). For organizational actors, the organization functions as a brain that acts independently and coordinates the collective action: This application is available for technicians on their smartphones. The idea is that the installation recognizes when it has certain symptoms and so it signals that it has some problems, to inform that it should be repaired before it goes into a fatal error. This application allows you to have a remote control of the device. It allows you to see the state of the installation and run some tests remotely. (Manager, industrial company)

The application appears as a personalized collective brain: it “knows” a lot of things, it “helps” and “tells people what to do.” The application becomes a personalized information management and activity coordination entity that embodies, through the material device of the smartphone, the whole organization. The brain metaphor highlights the importance of organizational learning through a constant feed of information and learning algorithms. This metaphor is useful to

METAPHORS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION    159 foster change in the context of New Ways of Working or assisted decision-​making applications by presenting brain-​like digitalized organizations which focus on information processing in a harmonized way. This mostly appears in the discourse of project managers, consultants, and executives. It offers a dynamic vision of the organization as constantly learning and improving. By putting the emphasis on information exchange and data management, this metaphor sheds light on the value of data and their role as key resources in digital organizations. Digits and data are at the center of the organization: they are the ones connecting organizational members together, and it is also thanks to them that the organization processes information, which represents its core activity. This metaphor often offers an idealized vision of technology and of digital organizations as smart, unbiased, and brain-​like. Digitalized organizations as brains are presented as efficient and harmonized networks of information exchange, which tends to overshadow issues of power and control in organizations. In the same vein, Artificial Intelligence is perceived as smarter and able to learn, and it is difficult to question the quality of decisions made by this artificial brain. Yet, applications have agendas, something that Morgan (1986) refers to as the purposes of the brain, the rational purposes to be served.

Digitalized Organizations as Instruments of Domination The metaphor of the instrument of domination can be used to categorize the understanding that specific groups of actors—​mainly employees and customers—​have of the surveillance and control that takes place in digitalized organizations. The metaphor of the instrument of domination (also presented by Morgan 1986) puts the emphasis on exploitation and control, and raises the question of power distribution within organizations (Morgan 1986; Örtenblad et al. 2016). Research literature on information systems notably highlights the enabler role of information technology in controlling and monitoring—​and hence, constraining—​action (Walsham 1991; Oates and Fitzgerald 2007: 437). In the context of digitalized organizations, the metaphor of instrument of domination is often associated with the transparency and traceability of data that allows for continuous surveillance. The phenomenon called “Big Data” refers to the technological improvements that have made it possible to handle (i.e., store, access, and analyze) huge volumes of data in various formats (De Mauro et al. 2014). Gareth Morgan, in his conversation with Oswick and Grant (2016), speaks about this phenomenon: “Big data in this world, that’s hugely important. Think about the Foucauldian metaphor, the panopticon and the whole idea of discipline and self-​discipline, punishment, surveillance” (Oswick and Grant 2016: 339). In the same article, the authors associate Big Data to Big Brother, a link that is often made in the literature and in the media (Oboler et al. 2012; Lesk 2013). The information collected allows for an emphasized control

160    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE to be exercised on both the employees and customers of the organization, through geolocation or online activity monitoring tools (Oboler et al. 2012; Rosengren and Ottosson 2016). The instrument of domination metaphor highlights various forms of digital control, be it in remote working or in the monitoring of operations with applications or digital artefacts. In our case studies, several actors used examples that more or less explicitly associated the digitalized organization with an instrument of domination. In the case of self-​service technologies, some customers recounted the constraining and routine nature of the sequences of actions directed by the machine: I noticed lately that they changed their random check system, it must have to do with their algorithm, I don’t know! And now I’m getting checked more often but that’s normal! Some people are forgetful, they forget to scan . . . but I’ve noticed that lately, I’m being checked more often than before. (Customer, retail company)

The instrument of domination metaphor also makes it possible to understand the perspective of the “exploited” (Morgan 1986: 303) and to offer a counterweight to the more rational and harmonized metaphors presented earlier. In the case of New Ways of Working, employees face new possibilities in terms of online tracking by circumventing the system by being online as often as possible, even without working. In the case of the applications that support and manage repairers’ decision making and operations, employees expressed the feeling of being controlled and monitored more closely through digital tools: For [the company], it definitely allows for greater control and tracking. Now [they] can compare our hours between sites and they can see that this site has less productive hours than that site, and say “how come you have so many non-​productive hours when this site has a lot less?” So we have to adapt. We fill the hours differently, even though we’re still doing the same thing. (Repairer, industrial company)

Some repairers admitted that they or some of their colleagues have developed rebellious behaviors to get past the determinism of the algorithms: shifting to airplane mode on their smartphone to avoid geolocation, or forgetting—​or even destroying—​their smartphone, which embodies the domination of a digitalized organization that dictates, via algorithms, its rhythms and priorities. The metaphor of the instrument of domination makes it possible to better understand employees’ and customers’ understandings of digitalized organizations in a context of monitoring and surveillance, when actors’ actions are constrained by digital artifacts. It makes it possible to highlight the control and surveillance “devices” (in a Foucauldian sense) of the digitalized organization, as well as the potential risks associated with these devices (De Vaujany et al. 2021). This metaphor also highlights the privacy issues related to digitalized organizations, whether it is the privacy of employees or customers. Technological artifacts and the rise of the Internet of Things have led to the emergence

METAPHORS OF DIGITAL TRANSFORMATION    161 of the “quantified self ” (Lupton 2016; Moore and Robinson 2016), a self whose actions are constantly measured. This raises questions in terms of activity tracking and potential drifts in terms of performance evaluation. This makes it possible to understand unplanned rebellious and resistance behaviors from some organization members facing digital change. This metaphor also raises the question of the rationality of digitalized organizations: what are the priorities behind the programming of algorithms? Who is in a dominating position behind the anonymous and seemingly objective virtuality of the machine? This metaphorical representation of the instrument of domination also creates a risk, already identified by Morgan (1986), of systematically demonizing digitalized transformation, or of falling prey to conspiracy theories.

Conclusion Metaphors offer a known frame of reference that is particularly useful in highlighting dynamics and varieties of digital transformation. The metaphors of digit and wave help better understand different dimensions of digital transformation as a technological and organizational change process. The metaphors of machine, brain, and instrument of domination show different understandings that organizational actors have of digitalized organizations. Relying on these metaphors helps present different perspectives on digital transformation and on digitally transformed organizations. We have presented how different metaphors present different actors’ understanding of different forms of digitalized organizations. The metaphor of the machine is most relevant in the context of digital automation. It highlights the superhuman and dehumanized rationality of digitalized organizations but tends to completely exclude their human side. The metaphor of the brain is most relevant in the context of New Ways of Working and of centralized decision making through algorithms and applications. It highlights data collection, exchange, and processing as the main source of value creation of the digitalized organization, and emphasizes the connectedness of digitalized organizations. Digitalized organizations are networked information systems that rely on algorithms which put in use a broad array of data to make the best decisions. This metaphor tends to neglect the social dimension of organizations. The metaphor of the instrument of domination is useful to understand the perception of those who feel “exploited” in or by digitalized organizations. It highlights a set of control mechanisms associated with digitalized organizations and helps us understand reactions of resistance from some organizational actors. It emphasizes the monitoring that takes place within digital organizations and warns us of the risks of surveillance. However, it gives a critical and negative view of digital organizations that tends to favor conspiracy theories. This metaphor is relevant in the context of Big Data, but also in other contexts of monitoring and surveillance, and when actors’ actions are constrained by digital artifacts. Each metaphor helps us understand different forms of digitalized organizations and the way organizational actors perceive them. This set of metaphors provides an

162    BERTRAND AUDRIN AND ERIC DAVOINE overview of the multifaceted phenomenon that is digital transformation. Comple­ mentary metaphors help achieve a better sense of the complexity of digital transformation that goes way beyond simply the “turning into digits” of organizational processes. The multiple perspectives provided by the set of metaphors are used as a “color map” (Örtenblad 2017) that helps uncover a variety of aspects of digitalized organizations. Complementary metaphors help better master the logics and dynamics of a wave that, once mastered through metaphorical representations, begins to lose its threatening nature. This chapter does not aim to provide a comprehensive overview of all the under­ standings of digitalized organizations through metaphors, but rather to raise awareness of the usefulness of considering a set of metaphors to understand digital transformation as a complex, multifaceted phenomenon. This analysis calls for more work on digital transformation using metaphors, whether they be Morgan’s remaining five metaphors (Morgan 1986) or new ones (see Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume), in order to better understand how organizational actors perceive digital transformation and digitalized organizations.

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chapter 10

“rob ots at work ” A Metaphor or a Label? barbara czarniawska

Introduction A title like “robots at work” in the media or in a social science text can lead to at least four interpretations. It can be a label, a shortcut signaling robotization of work, a process that began in the 1920s but seems to be exploding right now. This reading can lead to two, drastically different interpretations. The first interpretation is positive, practically enthusiastic: finally, robots will perform all the dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs (often called DDD jobs), freeing people to think and create! They will also perform more sophisticated caretaking jobs, taking care of people both medically and emotionally (like Artificial Friends in Ishiguro’s 2021 novel). A second, opposite interpretation sees robotization more metaphorically, as a process by which robots deprive people of work—​which, after all, is one of the elements of a dignified life and a necessary income. A third reading of “robots at work” is even more pessimistic and is completely metaphorical: more and more jobs will become robot-​like, and people performing them will be treated like soulless machines—​perhaps even become soulless machines . . . A fourth reading is the most pessimistic but has at least two variants. One is pessimistic in its assumption about human nature: robots in this interpretation will play the role of contemporary slaves and will be treated as slaves have been treated in the past. The other reading suggests that if robots are not treated like slaves, it will be at the expense of free humans, who may be treated worse than robots are. In this chapter, I take a closer look at all four interpretations,1 which can be found in popular culture, media, and the social sciences. I begin, however, with a brief section on the role that metaphors play in organizing and in organization theory. 1 There

is, of course, a fifth reading: robots as superhuman (“semi-​ divine”; Moravec 1998) Singularities (Kurzweil 2005), but it is safe to assume that such creatures will not bother to work.

“ROBOTS AT WORK”    167

Metaphors and Organizing—​ Theory and Practice Until the late 1970s, metaphors remained a subject matter of literary criticism, semiotics, and hermeneutics. The 1980s witnessed a “linguistic turn” in social sciences, in which their rhetoric began to be examined (e.g., Edmondson 1984; McCloskey 1985; Nelson et al. 1987; Simons 1988). Scholars began to speak of a “logic of inquiry,” often in a daring plural, and the fact that social scientists use a rich repertoire of persuasive instruments was no longer a startling discovery. In organization theory, Gareth Morgan suggested that research paradigms were situated in master metaphors of organization (Morgan 1980, 1983, 1986). The question of rhetoric was then raised unsystematically in various works inspired by Kenneth Burke (see, e.g., Mangham and Overington 1987), and more systematically in works originating in communication studies (Cheney 1991). It was suggested early on that the “metaphors of the field” can become a tool for the comparative analysis of different organizations (Manning 1979), and that social policy formulation is guided by what Donald Schön (1979) called “generative metaphors.” It was postulated that metaphors are much more than symbols: they are also devices used for control purposes, thus bridging the expressive and the practical orders in organizations (Harré 1981). Again, it was Gareth Morgan who summarized it most succinctly: the process of metaphorical conception is the basic mode of symbolism, central to the way in which humans forge their experience and knowledge of the world in which they live. (1980: 610)

From the outset, metaphors were the tropes that attracted the greatest attention of organization scholars (e.g., Morgan 1986; Czarniawska-​Joerges and Joerges 1988; Grant and Oswick 1996; Lennie 1999). One reason could be that—​unlike similes, metonymies, and synecdoches—​metaphors provide ambiguity, indispensable for people with many interests to unite in a collective endeavor without necessarily uniting their points of view. (Thus, metaphors play the role of “boundary words”; Diedrich and Czarniawska forthcoming.) Yet at the same time, metaphors work in the opposite direction: by familiarizing the unknown, they reduce the uncertainty caused by new or surprising situations, which are abundant in organizing. A third reason must be that they provide color and entertainment to the sometimes-​dreary everyday life in work organizations. Thus, if there were any warnings against the overuse of metaphors, they primarily concerned their use in organization theory, allegedly threating its “scientificity” (Pinder and Bourgeois 1982). Nevertheless, an overuse of metaphors may hurt organizing, which relies primarily on labels, or a “flat discourse” (Czarniawska 2004). Or, as Ohlsson and Rombach put it more sharply:

168   BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA Metaphors make description more comprehensible and easier to sell. But when it comes to organizations, metaphors also suppress our reasoning and our feeling. They control what we are able to see, and how we interpret what we see. (2014: 9)

I am not as pessimistic as Ohlsson and Rombach are about the amount of control that metaphors exert over their readers or listeners. The main point is, rather, how the object to which a metaphor carries the reader (after all, μεταφορά means “transport” in Greek) is being interpreted, and this is the focus in the present chapter.

The Robots Enter the Stage (and Stay There) When Czech author Karel Čapek introduced the term robot (from robota, “arduous work” in Slavic languages) in his 1920 comedy play Rossum’s Universal Robots, he probably did not expect it to be incorporated into English and from there into other languages (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020). At present, it is also unclear if Čapek’s robots were actually cyborgs (mechanized humans) or humanized machines. In his comedy, he consequently ignored the difference between the organic and the mechanical, making it into a comic point. Most likely, he was alluding to the then popular idea that organisms were machines assembled in a special way. The difference between humans and nonhumans was the “soul” (later on called “free will,” and finally “consciousness”). At present, however, as the border between cyborgs and robots seems to be constantly diminishing, it is exactly this vanishing difference that acquired enormous symbolic meaning. Again, this minimization can be interpreted in opposite ways: as a promise or a threat.

Robotization Will Make People Free (or At Least Better Off)! In one usage, “robots” and “robotization” are labels, signaling a positive development in the workplace. In the first place, robots will perform all “dirty, dull, and dangerous” (DDD) jobs. There are many dirty jobs, not the least of which are at home: the use of domestic robots is growing, but robots can also be sewer scrapers. There are many opinions about which jobs are dull, but there is a general opinion that robots doing dull jobs—​such as filling the shelves at Amazon—​will make people’s lives easier and less monotonous. The most discussed among dull jobs is journalism, or rather some parts of it. According to Associated Press, robots “will free journalists to do more journalism and less data processing” (Hern 2014). Dangerous jobs are plenty. The Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA) organized Robotics Challenge, an annual world competition for robots that

“ROBOTS AT WORK”    169 can work in disaster areas, whether natural or created by humans (DARPA 2021). In 2017, the Australian roboticist Rodney Brooks visited Fukushima, to which his iRobot company had previously sent six robots to help clean up the effects of the reactor’s explosion (Brooks 2017). Even people who are against robotization allow that automation could be limited to dangerous jobs. After all, [h]‌umans still have plenty to do if robots take these dirty, dangerous, and dull jobs. Technology advances have brought change throughout the history of industry. Robots are no different. . . . Humans will be able to choose the work they’d rather do. Workers can gain knowledge and skills. This increases their value so that they earn a higher income and can live a more rewarding life. (Robotics Online Marketing Team 2019)

Robots can obviously perform jobs that are difficult for human bodies, such as (at present) exploring other planets, but they may also be able to perform complex tasks better than people can. There are great hopes concerning robots’ capacity to analyze Big Data quickly, especially in medicine. Thanks to this capacity, robots can offer quick and correct diagnoses; thanks to the precision of their movements, they can perform surgeries. Employed in simpler jobs, robots will certainly work faster and more efficiently, and learn new skills more quickly. Some people even believe that robots could be better bosses than people (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020). It was predicted early on that robots would free people from work, but the appeal of this idea weakened in the 20th century. When Staffan Burenstam Linder’s The Harried Leisure Class was released in 1970, it was seen as provocative, but it soon turned out that the leisure class not only works a great deal but wants to work a great deal, as Juliet Schor (1991) clearly demonstrated in her summary of studies in this area. Yet the early prediction seems to be on its way back in vogue: Dutch historian Rutger Bregman firmly believes in a future where “[j]‌obs are for robots and life is for people” (2016, 2017). And, says Riccardo Campa: Those thinking that the planned end of work scenario is just a utopia should remember that in pre-​industrial societies there were much less [sic] working hours than today, if for no other reason than people could work only during the daylight. . . . There is no reason why a technologically advanced society should force its citizens to work harder than their ancestors, when they could work a lot less and without giving up their modern life standards. Among other things, this policy would also give workers more free time to take care of their children, the elderly and the disabled. Or they could just spend time with their families and friends, if the care of people is entrusted to robots. (Campa 2014: 98–​99)

In fact, many believe that robots can offer companionship, sympathy, and care. The well-​ established industrial and military robots have recently been joined by a new species on the working scene: social robots.

170   BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA A social robot is a physically embodied, autonomous agent that communicates and interacts with humans on an emotional level. (Darling 2016: 214)

Here, however, begins another problem of interpretation: Although Ishiguro’s (2021) Artificial Friends and other humanoids still remain in the uncertain future, there are a great many “robot pets,” such as AIBO dog, Paro baby seal, and the like (Darling 2016). Do they merit this label, or is it a dangerous metaphor? The critics claim that “the owners of the robot pets must systematically delude themselves regarding the real nature of their relation with these machines shaped like familiar household pets” (Campa 2016: 107). The defenders contend that “we are already self-​indulgent in such fake sentimentality in everyday life and such limited self-​indulgence can co-​exist with ordinary honesty and commitment to truth” (Campa 2016: 107). Most commentators agree, however, that pet robots are useful in dementia treatment, and—​not necessarily as pets—​in the care of the elderly. Kate Darling (2021) is convinced that if we stop compare robots to humans, it does not mean that we have to treat them only as machines; “robots” are neither metaphors nor labels. It would be best to see them as analogous to animals; a new breed, perhaps?

Robotization Will Make People Unemployed For those who predict a world of unemployed humans (and there are many—​in media as in the social sciences), robots and robotization are both labels and metaphors; they stand for the process in which people will become devoid of both employment and dignity. Like robots themselves, the fears related to their entrance into the workplace started as early as the 1920s, as shown by Louis Anslow (2016), whose report I am quoting here. Thus, in 1921, The New York Times published a book review entitled “Will machines devour man?” with a picture of a person being fed into a sausage grinder. On 26 February 1928, the same newspaper published an article with the title “March of the machine makes idle hands.” When Albert Einstein gave a speech in Berlin in August 1930 at the opening of the Seventh German Radio and Audio Show, he “laid the world ills to machine.” John Maynard Keynes shared his opinion, saying in the same year that “[w]‌e are being afflicted with a new disease, ‘technological unemployment.’ ” By 1939, everyone was using that term, although, in Anslow’s (2016) opinion, employment was steadily rising. Robotization as a threat to employment was a topic that vanished, then returned; as Anslow (2016) concluded in his review: “the fear of automation is once again at a fever pitch.” Critical management scholar Peter Fleming (2019) noted that this automation is bounded, and one of its limitations is actually cheap human labor: a pessimistic view from a new perspective. The current twist in the fear of automation is that it concerns white-​collar jobs: journalists, lawyers, traders. As to metaphors, Carl Benedikt Frey, a

“ROBOTS AT WORK”    171 Swedish researcher working at Oxford University and the author of The Technology Trap (2019), said in an interview, “AI will butcher the job market” (Business Insider 2017). Riccardo Campa (2017) conducted a thorough critical analysis of the McKinsey Global Institute’s optimistic report from 2013. He noticed that the report clearly addressed the needs of big corporations, ignoring small businesses and less skilled workers. Furthermore, he pointed out, McKinsey’s analysts assumed that new technologies may introduce many changes, but that the global political economy would remain the same. Thus, whatever problems robotization may cause, they can be solved in old, well-​proven ways. So even if robotization did make some jobs vanish, McKinsey’s analysts contended, it would also create a great many new ones. And more and better education (of the STEM type: science, technology, engineering, and mathematics) will solve all the future problems. As Campa observed, McKinsey analysts seemed to forget that workers are also consumers, and if they lose their jobs or adequate salaries, there will be economic consequences, which may turn into political ones. Also, as Paul Krugman (2013) suggested, when knowledge production becomes automated, education may become a site of problems rather than solutions. All in all, “[i]‌n future societies, people could be paid to consume goods and services, not to produce them” (Campa 2017: 31)—​provided Universal Basic Income is in place. In our analysis of the depiction of robotization in popular culture, media, and the social sciences, we (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020) noted that although sci-​fi authors had stopped writing about robots depriving people of their jobs as early as the 1950s, this (potential) deprivation was one of the main themes in media debates. The reason likely lies, at least partly, in the fact that people want to work, and unemployment is a central topic for the economy, and therefore for politics.

People Will Become Robots David F. Noble saw robotization as part of a new “religion of technology,” which may turn out more oppressive than traditional religions: In the wake of five decades of information revolution, people are now working longer hours, under worsening conditions, with greater anxiety and stress, less skills, less security, less power, less benefits, and less pay. Information technology has clearly been developed and used during years to deskill, discipline, and displace human labour in speed-​up of unprecedented proportions. (1995: xi)

For such true pessimists, “robotization” is a metaphor for dehumanization, and “robotic” is a synonym for “dehumanized”: Repulsed by the thought of artifacts that are human enough to threaten to replace us but not human enough to amount to our equals, we strive to distance ourselves

172   BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA from robots by classifying them as the very opposite of what we humans are. (Chu 2011: loc. 3 181)

Humans could be made into robots—​and worse yet, they may accept it. In reviewing the work of French author Georges Bernanos, and especially his 1944 book, France Against the Robots, Ralph McInerny (2005: 5–​6) observed that Bernanos foresaw what would happen when humans began to see themselves as robots, as machines responsive to extrinsic causes, their actions mere reactions. . . . The concept of sin, of moral responsibility, has been weakened.

As an answer to both Bernanos and McInerny, Seo-​Young Chu (2011) noted that Asimov’s “Three Rules of Robotics” (1950/​1996) are actually the same as the guiding principles of many ethical systems meant for the humans. Good humans are supposed to love others, protect them, and even risk their lives for them. They should also be equipped with a social conscience and a sense of responsibility: they ought to obey laws and follow rules, even if they interfere with their comfort or safety. Last but not least, they are assumed to have a self-​preservation instinct. If so, robots can be treated as ideal humans, not the other way around. A worse problem occurs, according to Evgeny Morozov (2013), when the word “humans” is treated as a synonym of the word “robots,” as, in his opinion, many “techno-​ optimists” do: None of this is to deny that technology . . . can be used to improve the human condition. . . . But this can happen only if our geeks, designers, and social engineers take the time to study what makes us human in the first place. Trying to improve the human condition by first assuming that humans are like robots is not going to get us very far. (Morozov 2013: 350)

Even collaborating robots will not remove the danger of dehumanization: [W]‌hile human-​machine collaboration jobs will certainly exist, they seem likely to be relatively few in number and often short-​lived. In a great many cases, they may also be un-​rewarding or even dehumanizing. (Ford 2015: loc. 2173)

Some critics’ understanding of dehumanization is even wider than that of Ford. Western social scientists have analyzed the Japanese use of robots in care and concluded that it means “a decrease in human contact, the mistreatment of elderly patients as objects, and the loss of control over one’s own life” (Sone 2017: 195). Sone was of a different opinion: [Japanese] traditions promote the idea that humans and non-​humans are viewed intrinsically as connected. The robot’s radical difference is perceived through what might be termed a functional anthropomorphism; at the same time, by seeing them

“ROBOTS AT WORK”    173 in such a way, human interactants can develop a certain affection for the non-​human and, in this case, for robots. (Sone 2017: 204–​207)

Both the use of metaphors and their interpretation obviously differ among cultures. This difference is also visible in the use of the term “slave.” The “Luddites” say that people who become like robots will be treated like slaves, but some techno-​optimists are predicting that robots will be treated like slaves, or even that they should be.

Robots Will Become Contemporary Slaves For some debaters, “robot” is a euphemism for “slave”; thus, robots will replace human slaves, who are now better protected by law. But even this reading can be interpreted in different ways. Luciano Floridi (2017) has suggested that the issue of robots’ responsibility for their actions (especially in case of errors and accidents) should be based on the Roman law for slaves: If robots become one day as good as human agents . . . we may adapt rules as old as Roman law, according to which the owner of an enslaved person was responsible for any damage caused by that person (respondeat superior). (Floridi 2017: 3)

As an argument for responsibility, it makes sense. Alas, this analogy brings many other issues to the fore, such as the question of whether robots should be treated as slaves were treated. Joanna J. Bryson (2010) is quite convinced that robots should be treated as slaves. In her opinion, understanding “robot” as a metaphor for “worker”—​a person who works—​is simply wrong. Robots should be servants to humans without being humans themselves, and though robots should be treated well, like any other service machines, there is no reason to give them human rights. To do so could have a paradoxical effect: “extending the title human to something which is not only serves to further devalue real humanity” (Bryson 2010: 11). Seo-​Young Chu (2011) has quoted people using more drastic, inhuman arguments for treating robots as slaves: “If I buy the robot, I should be able to do whatever the hell I want to it. Including beatings, burnings, disabling, beheading” (Chu 2011: loc. 2878). To all of that he formulated a following counter-​argument: If the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights states that “all human beings are born free and equal in dignity and rights,” then why should individuals that are constructed rather than born be eligible for the freedom and equality to which all “naturally born” humans are naturally entitled? But the dichotomy between “born” and “constructed” proves less than fully useful as a criterion for distinguishing between human beings and humanoid artifacts. “Born” and “constructed” exist on a single continuum. Many human bodies today contain artificial components such

174   BARBARA CZARNIAWSKA as hearing aids, pacemakers, retinal microchips, and psychopharmacological drugs that restructure the drug-​taker’s consciousness. Such bodies are partly born and partly constructed, yet surely the humans to whom these bodies belong are no less worthy of human rights than are those whose bodies are entirely organic. Even those of us with purely organic bodies can be thought of as cyborgs no less “constructed” than those of us whose bodies do contain artificial parts. (Chu 2011: loc. 3252)

Kate Darling (2016) did not go as far as to suggest human rights for robots, but she did plead for abuse protection for social robots, based on the model of animal abuse protection laws. As she reminded her readers, animal abuse protection is, strangely enough, based not so much on the fact that animals feel pain, but more on the negative feelings of humans that are provoked by animal abuse. People “might want to demand protection for social robots in order to discourage behavior that would be harmful in other contexts” (Darling 2016: 231). Doing something inhuman to other entities makes us inhuman, she argued, and ended her reasoning by quoting Kant. Much as she proposes to see robots as a “new breed,” she still reminds her readers that, unlike animals, robots are designed and controlled by people (Darling 2021). One could object that some animals are bred and controlled by people, but it does not contradict her plea that both animals and social robots should be treated well. A warning against treating robots as slaves came as early as 1963 from yet another perspective, when Norman Wiener formulated an argument based upon human laziness: The world of the future will be an ever more demanding struggle against the limitations of our intelligence, not a comfortable hammock in which we can lie down to be waited upon by our robot slaves. (Wiener 1963: 69)

Which of the uses of the robot metaphor in the context of work will prevail? Will they all survive, as they have for a century?

The Future Will Show The observation that the term “robots” is used both as label and metaphor, and in both usages can be interpreted positively and negatively (after all, transportation can take the users both to heaven and to hell), is in tune with Brynjolfsson and McAfee’s (2014/​2016) suggestion in their bestseller, The Second Machine Age: the results of digital technology in general will be “profoundly beneficial,” but they will be accompanied by some “thorny challenges.” As to solutions to “thorny challenges,” Universal Basic Income was seen as a means against unemployment; solar energy as the way to charge robots; and “collaborative robots” as a new and entirely positive label (Czarniawska and Joerges 2020). As to metaphors, perhaps the one that will replace robots both in the social sciences and

“ROBOTS AT WORK”    175 in public attention, thanks to its ambiguity, will be “cyborgs,” a term that removes the difference between human and machines. As Tom C. W. Lin (2013), a lawyer from Temple University put it: The choice of humans versus machines is a false one because every human is a cyborg now. We are all part human and part machine. The competition of the future is not a competition of humans against machines but a competition among humans with machines. (Lin 2013: 733, italics in original)

As usual, nobody knows exactly what the future will bring. Unexpected things do happen. A recent survey (Torres 2019) revealed that most people preferred to be replaced in their jobs by robots rather than by humans . . .

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chapter 11

m etaphors for c ompetition wi t h i n a nd bet ween org a ni z at i ons The Value and Use of Sports Metaphors terri byers and charles owusu

Introduction Research on competition in organizations is located in studies of workplace dynamics, while research on competition between organizations has been located in the marketing and strategy literatures (Hunt and Menon 1995). There is also an intersection of competition in and between organizations that recognizes how one may affect the other (Cooper et al. 2019), and there has been much discussion in the literature about alternatives to competition, such as cooperation, or a combination of the terms, known as coopetition, whereby people or organizations cooperate and compete simultaneously (Gnyawali and Charleton 2018). Metaphors have been used both in consulting and development of organizations generally (Akin and Palmer 2000), and in research on organizations (Cornelissen et al. 2008), which Alvesson et al. (Chapter 15 in this volume) focus on (see also Mitterhofer and Jordan, Chapter 16 in this volume; Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume; Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume). The research on organizations has focused on various aspects of competition, such as the role of leaders in establishing rules for competition, culture, and environment (Guenzi and Ruta 2013), corporate takeovers (Hirsch and Andrews 1983), management style (Glaser and Smalley 1995), and organizational conflict (Smith and Eisenberg 1987). A variety of metaphors have been used to understand competition in and between organizations, such as war, game, organism, ecosystem, and marriage. The use of sports metaphors has been embraced by industry and consultants to facilitate the development of organizations (e.g., Guenzi and Ruta 2013) and by academics as a lens and rich

METAPHORS FOR COMPETITION    179 empirical site of competitive behaviors (Day et al. 2012). Most recently, Fonti et al. (2023) have provided a comprehensive review of 249 papers published from 1972 to 2021, which advance several streams of management theory, some of which relate to understanding competition, such as leadership, rivalry, risk-​taking, and unethical behavior. This chapter focuses on the use of sports metaphors by researchers to critically explore the knowledge generated in this field and to suggest new metaphors from the sports world that may help fill the gaps in knowledge that currently exist around how competition emerges and the implications of the competition process in and between organizations. Sports metaphors have been underpinned by a naïve view of sport that fails to recognize that sport also has a “dark side” (Petroczi 2009; Krieger and Wassong 2019) and overlooks the complexities of sport as a management activity (Slack et al. 2021) and an industry (Byers 2019). Sports metaphors from a limited sports toolkit—​professional/​ elite sport—​have been utilized and it is argued that the new metaphors suggested in this chapter could help develop more critical perspectives of competition in and between organizations. As sport has been narrowly conceptualized, so too has competition, with limited understanding of how competition develops over time, and the impact of diversity and inequality in competition. However, increasing commercialization and professionalization of sport has increased competition in and between a variety of sport organizations, resulting in detrimental effects on stakeholders’ sport participation, volunteering, and welfare. Thus, sports metaphors may be useful to create more inclusive and sustainable competition in and between organizations, and to focus on the process of competition as a dynamic, socially constructed, and constrained practice, in which various levels of rationality and levels of power are evident. Metaphors have been described as a useful and influential communication device used in our daily conversation, management education (see Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume), and academic research, but metaphors may also trap us into a simplified way of thinking (Itkin and Nagy 2014), as Czarniawska (Chapter 10 in this volume) maintains by suggesting that metaphors may mislead (see also Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume). Örtenblad et al. (2016) suggested that the value of metaphors in organization studies is contingent upon context of use, reasons for using the metaphor, and desired result of using the metaphor. The colored lens approach is useful in describing how sports metaphors have been used to understand competition. The colored lens approach is to see everything in the target domain as if it were the source domain (Örtenblad 2017). Therefore, to understand competition (target domain), sport can be used as a lens through which all aspects of competition are viewed as if they were sports. Alternatively, sport as a variable can be employed to see only parts of the source domain (aspects of sport) and their application to the target domain (aspects of competition). Smircich (1983) and Alvesson (1995) extended these ideas in their writings about organization culture as a metaphor, by cautioning that metaphors should not be used too literally but can offer new, creative insights into organizations, which Letiche and De Loo (Chapter 27 in this volume) discuss as useful and important to organizations. Smircich (1983) usefully distinguishes between metaphor use as a variable and as a root metaphor. As a variable, sports would be seen as comprised of

180    TERRI BYERS AND CHARLES OWUSU contingent relationships among their various, relatively stable elements, which are identifiable as tools to be understood and used by management to influence competition in and between organizations. As a root metaphor, sports are conceptualized beyond the “instrumental view of organizations” (Smircich 1983: 347), allowing for greater room for ambiguity to draw sports metaphors from their “expressional, ideational and symbolic aspects” (347). Both colored lens and root metaphor terms are used in this chapter as they are similar in suggesting a broad and/​or deep use of metaphor to explore creative and new ways of understanding. Aside from a broad/​deep use of metaphor in a lens or root approach, or a more targeted, specific use of metaphor in the variable approach, how a metaphor is interpreted as largely positive or negative can have important consequences for the utility of the metaphor, as Weick (Chapter 21 in this volume) argues (see also Pinto and Johnsen, Chapter 24 in this volume), to offer insight into organizations generally and competition specifically. Alvesson (1995: 36) argued that culture is too often associated with positive notions of “integration, harmony, clarity and consistency,” but could and should be used to investigate alternative themes in organizations, such as “differentiation, conflict, domination, ambiguity and fragmentation.” This highlights the symbolic dimension of concepts such as culture, indicating that whether culture is positive or negative, or some combination of both, is open to the interpretation of individuals or groups within the organization, giving culture subjectivity in meaning beyond its objective representation (Alvesson 1995; also explored by Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume). Building on these ideas, we suggest that whether using a colored lens/​root or variable approach, adopting more critical perspectives of sport can facilitate further understanding of the process and consequences of competition by comparing aspects of competition in and between organizations that are obviously similar to sport (variable) or by seeing all aspects of competition in and between organizations as if they were sports (root metaphor). Furthermore, sports metaphors may be interpreted as legitimate or oppressive, or elements of both, by different individuals and groups within organizations, where such metaphors can have symbolic meaning for understanding competition in and between organizations. Sport as a variable or a root metaphor reveals different aspects of competition in the sports world that have different implications for competition in other contexts. The purpose of this chapter is to shed light on new sports metaphors for understanding aspects of competition, which embrace more holistic views of sport and competition as concepts that have inherently good and bad attributes that are open to interpretation in organizations. We see competition as a versatile concept (Arora-​ Jonsson et al. 2020) that is more than just a specific type of action, such as innovation or pricing (e.g., Baum and Korn 1996), a structural entity of actors in relation to a resource (the number of firms or buyers in a market defining the intensity of competition) (e.g., Burt 1993), or the collective framing and sensemaking of a situation (e.g., Cattani et al. 2018). Arora-​Jonsson et al. (2020) present competition as a sensemaking process, vulnerable to manipulation, power, and domination within a shared cognitive community

METAPHORS FOR COMPETITION    181 (Hodgkinson 1997). Their view implies that competition is organized, contingent upon institutions and the social construction of actors and their relationships. The chapter is structured as follows. First, a brief overview of sports and sports metaphors used in research on competition is provided. We then examine drawbacks of the use of sports metaphors and how these can be avoided before introducing and discussing some alternative sports metaphors. Finally, we provide conclusions and offer thoughts on future research in this space.

Brief Overview of Sports Metaphors What Is “Sport”? Sport is essentially an activity in which people voluntarily engage, usually governed by formal rules involving a competitive challenge to those participating (Cudd 2007). However, sport is more complex than this, since it is also an industry of organizations from the public, private and voluntary sectors, all of which have become increasingly commercial and professional (Byers 2019). Sport is also an institution, like family, education, and religion, with a rich history of global growth which has contributed to the academic field of sport management (Smith and Stewart 2013). Sport has been increasingly corrupted by standard business practices and commercialization, producing questionable management practices and erosion of the core social values of sport (Stewart and Smith 1999). Sport is increasingly studied from interdisciplinary (Doherty 2013) and multidisciplinary perspectives, due to its complex nature (e.g., Byers et al. 2021). There is a growing use of statistical analysis in sport organizations, often referred to as analytics, which has led to the availability of large data sets on a wide variety of concepts and behaviors in sport (e.g., rivalry, status, motivation, leadership) that scholars have used to make inferences to other contexts (Fonti et al. 2023). Metaphors building on a wide variety of sports have been used to provide engaging illustrations of how to manage, compete, lead, and negotiate, due to the steady and considerable expansion of sport products and services, high visibility in the media, increasing scholarship on the management of sport, and the prominent role of sport in society.

Sports Metaphors Sports metaphors have long been applied to a wide variety of phenomena, including life (Hardaway 1976), judicial opinions (Archer and Cohen 1997), politics (Bineham 1991), aspects of general organization (Svyantek 2017), leadership (Mayer-​Schoenberger and Oberlechner 2002), consulting (Burke 1992), and competition in and between organizations (Charteris-​Black 2017). Sports metaphors have become “ubiquitous in the

182    TERRI BYERS AND CHARLES OWUSU culture and language of business” (Hamington 2009: 473) and are used extensively as a lens for organizational life (Day et al. 2012). Professional sport is often taken as a source for sports metaphors due to the availability of large amounts of “objective, quantitative data” (Day et al. 2012: 400), the belief that sport is a microcosm of society, especially as regards competition (Wolfe et al. 2005), and the idea that as sport has become more institutionalized, it is an accurate mirror for understanding work contexts (Frey and Eitzen 1991). Chetwynd (2016) provides a broad reference guide to sports metaphors, such as “game plan” (football), “covering all the bases” (baseball), and less common terms such as “go to guy” (basketball) and “dead ringer” (horse racing). A number of studies have been conducted that empirically study (mostly professional) sport to understand competition, and which draw on different sports to illuminate aspects of competition that can be revealed through sport (Table 11.1). Table 11.1 lists, in no particular order, the metaphor examined, the sports context (specific sport or league), the expected result and application of each metaphor (aspect of competition), and the strengths and weaknesses of each metaphor for understanding competition. Table 11.1 shows that a variety of sports metaphors have been used to understand various aspects of competition (variable approach) or successful competition more broadly (colored lens) and its application in and between organizations. Day et al. (2012) provided a review of over 40 articles from organization studies and sport science, focused on understanding aspects of competition (getting ahead) and cooperation (getting along). Their review, dating back to the 1960s, suggested that the knowledge base is heavily skewed toward how to get ahead by successful competition. The “moneyball” metaphor (Lewis 2004), used to articulate successful implementation of human resource innovations to gain competitive advantage (Wolfe et al. 2006), took a unique case study from major league baseball team Oakland Athletics to suggest that an objective, calculated method of improving team performance in professional sport could work for other organizations. Here, the sports metaphor is broken down into variables (data analytics) that are argued to translate into understanding successful competition for organizations with limited resources. Keidel (2014) suggested that different sports are each a self-​contained world of structures, processes, and behaviors, and that there are lessons from sport for all aspects of organization, implying a variable approach to using sports metaphors to understand competition. For instance, Gregory (2010) examined aggressive behavior in basketball and the language associated with competitiveness, suggesting that lessons from basketball would carry dangers of white, middle-​class, heterosexual, masculine embodiment if used in competitive work environments. Young and Schlie (2011) explore dance, which Rossi (Chapter 12 in this volume) also explores in relation to building organization theory, as a more appropriate metaphor for the process of negotiation than more commonly used metaphors of war and games. The paper uses dance as a lens to view the process of negotiation and the benefits of empathy (such as experienced in dance) in negotiation. Hanold (2011), in her study of ultra-​running and individual competitive situations, also demonstrated that some competitive (and cooperative) behaviors

Individual career achievement

Sports hall of fame inductees

Highly successful people

Enduring competition Understand motivation, between individual performance, people athletes, fans, and teams. management, and strategy

Sports rivalry

Increased organization performance

Expected result/​application

Professional sport; data analytics

Context

Moneyball

Sport metaphors

Cotton et al. (2011)

Kilduff et al. (2010)

Lewis (2004)

Author

Table 11.1  Sports metaphors for competition in and between organizations

Metaphor may enable individuals to assess their own developmental network and help developers foster individual career achievement

Multilevel concept that could refer to individuals (e.g., fans), groups (e.g., organization departments), or organizations

Effective metaphor to illustrate how increasing commercialization and professionalization can help organizations be successful in competition

Strengths

(continued)

Narrow conceptualization of success which may not be equivalent to measuring success in other business competitive contexts

Metaphor highly context specific and grounded in historical/​cultural development of different sports and athlete or league evolution

Metaphor devoid of ethical considerations for human welfare, commercial focus using quantitative data for decision making

Weaknesses

Leadership lifecycle influence on performance, leader life cycles Leader succession impact Rowe et al. (2005) on performance Pay inequality and team performance

Impact of competitive Bothner et al. (2007) crowding on risk-​taking behavior to illustrate social structure influence on competition

National Basketball Association (NBA)

National Hockey League (NHL)

Major League Baseball (MLB)

National Association for Stock Car Auto Racing (NASCAR)

Harder (1992)

Giambatista (2004)

Fitzel and D’Itri (1999)

Leadership, managerial change influence on performance

NCAA College basketball

Author

Coaching

Expected result/​application

Context

Sport metaphors

Table 11.1  Continued

Possible lessons for competition in tournament-​like situations in business

Theoretical grounding in inequity theory and expectancy theory of motivation

60-​year data set, theoretical basis in existing theory

Strong theoretical basis; large dataset for empirical testing

Theoretical grounding in managerial efficiency and impacts of managerial hiring and firing on performance; empirical evidence provided

Strengths

NASCAR an idiosyncratic context, low generalizability to wider populations

Generalizability limited, professional sports context unique

Generalizability to large corporations limited

Generalizability to other business contexts limited

Focus is on developing data envelopment analysis (DEA), not theoretical generalization or the utility of metaphor

Weaknesses

Basketball

Mixed martial arts

Dance

Slam dunk; trash talk

Fight a good fight

Dance construction and performance

Negotiation

Environmental uncertainty

Individual, aggressive behavior

Ultra-​running, individual Role of cooperation, performance empathy

Female high-​ performance runners

Gender neutral

Attractive concepts, articulating strategies/​ tools to be successful in competition

Positive impact of empathy on performance

Young and Schlie (2011) Addresses issues of process and creation in competition

Serrano (2020)

Gregory (2010)

Hanold (2011)

Depicts competition devoid of cooperation

Promotes white, middle-​ class, heterosexual, masculine embodiment in competitive work environments

Narrow focus rather than holistic

186    TERRI BYERS AND CHARLES OWUSU in sport may provide good lessons for competitive situations in other industries. As Alvesson (1995) demonstrated, knowledge can be generated through focus on symbolism, concepts, and ideas, not just through empirical generalization. Thus, sports metaphors and contexts can be illuminating if we do not literally and empirically translate lessons from the sport context to other settings.

Drawbacks of Sports Metaphors There are several drawbacks to using sports metaphors, as identified in the literature and from our review. The danger of using sports metaphors (such as playing hardball, winning strategies, being a team player) in understanding competition lies in the potential for human error to conflate definition with metaphor, or confuse the “is” with the “like” (Hamington 2009: 475), given that knowledge (of how to use metaphors) is subject to interpretation (Alvesson 2004). We suggest that, as Alvesson (1995) illustrated with the complexity of the concept of culture, the complexity of sport must be realized if sports metaphors are to generate knowledge of competition in different contexts. A more complex view of sport would, as Czarniawska (Chapter 10 in this volume) suggests, provide much needed conceptual clarity in the use of metaphor. Taking a very functionalist approach to organizations as systems of patterns of contingent relationships (Smircich 1983), Taylor (2017) sees sports metaphors as variables to be transferred from sports to broader contexts and suggests three significant reasons why sports metaphors are not helpful in understanding business (and competition): (1) the nature of competition (sport has clear winners and losers; business is focused more on customer satisfaction than performance against a competitor), (2) different teamwork dynamics in professional sport, which has a high turnover of staff, whereas business attempts to retain staff and develop skillsets, and (3) economic value (sport has unique levels of fans who identify with players but not management; the business CEO has more direct influence on customer satisfaction and the firm’s success). This assumes sport as a root metaphor where the social phenomenon of sport is used to provide understanding of the social interactions in broader organization settings, illustrating organizations as expressive forms (Smircich 1983), but perhaps takes metaphor use too literally. This is what Hamington (2009) warns of—​assuming metaphors are a definition rather than taking partial lessons from different contexts. As Smircich (1983) reflects on the value of a cultural perspective of organizations, we can also focus on how the sports context contributes to our understanding of competition, without making literal comparisons to contexts. Sports metaphors have been used to understand competition as a lens to focus on the “lessons” from the sports world for improving competitive advantage or personal/​ organizational performance in a competitive environment (e.g., Cotton et al. 2011; Lewis 2004). The sports metaphors lens is often “rose colored,” used as inspirational examples of teamwork or strategic success (Katz 2001), with the assumption that sports

METAPHORS FOR COMPETITION    187 metaphors can be “tools of instruction” (Miller and Wang 2017: 52) to facilitate understanding of how to be successful in competition, in or between organizations. However, as Lam (2016) indicates, this may send an inappropriate message to organizations about the nature and value of competition, given the changing nature of organizations and competition to more cooperative or collaborative arrangements in order to reduce turbulent environments and external uncertainty in the marketplace. Indeed, Katz (2001) indicates that the value of team sports metaphors can be in the role of cooperation in producing effective teams (see Pescosolido and Saavedra 2012 for a review of the cohesion concept and sports teams). According to Vermeulen (2016), only partial elements of sport may be applicable to understanding different business contexts, suggesting that a variable rather than a colored lens approach may facilitate sports metaphors’ usefulness in understanding competition. For example, the “moneyball” metaphor took a unique situation in professional sport (use of quantitative data for decision making) and suggested it was the secret of success in human resource management (HRM) for competitive advantage. An all-​encompassing transfer of the moneyball metaphor as a “new vision” of HRM is less helpful than other more targeted lessons for innovation management, resistance to change, and achieving excellence (Wolfe et al. 2006: 112) for HRM. As a new vision of HRM, the moneyball metaphor has potential to dehumanize the workplace, which favors efficiency and effectiveness over social and psychological impacts on people. Sports metaphors are notorious for creating ingroups and outgroups (Anderson 2010), resulting in group mentalities that are devoid of empathy (Garner 2009) and a view of competition that promotes individuals as opponents or enemies. There is some debate as to whether sports metaphors can also promote gender bias (Gribas 1999), as sport is traditionally a male-​dominated activity (Segrave et al. 2006). Sport has become increasingly plagued by corruption, causing governance and control in sport to be a major concern (Dowling et al. 2018). Some argue that sport is a unique business context (Stewart and Smith 1999) which does not resemble other contexts.

How Drawbacks Can Be Avoided Many drawbacks of sports metaphors for understanding competition can be avoided by recognizing that sport is multifaceted and can be problematic (e.g., Byers et al. 2021). We suggest that the specific drawbacks covered in the previous section arise due to a narrow and naïve conceptualization of sport. Rather than being a rose-​colored lens, sport is a kaleidoscope, with bright and dark aspects. Linstead (Chapter 13 in this volume) explores in more detail how light and dark can be interpreted to increase the value of metaphors. Through an examination of the dark side of sport, the sport lens changes to help in understanding how competition is affected by crisis or scandal, corruption or unethical behavior in and by firms (e.g., Piazza and Jourdan 2018). By broadening our conceptualization of sport, it is possible to draw new, innovative elements and lessons from sports.

188    TERRI BYERS AND CHARLES OWUSU Trim (2007) cautioned that metaphors should not be taken too literally, or their value will be lost. Given this, metaphors are not objective, innovative tools because they rely on the individual’s interpretation (organizational context), purpose, and user intentions. Knowledge includes the exercise of judgement and the capacity to make interpretations (Alvesson 2004). A pragmatic approach is offered by Fonti et al. (2023), who suggest setting boundary conditions for scholars and managers to define the contextual aspects of a sport setting that may logically transfer to other contexts. Sports metaphors as a colored lens may help facilitate innovative perspectives and inspire creativity (Örtenblad 2017), when used by managers as a guide to encourage employees to accept some change occurring or about to happen in an organization, but the value of sports metaphors needs to be considered more carefully by close scrutiny of how scholars are conceptualizing sport (and related terms), to what context of competition they are attempting to apply the metaphor, and the rationale (intended value) for the application. Sport management scholars have long reflected on developments in the field (Kim et al. 2020), and metaphorical analysis of competition would benefit from a closer examination of the unique structures and institutional and agency power that are constantly evolving in the dynamic sports industry, which operates across public, private and voluntary sectors, including through multisectoral partnerships (Byers 2019). Examining the complexity and historical development of sport as an activity, an industry, and an institution, analysts can perhaps identify new interpretations of the nuances of competition and the role of structures and agents in constructing competitive, cooperative, and other forms of individual or organization interaction. Alvesson et al. (Chapter 15 in this volume), similarly, elaborate on the importance of this reflexivity in metaphor awareness and use, pointing to the value of new metaphors that challenge existing ways of thinking. The next section suggests new sports metaphors to illustrate how more complex metaphors are needed to advance understanding of the recently revealed complexity of the origins and nature of competition (Arora-​Jonsson et al. 2020).

Alternative Sports Metaphors Sports metaphors used to understand competition in and between organizations have drawn from the practice of sport and include positive ideologies and elements of sport such as teamwork, winning, agility, and dynamics (e.g., Yoffie and Cusumano 1999; Sull 2009). This is ontologically limited as research in sport management has recognized that sport has a dark side, with corruption (on and off the field), discrimination, abuse, political manipulation, and oppression (Slack et al. 2021). Sports metaphors have been used to increase competitiveness, to suggest the transfer of effective leadership or great teamwork from the sports field and coaches to the boardroom, or to gain competitive advantage through innovative strategies, interpersonal skills, developing a positive culture, or facilitating strategic change. However, the sport management literature presents

METAPHORS FOR COMPETITION    189 a rich body of evidence of the challenges, developments, and inherent inequity in sport that result from the dual existence of sport as a commercial activity and as a facilitator of social skills, social capital, and inclusion (Gammelsæter 2021). Fonti et al. (2023) suggest that sport contexts could be useful for examining grand challenges such as inequality or inclusion, given that the impacts of sport often extend beyond the individual to business and society. A “sport paradox” metaphor draws on the kaleidoscope lens, suggesting that multiple metaphorical colors (see Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman, Chapter 14 in this volume) are needed to understand “sport” and to provide a different analysis of competition in and between organizations. Sport is complicated and exists on multiple levels of analysis: individual physical and mental practice, organizational, stakeholder groups, and institutional, taken-​for-​granted systems of operating. Where there are perceived benefits within sport, researchers often also identify challenges or negative consequences (Peachey et al. 2018). These challenges or undesirable traits within sport may prove fruitful grounds for exploring multiple sports metaphors to understand how competition develops over time, creates oppressive practices, and hinders performance, akin to the critical realist ontology, discussed by Reed (Chapter 26 in this volume). Sport as a multifaceted phenomenon can be examined in a variety of contexts to draw metaphorical lessons or frame situations for problem analysis. For example, “sport entrepreneurship” is an area of research that is investigating the “innovative, c­ ompetitive and forward thinking actions of sport entities” (Ratten and Jones 2020: 961). Drawing on sport entrepreneurship as a colored lens also reveals the high degree of identification and cooperation that sometimes exists in sport, facilitating the interaction of organizations, leagues, and individuals within the sports industry. Some sport management scholars have taken a more critical view of sport (Frisby 2005; Knoppers 2015), identifying many troubling aspects of sport organization’s governance systems that have led to widespread corruption (Kihl et al. 2017), abuse (Sanderson and Weathers 2020), neglect (Fortier et al. 2020), social exclusion (Spaaij et al. 2014), and human rights violations (van Rheenen 2014). The “sports governance” metaphor could be used to examine the dynamics of competition, the role of actors, and institutional pressures and cultural norms in different sports. This is a fascinating context of competition where governing bodies, which are different combinations of public, private, and voluntary organizations, some with long, rich histories, manage increasing government interest in transparent governance practices, paid staff, volunteers, and a wide complexity of stakeholders with divergent interests. Commercialization and professionalization of sport (see Slack 2004; Thibault 2009) have created a mixture of advantages and disadvantages, or challenges, to sport and sport managers. Given the complexity of sport, and the problems that have emerged in sport evidenced through the “dark side” of sport literature, scholars and practitioners who are looking to use sports metaphors to understand competition or to provide advice to develop organizations should look to sport as a metaphor for identifying problems or analyzing how the negative consequences of competitive forces (e.g., commercialization) impact organizations. Sport has a long and rich history, so it is well

190    TERRI BYERS AND CHARLES OWUSU placed to inform research on the processes, consequences, and antecedents of competition. Taking Smircich’s (1983) lead, using sport as a variable or a root metaphor may provide different insights into competition, where one insight is not necessarily more useful than another. However, the root metaphor does offer more flexibility in interpretation and the colored lens allows us to select aspects of sport rather than sport in its entirety. For example, the colored lens may examine institutionalized sports practices, such as in O’Brien and Slack’s (2004) analysis of commercial pressures on rugby union organizations, for insightful metaphors to explore the role of power, structures, and agency in strategic management.

Conclusion As Mutch (2006) argues, it is useful to regularly reexamine metaphors used in the corporate context. This chapter has discussed how sports metaphors have been used to understand competition, the drawbacks of sports metaphors, as well as how to avoid these drawbacks. Beyond the scope of this chapter, Fonti et al. (2023) identified a wealth of published articles that have used a variety of sports data to contribute to knowledge of several aspects of competition in and between organizations. While their work is not explicitly focused on the use of metaphors, their identification of numerous empirical studies on many aspects of competition, from status and reputation, rivalry, and resource-​based perspectives to risk taking, motivation, leadership, decision making, and unethical behavior, identifies many advantages and disadvantages of assuming that the context of sport can transfer to other settings. Thus, while they indicate that sport can be considered a living laboratory, they recognize ways in which scholars and practitioners should also be cautious to avoid the drawbacks of sports data and their implications for alternative settings. This chapter presents new, more critical perspectives of sport to assist in analyzing the origins, processes, and problems of competition. Örtenblad et al. (2016) supported the idea that metaphors represent the diversity of homogenized ideologies and can be treated as discretionary lenses (the colored lens approach) for viewing organizational reality. Therefore, given that sport has developed from an activity into a complex, political, and multidisciplinary phenomenon that exists as a capitalist provider of commercial products/​services (private sector), a public-​sector vehicle for building community cohesion, health, and inclusion (through government policy), and a more altruistic voluntary sector, it is a unique industry that contains many opportunities for using metaphor to understand competition. Whether used in a colored lens or variable approach, as long as sports metaphors are not taken too literally or without critique, they provide a fruitful site for innovation and insight into competition in and between organizations. As Alvesson (1995) noted in relation to using culture to understand organizations, it may be wise to direct

METAPHORS FOR COMPETITION    191 attention to the symbolic aspects and interpretations of sports metaphors, rather than relying on empirical generalization between contexts, in order to benefit from the rich and diverse sports space. Without a critical perspective, sports metaphors are at risk of underestimating both sport and competition. We illustrated this by portraying sport as a kaleidoscope, which enables the paradoxical dark and bright sides of sport to be revealed, rather than using the metaphor of rose-​colored glasses. Sport is paradoxical, neither entirely good nor entirely bad, and so it offers a rich context in which to study the evolution of competition, actors, and structures in power relations negotiating their social space.

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chapter 12

on musi c - ​ a nd dance-r e l at e d m etaphors for organiz ati on a nd manageme nt paula rossi

Introduction The aim of this chapter is to explore the previous literature on organization and management where the metaphors of music and dance have been utilized. This is because the contexts in which the organizations of the 2020s operate are, often, far from simple and stable. As the organizational contexts are becoming increasingly complex, novel ways of understanding the irrational, tension-​filled, and even chaotic everyday organizational life are needed. Thus, the focus of this chapter is “on the generative power of [music-​and dance-​related] metaphor[s]‌and on clusters of images that offer insights about organizational phenomena in different ways” (Örtenblad et al. 2016: 886). In general, the metaphors, as a tool for creating new knowledge and understandings, offer ways for scholars to develop organizational theory (Elenurm 2012; Ehrich and English 2013; Örtenblad et al. 2016). As Mary Jo Hatch stated at the Vancouver Academy of Management Jazz Symposium in 1995, there is a strong belief “that the use of metaphor is a very powerful way to enhance understanding” (1998: 557, italics added). The use of metaphor is interwoven with the complexities, uncertainties, and dynamics of any organization-​related phenomena because, through drawing “upon more familiar areas of experience” (Clarke et al. 2014: 3), metaphor helps us better

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    197 understand the phenomena being studied. Metaphor, then, links to reflecting on and reasoning about what we know, “what is highlighted and what is hidden, what is seen in the organizations as problems and what is understood as solutions” (Andriessen 2008: 6). The organizational research on music-​and dance-​related metaphors, consequently, is closely interlinked with knowledge, knowledge management, and knowledge creation (see, e.g., Maimone and Sinclair 2014; Rossi 2020). Reimagining and rethinking through metaphors is a way to build connections between old and new knowledge, to synthesize contradictions and conflicts in meanings, and to express novel ideas about management and organizations (Nonaka and Toyama 2003; Spender 2008; Tsoukas 2009; Elenurm 2012). Indeed, often the organizational research utilizing the metaphorical approach refers to rethinking, reconceptualizing, and reimagining in different ways the organizations and the organizational phenomena being studied (see, e.g., Hatch 1998; Spender 2008; Clarke et al. 2014; Örtenblad et al. 2016; Rossi 2020). These explorations, naturally, are linked to the functions and characteristics of the metaphor itself in a profound way; as Andriessen (2008) highlights, all abstract concepts derive their meaning from metaphor, and the ways we reason about our knowledge through metaphors relate to the functions of the human mind. To summarize the metaphorical imagination—​ the emerging meanings of and from metaphors—​becomes important in the process of theory construction (Cornelissen 2006; Clarke et al. 2014). Though the use of metaphor in organizational studies is considered beneficial, there are also some pitfalls to keep in mind. Along with exploring the common grounds of the chosen metaphors with the phenomena under study, it becomes equally important, if not crucial, to focus on what is paradoxical and “hidden”—​the tensions, paradoxes, and conflicts between the metaphors and the phenomena. This is because, as Morgan (1996) argues, using metaphors to understand organizations and management is an inherently paradoxical choice of seeing and not seeing at the same time; metaphor bridges two domains of experience, and “lives with the tension, even contradictories, of what it brings together” (Wurmser 2011: 107). Metaphors, especially the often-​used ones such as jazz, can also “trap” and thus limit our ways of seeing organization-​related phenomena (Kemp 2016). Thus, despite the fact that music-​and dance-​related metaphors have been extensively utilized in scholarly literature as ways of understanding phenomena related to organizations and management, we still have much to learn. Methodologically, this chapter utilizes an approach which Örtenblad et al. (2016: 886) refer to as “a flexible interpretive approach.” Within this approach, the metaphors are seen as “living, practical frames for engaging and shaping the ontological dimensions of organizational life” (Morgan 2016: 1039). Thus, my focus is on the generative power of music-​and dance-​ related metaphors which have been previously utilized in organizational literature. These metaphors, then, are seen as frames for engaging and shaping the understanding of organizational researchers and practitioners about organizational life and its ontological dimensions.

198   PAULA ROSSI The remainder of the chapter is organized as follows. First, I explore the role of music and dance in human life, in general, to illustrate their importance in studying organizational life. Next, the music-​and dance-​related metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra, and Tango Argentino are introduced to gain an understanding of what viewpoints and aspects of organizations and related phenomena these metaphors highlight and hide. To conclude, drawing from the exploration of these music-​and dance-​ related metaphors in organization and management literature, I suggest a metaphor of musical meaning. In it, the explored music-​and dance-​related metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra, and Tango Argentino are combined as an overarching way to think about organizational life. Along with theory development, the metaphor of musical meaning offers means and pathways for organizational researchers to foster future empirical research on organizations and management.

Music and Dance Music and dance have been a natural part of our lives throughout the history of humankind (van der Schyff and Schiavio 2017). Musical activity—​music and dance—​is considered to be crucial for human wellbeing, and entangled in the areas of work, play, religion, rituals, politics, and social life (Ehrich and English 2013; van der Schyff and Schiavio 2017). Music and dance are, with their social, ritual, and cultural practices, ways to express ourselves and to tell stories to ourselves and to others that serve varying aims (Ehrich and English 2013; Rossi 2020). Dance has also been referred to as the “language of the body,” and as such, is a powerful method of communicating (Ehrich and English 2013: 457). In the 2020s, the lives of the modern human being often revolve around workplaces, and music and dance are increasingly linked to the context of work. Recent research by Kathleen Keeler and Jose Cortina (2020) links music characteristics to job performance and concludes that listening to music at work can influence our behavior and job performance through various physiological, affective, and cognitive processes. The researchers argue that characteristics of music such as musical key, tempo, complexity, and volume influence job performance; therefore, employees should be allowed and even encouraged to listen to music at work (Keeler and Cortina 2020). As Berniker (1998) describes, jazz, an often-​used music-​related metaphor in organizational studies, is typically linked with improvisational music making. Jazz bands create the music and its groove in an improvisational manner through themes, structures, successes, and failures. Thus, the effectiveness of jazz’s groove is tied to improvisation, uncertainty, and the interaction of its players; jazz “fails” to express its nature when

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    199 the music is controlled and predictable. It can be argued that jazz’s structure enables creativity and improvisation, and thus embraces uncertainty. Jazz, like other genres of music, is not only played but also heard and felt by the musicians, audience, and dancers involved. The vocabulary of movement, flow, energy, rhythm, steps, improvisation, patterns of relating, dedication, and passion are connected to dance, in addition to constraints of time, space, and music (Ehrich and English 2013). Ehrich and English (2013: 462) illustrate the connections between music and dance, such that music “complements the story or narrative told through the dance [and that] music can constrain or liberate the dance since it provides a structure in which the dance is set.” Music encourages people to dance, either alone or in ever-​changing constellations, and creates patterns of relating. People might dance alone, in groups, by simply tapping out the beat, with pre-​fixed and learned steps and patterns, or in a self-​organizing manner following the music and its meaning. People who hear and feel the music express their sense of it, and resonate and interact with the players. Music, then, creates a space for dance. Dance, particularly, highlights the movement and dialogue of human bodies. Dancers, in this dialogue of bodies, might be in close proximity, moving to certain distances, and moving at different paces and in different directions. Dance may involve reversals, restarts, changes of direction, collisions, falls, and, importantly, tensions between the dancers to which others respond. Many dance genres, such as ballet, have formal and rehearsed steps and movements, leading to a process of causation. Other dances, such as Tango Argentino, rely on improvisation and dialogue, and thus better visualize “the spontaneous, emergent and adaptive movement” (Pattinson et al. 2020: 318) of dance. Improvisational dance, or dance without formal steps, requires communication and sensitivity to others’ emotions and intentions, atmosphere within the context, reactions, movement, and music. Consequently, music and dance are interwoven with each other; music inspires physical, bodily movement and emotions, and dance, as felt, bodily movement, arises from music. For the purpose of this chapter, music and dance are explored together under the metaphor of musical meaning. The improvisational forms of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra, and Tango Argentino are emphasized over the more rule-​specific music and dance genres such as classical music and ballet. This is because improvisational music and dance better meet the expectations and requirements of today’s complex and tension-​filled organizational life. Indeed, the research on music and dance metaphors often contrasts with positivistic and linear ideas of management and organizations, offering an understanding of the everyday complexities and paradoxes of interpreting organizational life (Hatch 1998; Ropo and Sauer 2008; Leybourne and Kennedy 2015; Rossi 2020).

200   PAULA ROSSI

Music-​and Dance-Related Metaphors for Organization and Management In this section, an outline of music-​and dance-​related metaphors for organization and management is introduced in order to offer an understanding of their contribution to studies about organization and management. Instead of focusing on one musical or dance genre, constellation, or musical performance, this set of metaphors offers a multidimensional image of the music-​and dance-​related metaphors utilized in organization and management literature. The musical genre of jazz is first explored in detail, followed by the images of music making in group constellations of jamband and symphony orchestra. Finally, the Tango Argentino metaphor offers an image of organizational life as a special type of dance. These metaphors are chosen because they offer an image of a complex, tension-​filled organizational life rather than a pre-​fixed, rule-​following understanding. The rule-​following image of an organization is useful when the context in which the organization operates is simple and stable (Leybourne and Cook 2015). However, as organizational contexts are becoming increasingly complex, a more holistic and dynamic image of organizational life is needed, both in organizational practice and in research. Indeed, organizational life is far from stable and simple; more often, it is uncertain, dynamic, complex, and filled with tensions. A common feature in the research on organizations and management is that music-​ and dance-​related metaphors focus on a particular musical genre such as jazz (Bathurst and Williams 2013; Leybourne et al. 2014; Diasio 2016), classical, or rock (Leybourne and Cook 2015), or on exploring the performance of the symphony orchestra (Marotto et al. 2007; Bathurst and Williams 2013) or jamband (Diasio 2016). Particular dances, such as Tango Argentino (Pattinson et al. 2020), ballroom dance waltz, raves (Ropo and Sauer 2008), folk dance, or ballet, and notions of choreography, presence, and rhythm related to dance have also been explored to increase understanding about organizations, management, and related phenomena (Atkinson 2008; Maimone and Sinclair 2014). In addition, the dimensions structuring musical experience—​form, volume, harmony, rhythm, texture—​have been utilized (Mantere et al. 2007; Rossi 2020). These varying metaphors of music and dance have often been explored in the scholarly literature concerning organizational improvisation: that is, how organizational actors can operate in complex and uncertain environments by using experiments, creative thought, and intuition to accommodate the previous routines and rules (see, e.g., Cornelissen 2006; Marotto et al. 2007; Leybourne and Cook 2015; Leybourne and Kennedy 2015). In these streams of literature, the metaphors are used to explain the ways in which improvisation works: for example, ideas from jazz performance (Eisenhardt 1997; Barrett 1998a, 1998b; Hatch 1998) may be applied to understand organizational improvisation. Knowledge creation through metaphors in the organizational studies of improvisation, innovation, and organizational change is a profound theme within the research

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    201 of music-​and dance-​related metaphors. Thus, innovation (Diasio 2016) and organizational change (Mantere et al. 2007; Maimone and Sinclair 2014; Rossi 2020; Spann and Martin 2021) as “becoming” or, as in Morgan’s exploration of organizational images, as “flux and transformation” (Schoeneborn et al. 2016; Pattinson et al. 2020) appear to be popular phenomena where the metaphoric approach, especially that of music and dance, helps us to gain new understandings. In Table 12.1, the music-​and dance-​related metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra, and Tango Argentino are explored in order to offer an overview of their contribution to the studies of organizations and management. The metaphor of jazz, here, offers an image of organizational improvisation (Berniker 1998; Leybourne et al. 2014; Leybourne and Cook 2015); the metaphor of jamband focuses on organizational innovation (Diasio 2016); the metaphor of the symphony orchestra focuses on management (Bathurst and Williams 2013); and the metaphor of Tango Argentino illustrates the phenomenon of entrepreneurial effectuation (Pattinson et al. 2020). Within Table 12.1, the elements of each metaphor are explored. The chapter proceeds with a subsection on each of the four metaphors and what their various elements contribute to our understanding of organizational life. In these four subsections, all of the emboldened terms in Table 12.1 that have not been defined above are defined and explained.

The Metaphor of Jazz The characteristics of the 21st-​century organization—​flexible, adaptive, responsive to the environment, with loose boundaries and minimal hierarchy—​can all be associated with a jazz band (Hatch 1998). Consequently, different studies utilize the metaphor of jazz to understand complex organizational phenomena such as organizational improvisation (Berniker 1998; Leybourne et al. 2014; Leybourne and Cook 2015). Jazz’s structure, in general, enables improvisation and creative freedom in music making; contradictions and the importance of failure are seen as fostering creativity. Along with jazz’s structure, the sense of space provides a basis for musicians to improvise, and for the listeners to dance. As the music making varies through improvisation, contradictions, and failures, the ways of dancing vary due to the different interpretations and meanings associated with the music. Thus, music making and dancing in improvisational ways requires dialogue and resonance between the band and the dancers. Instruments are played by the band, and the emerging music is understood by the listeners and dancers, while the interpretations and requests from the dancers influence the musical performance. To meet the complexities, dynamics, and uncertainties of organizational life, improvisation is needed. The metaphor of jazz in understanding organizational improvisation, therefore, fosters the need to move beyond strategic planning to an organic and reactive approach, where creating the space and patterns for organizing and relating becomes important. Organizational structure and space should encourage diverse ways of participation and foster tensions, contradictions, and conflicts as the basis

Organizational improvisation (Berniker 1998; Leybourne et al. 2014; Leybourne and Cook 2015)

Organizational innovation

Jazz

Jamband

(Diasio 2016)

Organizational phenomenon

Metaphor

Inclusive and open, diversity and relationality: jamband musical experience interwoven with the connection between the band and the audience, and between members of the audience themselves; jamband responds to spontaneous suggestions of band members and audience; music responds to the interpretations and requests in relation to its community

Variation and context: toolbox of genres to make and change the harmonic structure, melody, and rhythm; multiple music genres offer history, tradition, and repertoire to manage the complexity of making music

Dialogue and resonance: between the band and the dancers; instruments played by the band; music creates space for dance; music made sense of by the listeners and dancers; requests from the dancers influencing the musical performance; multiple ways of dancing

Context: sense of space as basis for improvisation; band announces the compositions, composers, and players

Improvisation: jazz’s structure enables creative freedom; contradictions foster creativity; importance of failure; absence of a rational actor in improvisation

Elements of the metaphor

Context: collective and cultural context helps to understand and contextualize emerging models of organizing innovation

Relationality: collectivity and responsiveness, sense of community, collaborative feedback and knowledge sharing, expertise integration

Diversity and context: open models of innovation; various strategies employed to manage the complexity of innovation processes; interdisciplinary and dynamic organizational contexts

Relationality and sensemaking: experiences created in interaction; managers with influence but no control; ways of managing made sense of by the ones involved; sensemaking as a dialogue between managers and employees

Context: improvisation required in coping with the dynamic, uncertain, and complex contexts of organizational life

Relationality and diversity: from strategic planning to organic and reactive approach; creating space and patterns for organizing and relating; organizational space and diverse ways of participation; tensions, contradictions, and conflicts creating creativity

Reveals about organizational life

Table 12.1  Music-​and dance-​related metaphors for understanding organizational life

Management (Bathurst and Williams 2013)

Entrepreneurial effectuation (Pattinson et al. 2020)

Symphony orchestra

Tango Argentino

Embodiment, sensemaking, diversity, and relationality: improvisation and management as an embodied practice; managing musically is becoming sensitized to gestural, bodily nuances in sensemaking and sensegiving of multiple stakeholders within the specific organizational context; relationship and interpretations through bodily gestures

Context: structures and spontaneous acts underpinning organizational activities

Relationality, embodiment, and context: individuality, micro-​level movement of bodies; creativity in relation to ecosystems as the context; entrepreneurs (as dancers) in the context of ecosystems (as dance floor); choices made by the actors draw from the rules and resources Relationality of bodies: relations, distance, available within the context in relation to others; tensions, and dialogue of bodies between the relational, collective, improvisational, and spontaneous dancers construct the improvisational dance; communication, close interaction, and sensitivity to processes of organizing others’ intentions needed

Context and movement: movement in the dance as the performance on the dance floor; the music and rhythm, the choice and changing of partners creating the context for the dancers

Relationality: moving to explore the dynamics and relations between the players; requiring sensemaking and sensegiving including players, conductors, administrative staff, funding agencies, etc.; conductor’s significant yet silent role, gesturing and articulating through body language in performance

Improvisation and performance: through elements of musicianship, ensemble, and the conductor–​musician relationship; the interface between fixed structure and spontaneous acts; institution of an orchestra as the structural dimension

204   PAULA ROSSI for organizational improvisation and creativity (Rossi 2020, 2021). The metaphor of jazz in understanding organizational improvisation also implies that the experiences about organizational life of the people involved are created in interaction between the operating actors. Consequently, sensemaking happens in relations and dialogue between the (music-​making) managers and (dancing) employees; however, the variety of participating actors and roles is more diverse than just managers and employees within one organizational context. As Berniker (1998: 585) asks, “who is the crowd at the door?” Organizational life always entails “outsiders” as people join and leave the organizational life, and these, “too, dance and respond to the combo and make requests selecting from among improvisations” (Berniker 1998: 585). It must, therefore, be recognized that organizations operate in open systems, where customers, politicians, citizens, and other organizations influence, interpret, and make requests in relation to organizational actors.

The Metaphor of Jamband As useful as the jazz metaphor is in understanding organizational improvisation and innovation in organizational life, Diasio’s (2016) critique of the jazz metaphor relates to its fixation on one musical genre. As a result, the metaphor of the jamband has been introduced. Diasio (2016) suggests that in contrast to the fixed structures and rules imposed by managers, the varying tools offered by different musical genres may change the harmonic structure, melody, and rhythm of a musical performance. Different musical genres such as blues, bluegrass, funk, rock, psychedelia, and techno offer their own history, traditions, and repertoires for managing the complexity of making music; as a result, music making becomes inclusive and open, fostering extensive diversity. The musical experience created by the jamband is interwoven with the connection between the band and the audience, and between the audience members themselves. Thus, the jamband’s music responds to interpretations and requests in relation to its community. As a metaphor for understanding organizational innovation, the jamband highlights the need for understanding open innovations and, consequently, multiple stakeholders’ diverse interpretations and ways of participating in the context of an open system. Managers, then, employ various strategies to manage the complexity of innovation processes within interdisciplinary and dynamic organizational contexts.

The Metaphor of the Symphony Orchestra Bathurst and Williams (2013) utilized the metaphor of a symphony orchestra to understand management by underlining the importance of acute awareness of the environment to understanding and responding to the specific context. Musicianship, then, combines individual, technical mastery and the ability to perform within the limits,

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    205 resources, and style that the context of the performance provides. The authors also note that musicianship goes beyond cognitive activity and “embraces the whole body as a sonic self, a self that is continuously aware of the vibrations and physical sensations of the sounds within which the musicians are immersed” (Bathurst and Williams 2013: 42). Improvisation, thus, happens in the interface between the fixed structure and spontaneous acts of musicians. The structural dimension is explained through the institution of an orchestra, but the improvisational nuances of action are explored through the dynamics and relations between the players. To foster improvisation requires the sensemaking and sensegiving of multiple diverse actors involved: the players, conductors, and administrative staff as well as the funding agencies and audience. In orchestras, the role of the conductor is emphasized, and, while Bathurst and Williams (2013) recognize the importance of this role, they also understand the conductor’s role in the musical performance to be a silent one. The conductor, thus, gestures and articulates to others through their body language. According to Bathurst and Williams (2013), management consists of elements of personal mastery, teamwork, and management practice. As the authors note, the possibilities for improvisation within organizational activities arise from the structures and spontaneous acts of people within the specific context. Managing, then, means becoming sensitized to gestural, bodily nuances in the sensemaking and sensegiving of multiple actors. Bathurst and Williams (2013) conclude that management, understood through the metaphor of a symphony orchestra, is an embodied practice, in which the relationships and interpretations happen through bodily gestures.

The Metaphor of Tango Argentino The metaphor of the dance Tango Argentino suggests that dance performance happens as movements in the dance and on the dance floor, where the music, rhythm, and the choice and changing of partners creates the context for the dancers (Pattinson et al. 2020). Tango Argentino, as an improvisational dance, is constructed through the relations, distances, tensions, and dialogue of the dancing bodies. Therefore, as a relational performance, communication, close interaction, and sensitivity to others’ intentions are essential in dance. What the metaphor of Tango Argentino reveals about organizational life, and more particularly in Pattinson et al.’s (2020) research about entrepreneurial effectuation, is that entrepreneurs, like dancers in the ecosystem of the dance floor, construct their actions through individuality and micro-​level movement in relation to others and the ecosystem in which they operate. Thus, Tango Argentino draws our attention to relational, collective, improvisational, and spontaneous processes of organizing. The micro-​ level, relational movement, then, happens in ecosystems, and the choices made by the actors draw from the rules and resources available to them within that particular context.

206   PAULA ROSSI

Toward a Better Use of Music-​ and Dance-Related Metaphors in Organization Studies I did not just hear music and appreciate it intellectually, I felt it deeply. (Kemler 2001: 1)

My aim in this chapter is to reveal the shared elements of organizational life by exploring the previous scholarly research utilizing the music-​and dance-​related metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra, and Tango Argentino. As a summary of these individual metaphors, I propose a metaphor of musical meaning. The metaphor of musical meaning contributes to our understanding of the complex, chaotic, and tension-​filled life of organizations by shifting the focus away from the rational, linear, and somewhat mechanistic approach to appreciating the felt meanings and lived experiences of humans (Rossi 2020, 2021; Spann and Martin 2021). Similarly, the metaphor of music has been utilized previously in understanding organizational change (Mantere et al. 2007) and organizational conflicts (Rossi 2020), and the metaphor of dance in understanding management (Atkinson 2008) and leadership (Ropo and Sauer 2008; Ehrich and English 2013). In the metaphor of musical meaning, however, music and dance are considered not as separate but, rather, as interwoven; music creates the space for dance, and dance as bodily movement arises from music. The metaphor of musical meaning offers organizational scholars and practitioners a reimagined understanding about organizational life and related phenomena. The metaphor of musical meaning can be utilized to find novel ways of talking and thinking about the complex, chaotic, and tension-​filled life of organizations and the theorizations of it. In their insightful work, Cornelissen and Kafouros (2008) explore complex metaphors, which are “made up of primary metaphors that are often grounded in our embodied experiences as human beings” (2008: 957, italics added). Complex metaphors, such as “organizations as complex adaptive systems,” are formed from primary metaphors through conceptual blending, offering a basis for complex metaphorical thought (Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008). Likewise, the metaphor of musical meaning consists of smaller metaphorical parts and is grounded in the embodied experience. Drawing from the shared ideas of the individual metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra and Tango Argentino, the metaphor of musical meaning shifts the focus of understanding organizational life from the context of an organization-​centric approach to complex and uncertain open systems; from categorizations and entities to understanding organizational life as emerging through relationality; from fixed organizational roles to understanding the polyphony of multiple actors contributing to organizational life; and from rationality and linear causality to understanding organizational life through embodied sensemaking. Thus, the metaphor of musical meaning offers a broadened, multidimensional, and human-​centric view of organizational life,

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    207 shifting the focus away from rationally addressed, controlled, and managed events toward appreciating the embodied experiences of people (Rossi 2020, 2021). The metaphor of musical meaning provides a way for organizational scholars and practitioners to conceptualize and understand organization-​related phenomena and practices, in order to meet the challenges of the uncertain, complex, and tension-​filled contexts of organizational life. The remainder of this section focuses on exploring organizational life through the elements of the metaphor of musical meaning: context, relationality, polyphony, and embodied sensemaking.

Understanding the Context of Organizational Life As the metaphor of the symphony orchestra in understanding management suggests, improvisation is happening in the context provided by the institution of the orchestra; consequently, organizational life happens in the interface between the fixed structures and spontaneous acts of the people involved (Bathurst and Williams 2013). In addition, the jamband metaphor illustrates the complexity and dynamics of the context through multiple music genres that offer varied histories, traditions, and repertoires through which the organizational actors operate. Thus, music and dance always evolve in a specific context due to the structures and genres, interpretations, reactions, and gestures of those involved. Humans, as musicians, conductors, composers, dancers, and listeners, and consequently, as organizational actors, are always situated in a context that both enables and limits their actions, reactions, and interpretations. Therefore, it becomes important to understand the context beyond the organization-​centric view, because the context provides the enabling as well as limiting structures, rules and routines, values, beliefs, assumptions, and practices through which organizational actors operate.

Understanding the Relationality of Organizational Life As all the explored metaphors of jazz, jamband, symphony orchestra and Tango Argentino highlight, music and dance are experienced and performed in a relational way in dialogue with the context, players, conductors, composers, orchestra leaders, listeners, and dancers. For example, the metaphors of Tango Argentino (Pattinson et al. 2020) and jazz (Berniker 1998; Leybourne et al. 2014; Leybourne and Cook 2015) emphasize that the dialogue and resonance between the played music and moving dancers are inevitably interwoven in the performance. Especially in dance, the relations, distance, tensions, and dialogue of bodies between the dancers construct the improvisational dance (Pattinson et al. 2020). Relationality, then, fosters an understanding about organizational life as constructed and evolving in interaction between the context and the actors as well as between the actors involved. The element of relationality suggests that it becomes important to focus on and foster the creation of the space and patterns of organizing and relating.

208   PAULA ROSSI

Understanding the Polyphony of Organizational Life Often, understanding organizational life through an individual music-​and dance-​ related metaphor is limited to a specific organization-​centric context with reduced and pre-​fixed roles for managers and employees. What the metaphor of musical meaning offers is an image of an organizational life happening through polyphony. In music, polyphony refers to musical texture, which consists of several, independent melodic voices, as opposed to music with just one voice or music with one dominant melodic voice accompanied by chords. The musical performance, thus, is “always entailing people who listen and dance to the music at the door” (Berniker 1998: 585); imagine an orchestra hall (organization-​centric) where the composer (manager) holds the operating instructions for the musicians (employees), who follow the instructions without deviation (Leybourne and Cook 2015). When is the music played, and who else hears, dances, and makes requests to the musicians? These can be members of the administrative staff, composers, the audience, or random people just passing by. In organizational contexts, actors in other organizations, policy-​makers, customers, and citizens, influence, interpret, and make varying and often conflicting requests on organizational life. Illustratively, the metaphor of the symphony orchestra (Bathurst and Williams 2013) underlies the importance of sensemaking and sensegiving of the multiple actors: players, conductors, administrative staff, funding agencies, and audience. What the metaphor of musical meaning provides, then, is an understanding of the element of polyphony, recognizing the multiplicity and diversity of the actors involved. Instead of there being reduced and pre-​fixed roles for the operating actors within organizational life, the element of polyphony broadens our understanding about organizational life by inviting multiple actors involved in the context of a complex and open system—​citizens, customers, frontline workers, and politicians, to name a few—​to join in and share their varying and even conflicting meanings.

Understanding the Embodied Sensemaking of Organizational Life To continue, the metaphor of musical meaning underlies the importance of one’s body and its movement. For example, in symphony orchestras, the role of the conductor is a silent one; instead of using spoken language, the conductor communicates through bodily gestures to which the players respond (Bathurst and Williams 2013). Similarly, the dance metaphor of Tango Argentino (Pattinson et al. 2020) builds on the relations, distances, tensions, and dialogue between the dancing bodies. The element of embodied sensemaking in the metaphor of musical meaning, therefore, emphasizes the role of one’s senses, body, and emotions in experiencing and knowing about organizational life (see, e.g., Atkinson 2008; Heracleous and Jacobs 2008; Ladkin 2008; Ropo and Sauer 2008; Ehrich and English 2013).

MUSIC- AND DANCE-RELATED METAPHORS    209 The element of embodied sensemaking bridges the mind–​ body dualism and recognizes that the mind is not the “only” placeholder of knowledge; our bodies also hold knowledge that includes emotions, intuition, and physical skills that are made sense of in one’s mind. The knowledge of the body is no less valuable than that of the mind and should be included in scientific discussions about organizational life (Ehrich and English 2013). Cunliffe and Coupland even argue that “embodiment is integral to sensemaking” (2011: 68), and that embodied sensemaking happens in the lived, responsive, contested, and embodied moments when people struggle to understand their experiences in relation to others. Indeed, we humans are highly skilled in sensing and interpreting our own unspoken behaviors and those of others—​the gestures, facial expressions, and body positions. We do not necessarily rationalize them, but we sense their meanings in and through our bodies (Rossi 2020). Embodied sensemaking offers a way to focus on these lived, embodied experiences in ways other than by understanding organizational life solely as a rational, linear, and intellectual process of interpretation (Cunliffe and Coupland 2011).

Final Remarks As Morgan (2016) illustrates, the generative power of metaphors lies in their ability to reshape our understanding of organizational life and its ontological dimensions. In particular, the metaphor of musical meaning shapes our understanding of organizational life by drawing attention to the embodied sensemaking of experiences; to understand complex organizational life and its related phenomena is to understand the subjective, yet relational experiences of the people involved (Rossi 2020, 2021). The metaphor of musical meaning, thus, could foster a holistic understanding of a human-​centric organizational life. Therefore, I want to conclude this chapter with the words of Berniker (1998: 585), who asks: [C]‌an we hope for dancing/​organizing that elevates, confirms and even creates our humanity? Can we conceive of “sustainable organizations” whose organizing dances cultivate more humanity than they consume?

I believe that these questions are more relevant today than ever before. Indeed, because the contexts in which today’s organizations operate are increasingly complex, the image of organizational life needs to shift from a stable and simple, rule-​following understanding toward a more human-​centric, dynamic, holistic, and tension-​filled view, both in organizational research and in practice. Musical meaning, as a metaphor for understanding organizational life and its related phenomena, foregrounds our humanity in and around organizations. The metaphor of musical meaning, then, contributes to the research and practices of organizations and management by returning human bodies, emotions, experiences, uncertainty, and even irrationality to our ways of understanding organizational life (Spann and Martin 2021).

210   PAULA ROSSI

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chapter 13

fift y sha de s of organiz at i on Darkness and Light as Metaphors for Processes stephen a. linstead

Introduction: Darkness on the Edge of Town As Linstead et al. (2018: 165) observed, darkness and light have historically served as metaphors for variations in the human condition, its states of consciousness, its deepest instinctual urges and the boundary between life and death.

Accordingly we find a recent special issue of the scholarly journal Organization Studies invites contributions addressing the question, “How Does Philosophy Illuminate the Study of Organizations?” (Tsoukas et al. 2021). The assumption behind such a question—​ that knowledge is a form of light—​did not begin with the Enlightenment, but it certainly took on its modern character in Europe from the 17th century onwards, and this continues to shape contemporary discourse. On the other hand, over the past three decades, it has become more common for writers on organization to explicitly refer to its “dark side,” although it is more than 200 years since William Blake’s evocation of “dark Satanic Mills” in his poem “And did those feet in ancient time” from the preface to his epic Milton: A Poem in Two Books (1811/​1907), one of his Prophetic Books. This is commonly assumed to refer to the factories and mills of the Industrial Revolution, and most particularly the Albion Mills behemoth beside the Thames at Bankside, quite close to Blake’s Lambeth home. This huge steam-​powered mill was accused of threatening to put out of business many small family millers, until it burned down in 1791 in mysterious

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    213 circumstances. Opponents of such mills expressly labelled them Satanic, and accused them of using inferior, cheaper, imported flour, and adulterating their flour with cheaper grain. The independent millers carried placards saying “Success to the mills of Albion but no Albion Mills.” So part of Blake’s message was about the “darkness” of the inhuman side of the Industrial Revolution, abusing people as it used them and cast them aside. Organizationally, it also saw the “darkness” as the property of organized vested interests that sought to permanently benight the independent of mind, heart, and spirit, recusants who failed to conform. Another inference that could be taken from the poem is that the dark Satanic Mills are the powerful churches of organized religion. Blake said in his preface to Milton, “Every Man’s Wisdom is Peculiar to his own Individuality” and God’s light was revealed through the individual’s relationship with the divine, not through comportment to the stifling rules and rituals of institutionalized religion. Specifically, this indexed increasing opposition by Nonconformist religions such as the Quakers (the Society of Friends, somewhat informally founded in the 1640s) and John Wesley’s Methodists (whose roots lay in the Oxford University Holy Club of the 1720s) to the established Church of England, which preached acceptance of and submission to the dominant organs of state and class oppression. This ecclesiastical “brightsiding” of oppression is perhaps best exemplified by the Victorian hymn “All things bright and beautiful” (Alexander 1848/​1850; Woods 2016) which originally included the verse: The rich man in his castle The poor man at his gate God made them high or lowly And ordered their estate.

Blake was not himself directly aligned with religious nonconformity as he was skeptical of alternate forms of social regulation, even if benign. But Blake’s light can also be seen as the light of social revolution. His “bow of burning gold” and “chariot of fire” combine heat and light, passion and illumination, and his call in this poem is to use this individual inspiration as the building blocks of a heaven on earth. His revolutionary fervor, and support for the French revolution, had led him to be charged with treason, and this poem—​ironically later to be adopted as a nationalist anthem by the very institutions it railed against—​was part of his insistence that his politics were indigenous and nationally loyalistic, not treacherous. As such, he argued that personal insights, and experience of both light and dark, must be shared—​that breaking silence was essential to dispelling the institutional chains that literally keep us “in the dark.” This could also be read as an articulation of the workings of the “dark Satanic Mills” as the cruel but invisible machineries of the Devil that psychologically as well as socially, economically, and spiritually dupe us into accepting or even defending our exploited position. Satan mirrors God in moving in a mysterious way, but in a dark mirror. In the rest of this chapter I will consider how the darkness and light metaphors have developed in relation to ideas of order, change, and organization, since the contributions

214   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD of Milton and Blake, and explore further the impact of Milton and Blake on the work of Burrell (1997), order and disorder, and the suppressed. The following section takes up the idea of the relation between light and dark, transparency, consumption, identity, and change in “organizational bedazzlement,” particularly in the work of Gabriel, who develops Weber and Freud into metaphors of glass cages, glass palaces, and a theory of the return of the suppressed in “organizational miasma.” The next section turns to consider classic pieces of work on the “dark side” of organization—​Vaughan (1999) from a sociology of deviance perspective, Griffin and O’Leary-​Kelly (2004) from a psychological perspective, and Ackroyd and Thompson (1999) from a critical management studies perspective—​and the difference in emphasis on conscious, unconscious, or organized “misbehavior.” The penultimate section considers the issue of fading yet persistent vision as memory, and the recent emergence of “organizational hauntology,” which studies how impressions or shades of the past affect organizational futures. Finally, the concluding section reviews the relationship between metaphor and concept, including the elemental power of light and dark as a root metaphor, and some possible future avenues that might be taken.

Looking under the Lamppost The Enlightenment, which was at its early peak when Blake was writing, is often presented as unremittingly committed to reason against belief, logic against emotion, abstraction against empathy, mind against body—​the source of both systemic and aesthetic Modernism that at their extremes take us to the darkest of organizational formations, the Holocaust (Horkheimer and Adorno 1948/​2002; Lyotard 1979; Cooper and Burrell 1988). Science, motivated only by the light of knowledge, becomes a morally neutered tool in the service of good or evil. Pastiche versions of postmodernism are characterized as anti-​Enlightenment, nihilistic to the point of embracing their own peculiarly conservative form of darkness (Pinker 2018). Such easy binarisms neglect the many shades of illumination that were debated in the Enlightenment between one extreme and another, between individual and state, conservative and liberal, humanity and God, monarch and revolution, race and religion, authority and evidence, man and machine. Paradox and contradiction were to be questioned and debated: experiment raged, in the arts as well as the sciences. Yet these were still not comfortable times for speaking truth to power in furtherance of human rights or emancipation: Tom Paine (1945), hugely influential revolutionary author of “Common Sense” (originally published in 1776), “The Rights of Man” (originally published in two parts in 1791 and 1792), and “The Age of Reason” (originally published in two parts in 1793 and 1794) found himself in and out of favor with governments in Britain, France, and the United States, frequently having to relocate as a result. Kant’s (1784) “What is Enlightenment?” is less than revolutionary because it was written partly to advise Frederick the Great of Prussia, an iconic

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    215 absolutist monarch who might well have reacted with extreme prejudice to a word out of place. David Sims (2010) uses an old joke to express what he sees as the problems of leadership theory, but his concerns could be extended to organization theory, and even the direction Enlightenment thought has taken, more broadly. To paraphrase, it’s night, and a drunk is crawling on the pavement under a lamppost. On being questioned by a passer-​by as to what he is doing, he says he’s looking for his house keys. “Where did you last have them?” asks the well-​meaning pedestrian. “Over there,” grunts the drunk, gesturing toward the end of a dark alley. “Then why are you looking here?” queries the puzzled citizen. “Because there’s no light over there,” replies the irritated drunk. Gibson Burrell (1997) makes a similar point. When a light is shone in one direction, it creates shadows in another, and also draws attention away from those shaded areas. As a filmmaker, I’m familiar with the challenges of achieving even illumination, and also of the powerful effects that manipulating illumination can have. Where we cannot see, and cannot reframe, we project—​external space becomes a screen for the fantasies, fears, and longings populating our inner spaces (Linstead and Maréchal 2016). Burrell, like Blake, took inspiration from Milton (1667/​1908), beginning each chapter with a brief epigraph from Paradise Lost. But apart from rich descriptions of hell, and a nuanced portrait of Satan, Milton also crystallized the association between darkness and disorder, light and order, taken up by Lucy Hutchinson in Order and Disorder (originally published 1667; Hutchinson and Norbrook 2001; Hawkins 2016). For Milton, mystery should not lead us into speculation in analysis, and illumination requires deference toward evidence and existing wisdom. What dark Eternity hath kept concealed From mortals’ apprehensions, what hath been Before the race of time did first begin, It were presumptuous folly to inquire.

Let not my thoughts beyond their bounds aspire . . . (Milton 1667/​1908, Canto 1.38–​42) . . . Let us in its (the sun’s –​SAL) own blazing conduct go And look no further than light doth show (Milton 1667/​1908, Canto 4.59–​60) Indeed, for Milton God’s creative act was itself an act of ordering and organization: I saw when at his Word the formless Mass, This world’s material mould, came to a heap: Confusion heard his voice, and wilde uproar Stood rul’d, stood vast infinitude confin’d; Till at his second bidding darkness fled, Light shone, and order from disorder sprung. (Milton 1667/​1908, Canto 3.708–​23)

216   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD Yet still Blake’s Satanic mills became the factories of the mid-​Victorian era, and by the turn of the century they were such behemoths on either side of the Atlantic that their steel and stonework became the source of Weber’s (1905/​2002) metaphor of the “Iron Cage.” This iron cage was not the material structure of the factory locking its inmates in place, but the grids of rationality and bureaucracy that bound them even more firmly, in every aspect of their increasingly modern lives—​that Weber (1994: xvi) himself labelled “the polar night of icy darkness.” The darkness was no longer contained in what a description of a landscape or cityscape might capture, as Gabriel (2005: 12) reminds us: The modern metropolis, the city that never sleeps, is also the city that never stops suffering. It is a city of a million nightmares, a million neuroses, a million painful stories. It is a city of broken families, deracinated lives, constant anxieties, in short, a phantasmagoria of unhappiness.

Glass Cages and Glass Palaces Collective illusion and collective neuroses, which once hid themselves in the light of religion and utopian politics, transformed themselves into personal issues, plaited into the dark side of the modern individual subconscious. The dark interiors of modern manufactories prompted Western Electric to launch the Hawthorne Studies into the effects of workplace illumination, with the unexpected effect of illuminating workplace behavior, lending their name metaphorically to the moderating effect of research on the researched. The shift toward the increased use of glass in modern architecture, which also paralleled the shift from the dominance of production factors in the economy toward hyper-​consumerism, provides Gabriel with two new metaphors to displace the iron cage of rationality—​the glass cage of scrutiny (whose key critic was perhaps Foucault) and the glass palace of spectacle (the focus of Baudrillard 1970/​2017). Gabriel (2005: 17) argues that “the controls that were associated with the modern bureaucracy, the rules and regulations that formed the bars of the iron cage” have now been supplanted because “today’s organizations resort to far subtler, yet deeper, controls, controls that are pervasive and invasive, that do not merely constrain a person but define a person.” They can, of course, degrade as well as enhance identity, especially for those who do not have the means to consume, and hence play these identity games, and who are rendered invisible. There has been a shifting in the grounding of identity in what a person does toward what they are able to appear to be, and the new controls include the cultural and ideological (emphasizing the importance of customer service, quality and image; affirming the business enterprise as an arena for heroic or spiritual accomplishments), structural controls (continuous measurements and benchmarking, flatter organizational hierarchies), technological controls (electronic surveillance of unimaginable sophistication) and spatial controls (open-​plan offices, controlled access). (Gabriel 2005: 17)

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    217 The glass cage is not restricted to the ubiquity of cameras and lenses, but is created by a liturgical dedication to “transparency” through audits, reviews, appraisals, feedback, lists and league tables . . . like the panopticon, the glass cage acts as a metaphor for the formidable machinery of contemporary surveillance, one that deploys all kinds of technologies—​electronic, spatial, psychological and cultural. Appearances are paramount; image is what people are constantly judged by. (Gabriel 2005: 18–​19)

Where the glass cage is predominantly a matter for the employee showing up under surveillance, attaining identity by comportment, the glass palace, drawing on the work of Baudrillard via Ritzer (1999), and Bauman (1998), is a matter for showing off, attaining identity through more or less conspicuous consumption. Baudrillard saw Las Vegas as being the ultimate materialization of fantasized identity in, not just simulation, but a series of displaceable and disposable simulations, to be purchased at will by those with the means. Identity becomes not who you are, but who you can afford to be, and it’s both fungible and melancholic, perhaps tragic. As Adorno (1941) observed, the cycle of distraction is powered by sentiment, and ready-​made kitsch responses to identity signals offer psychologically easy comfort, as long as we are able to consume. Gabriel (2005: 21) hinted that the cathedrals of consumption had begun to enter the home, making it a more individualized site of consumption. Since he wrote, the incursions of the Internet in digitizing, monetizing, and making every screen a labyrinth of markets have made homes themselves part of the spectacle, with often rapacious “influencers” driving the process and eager followers swept along. The palatial glass cathedrals have turned suburban bedrooms into a network of monastic cells dedicated to consumption, carrying performance and simulation deep into personal intimate spaces. Here, whether Zoom meeting from home for work or Portaling with friends, our insecurities are fueled by TV program schedules that normalize being embarrassed by clutter; shamed by DIY failures; isolated by slow Wi-​Fi; horrified by others’ cosmetic surgery gambles; mesmerized by other people at work, from factory hands to traffic cops, trawlermen to ice truckers, kitchen disasters to helicopter rescues; tantalized by the prospect of overlooked antiques, and hence riches, in a spare room (although demeaned if we have no room “spare,” and not only are not in the game but lack a visible and material past on which the experts can shed light); or even secretly terrify us with the thought of Gordon Ramsay turning his UV beam on the activities of our unseemly history. Or the rusty old mysterious thingummy in the gloomy shed could be the next upcycling star, seen in a different light and reprocessed. Suspended between aspiration and anxiety, even our private fantasies of escape are exposed, claimed, and despoiled by capital as we watch the middle classes desperately seek evacuation to the country or chateau or sunnier climes, even to a second home—​or discover a reassuringly distinguished ancestor. In my case, my working-​class Yorkshire family roots only came about because my East Anglian great-​grandfather found work here after completing a sentence in Wakefield prison. Two hundred years prior to that, two of

218   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD the family were hanged as witches. So for us the light, as Burrell warned, has only made things darker. As Cavafy cautioned, Perhaps the light will prove another tyranny. Who knows what new things it will expose? (Cavafy, cited in Tsoukas 1997: 828)

Darkness in and around the Mainstream The two major mainstream uses of the darkness and light metaphors, Vaughan (1999) in sociology and Griffin and O’Leary-​Kelly (2004) in psychology, both attempt to map the metaphor onto real behaviors that they then process rationally rather than figuratively. Linstead et al. (2014) summarize the strengths and limitations of both these foundational approaches in some detail, so we will merely offer a brief summary here. Griffin and O’Leary-​Kelly (2004: 2) are critical of the early “bright side” attempts of Hugo Munsterberg to help managers to find the right blend of organizational efficiency and psychological fulfillment, so that “mental dissatisfaction at work may be replaced in our social community by overflowing joy and perfect social harmony.” They comment, “one can almost hear the birds singing, feel the breeze gently blowing, and see the flowers blooming!” (Griffin and O’Leary-​Kelly 2004: 2). They do, however, note that this focus on the light led to a positive and functional bias in subsequent research. In outlining what a complementary focus on the dark side entails, they categorize dark side behavior (organizational behaviors being their core concern) as explicitly intentional, and resulting in either harm to the organization or harm to the individual. In some cases the same behavior can be either functional or dysfunctional, depending on intent, motive, context, and consequence. Dark side behavior is ambivalent rather than ambiguous, and their commitment is to clarify its variety and provide a means for understanding why it can be considered rational against its circumstances, even when outcomes are negative, and to provide a means for organizations to intervene in their own processes to ameliorate the damage it might do in terms of such phenomena as theft, violence, bullying, sexual predation, and even modern slavery. The use of the dark side metaphor to capture the dynamic proliferation of such behaviors also enables a rereading of history, a rekindling of suppressed organizational memory and resuscitation of institutionally silenced and disempowered voices, who in a post-​MeToo world are being revoiced, allowed to breathe once more in making themselves heard (Tyler 2021). Vaughan (1999) recognizes misconduct, but takes a cultural rather than psychological approach to its analysis. Like Griffin and O’Leary-​Kelly, she wishes to understand behavior as being reasonable in its context, at least for participants, although her concentration is on social deviance. She has this in common with Ackroyd and Thompson

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    219 (1999), who characterize organizational misbehavior as attempts by workers to reclaim or reassert something of what they have lost control of—​the products of their work, the processes by which it is done, individual and collective identity, and political power. In doing this, they attempt to bring greater nuance to concepts like resistance, which is seen to have a variety of shades from mildly frictional to outright contestation. Vaughan, however, is even more emphatic in her commitment to build theory from the interconnection between environment, organizations, cognition, and choice. Hence unintended consequences that lead to the retrospective identification or definition of “mistakes” that arise from routine nonconformity are equally important. Disasters are not the outcome of catastrophic failure of a system part, or deliberate sabotage, but more often the cumulation of a series of minor errors, omissions, communications lapses, or minor misconduct—​they are cultural as much as technical failures. Vaughan’s construction of deviance, which pursues its own form of empirically grounded precision, is neither politicized nor critical, preferring to assume analytic neutrality. However different their conclusions, both Vaughan and Ackroyd and Thompson attempt to show that dramatic or extreme events can be rendered understandable in the light of both careful, micro-​ level evidential scrutiny and analytic reason focused systemically on both context and content. More recent developments have focused on behavior that is not merely intentional or unintentional, but organized. Corporate crime and corruption take ever new forms, from simple deceit, to public lying, corporate fraud, and tax evasion on a global scale, which impacts on health and safety, fair trade, sustainability, and climate change responses. UK prime minister Boris Johnson unwittingly elaborated the metaphor, when after a rhetorical address widely regarded as disappointingly lacking in specific action commitments, he left the Glasgow COP 26 environmental conference in a helicopter in order to dine with his former boss, a notorious climate sceptic widely regarded as a media apologist for corporate interests. Less dramatically, sympathetic scholars in the field of corporate social responsibility (CSR) such as De George (2008) are increasingly being criticized as enablers of the uglier dark side of CSR following the pioneering critique of Banerjee (2007) and the resurgence of the field of critical public relations (Linstead 2015). In the field of information studies, the work of the dark side of digitization and its capacity to elevate decontextualized and deeply backgrounded algorithms in managing everything from consumer bewilderment to political voter choice has been boosted by events that have had wide-​ ranging, complex, contradictory, and unintended consequences, such as Brexit, or insufficiently anticipated impact, such as the COVID-​ 19 pandemic. Costas and Grey’s (2014, 2016) work on organizational secrecy and Munro’s (2004) work on information warfare, whistleblowing, and digitalization (with Trittin-​Ulbrich et al. 2021) are important elaborations here. Hacking as both criminal and liberatory (from simple “life-​hacks” to Wikileaks) is perhaps the iconic ambivalent behavior that marks the swirling and essentially contested definitional terrain around

220   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD the dark side of knowledge, the ethics of the relation between technology and epistemology. The idea of the “variant” may become the next supplementary metaphor for the dynamic qualities of the ever-​shifting object of dark side research.

Beyond Metaphor? Metaphors are always in play (Alvesson 1993; Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume) before they are set to work (Akin and Palmer 2000), but this need not trivialize the metaphorical movement inherent in all forms of representation. In a further paper, Gabriel (2012) offers another metaphor for the contemporary dark side, building among others on the work of Stein (2001), although he claims that it is not a metaphor as commonly understood to be “a prism through which to view organizations,” but a concept that is capable of elaboration with respect to actual organizational phenomena. This might seem to put him at odds with Derrida (1994), but as Orr (2014: 1042) reminds us, Derrida himself warned us to be wary of confusing the ordinary sense of metaphor with the more ontological sense that is carried throughout his work: [T]‌he motifs of mourning, inheritance and promise are, in Specters of Marx, anything but “metaphors” in the ordinary sense of the word. They are focal points for conceptual or theoretical activity, the organizing themes of the entire deconstructive critique that I am attempting to make. (Derrida 1999: 235, emphasis in original)

Miasma as a concept “accounts for and explains certain puzzling qualities in specific organizations” (Gabriel 2012: 1139), which indicates a toxic experience of pollution and uncleanliness, an incapacitating ethos of self-​criticism, an inability to maintain boundaries between public and private lives, a silencing of organizational stories, a compulsive scapegoating and, above all, a paralysis of resistance. (Gabriel 2012: 1139)

One can, I think, see more than a passing resemblance to contemporary pandemic conditions, where the actual contagion of a rapidly spreading potentially fatal virus attaches itself to organizational miasma. Nothing that most organizations did led to the visitation of the virus upon them, but nevertheless there is a battlefield of scapegoating and abundance of conspiracy theories, and an urge to reject any thought of return to the “normal.” This leads to all manner of initiatives—​both altruistic and self-​servingly cynical—​to cleanse organizational practices and values along with buildings and atmospheres. As Gabriel (2012: 1149) observes, “attempts to cleanse such organizations, eliminate the pathologies and return them to health often lead to an intensification of these pathologies.” This does not put miasma outside of metaphor—​the pandemic,

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    221 I think, highlights, as Derrida would expect, that it is both metaphor and theory. Tellingly, attempts to fight miasma through decisive “cleansing” action are no more successful than attempts to fend it off through the erection of boundaries. Miasma erodes boundaries and silences stories. (Gabriel 2012: 1149)

The attempts of some universities, key sites in the spread of the virus, to purge certain departments as part of creating a “new normal,” as in the University of Leicester’s gratuitous expunging of critical research on management and organization, would seem to expose miasma as infecting toxic management practices rather than the stigmatized scapegoating targets. While associated with toxicity, however, miasma has significant differences that take it beyond the mere toxic. First is the extent of its contagion; second is the inability to metabolize, neutralize, or “vaccinate” against it; and third, “it generates a self-​reinforcing vicious cycle, where attempts at purification deepen the condition” Gabriel (2012: 1145–​6). The consequences are “a state of moral and spiritual decay, a corruption of all values and human relations of trust, love and community . . . people suspect their neighbors of being the cause” (Gabriel 2012: 1146) and managers encourage them to do so, as moral chaos can provide a veil for securing short-​term internal or external competitive advantage that may become the springboard for something more sustainable, and which, if not, can be easily abandoned.

Seeing the Unseeable and Unseeing the Seen: Memory and Hauntology We have earlier noted Vaughan’s focus on a particular sociology of organizations, and this inevitably neglects potential contributions to organizational understanding from related domains, although it does not negate its value. The concept of legitimacy, important to Vaughan via neoinstitutionalism, is also significant in the field of organizational communication, where it has often been viewed through the work of Jürgen Habermas (1975) on systematically distorted communication, but Vaughan does not even mention this work. Seeing, especially intensive seeing, as Burrell warned, can therefore also be a form of blindness. The idea of the doubled nature of seeing is also addressed by Derrida (1993) in Memoirs of the Blind. He references Baudelaire, for whom the “blind” are portrait artists who, in placing the subject under their interpretive lens and to some extent the rules and constraints of the medium, blind themselves to other moods, other perspectives, inconsistencies, and contradictions. Memory filters itself, supporting and animating the process by providing what the image needs, smoothing rather than recording or disturbing—​hence the paradoxical title of the book, which is a study of portraiture.

222   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD Derrida also notes the absent presence of preparatory studies that effectively “haunt” the finished painting, which complements his work after Spectres of Marx (1994), in which he introduced his concept of hauntology, which is the being of non-​being, the continued presence, or after-​image, of what has gone before. This connects to our title for this chapter, as “shades” are a matter not just of darker or lighter, but of texture and translucency, in the sense of twilight, mist, apparition, or the ghostly wraith as a “shade.” Some work in organization studies has already begun to work with this spectrality, connecting immaterial intensity to organizational memory (Orr 2014: 1041), the influence of founders, and the affective atmospheres of spaces (O’Doherty et al. 2013). Critical geographers have led the way on the understanding and theorization of memory in, and the transmission of affect by, the physical landscape (Pile 2002, 2005), ruins (Edensor 2005), and memorials (Edensor 2019). Perhaps the most dramatic recent use of the darkness metaphor has been in Adiga’s (2008) Booker Prize-​winning novel and 2021 film, The White Tiger. The white tiger is a metaphor for excellence, of a sort, but it is idiosyncratic, independent, and difficult to control. Adiga’s central character, Balram, is a Dalit from Laxmangarh and, as he says himself, typical of the sort of men one meets as one travels through India, a voiceless but colossal underclass of untouchables imprisoned by rural poverty. Such people live, physically and intellectually, in what he calls “The Darkness.” Through familial ties, caste restrictions, and huge power disparities with the wealthy, they are effectively owned and, if noticed at all, are brutally intimidated by the village henchmen of the absentee owner of village land—​known as The Stork. In voicing the unspoken and unseen mass, Adiga gives them a history, but it is one from which it is almost impossible to escape because of the retributions that may be exacted by both the powerless within the family and the powerful upon the family. Balram manages to trick his way into becoming a chauffeur for the son of The Stork in Delhi, but after being forced to sign a confession for a crime the son’s wife committed, he realizes that he is disposable and begins to defraud his employer as “insurance.” He escapes by murdering the son and stealing a large bribe that he was about to pay to a crooked politician. He escapes to Bangalore, assumes a new identity, and after using some of the money to bribe local police to overlook licensing issues starts his own taxi business, ferrying executives of the international corporations that are developing huge IT centers in, out of, and around the city. The contrast between the primitive darkness of the village and the lights of the city, in dwellings, shops, offices, and streets, is made along many dimensions, with the glitter hiding the dark behaviors beneath. Balram is fairly certain that his family have been murdered as a reprisal for his disappearance, but he goes on and tries to do whatever good he can for others, as he hides in the light. Yet he remains personally compromised by the darkness of his deeds, and a shadow inhabits his consciousness, haunting him privately with the ghosts of his family and employer. In both the book and the film, the darkness metaphor is cleverly and richly layered, in a way that reveals the imbrication of rural caste exploitation and atrocity with morally blind enabling forces of globalization. Since the initial success of the book, there has been a renewed interest in caste as a concept in sociology and most recently in organization studies in connection with the rapid post-​1991 growth

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    223 and reconfiguration of the Indian economy, along with the problematic consequences of such expansion that has created unparalleled disparity between the socially advantaged and the Darkness (Saracini and Shanmugavelan 2019; Prasad et al. 2020; Chrispal et al. 2021).

Conclusion: Light and Dark in the Haunted House A conclusion should, one suspects, highlight what has gone before, and set down in black and white what requires further illumination. However, contrary to such purposes, this chapter has been something of a plea for a greater sensibility toward shadiness, adumbration, the diaphanous, the brumous, and the glissando of the more fragile forms of the fuzzy. If organization were stained glass, the chapter was more interested in the staining than the glazing. During a recent bottom-​of-​the-​table soccer match in the English Football League, the floodlights failed and plunged the ground into blackness for 15 minutes. Supporters of both sides were quick to comment that the broadcaster should use that period in its entirety for the 15-​minute “highlights” program that would follow, as the rest of the game had been so dire. Not only is the light and dark metaphor a basic feature of existence, it is constantly being adapted to technology and context to improvise new communicative expressions. Discussions online quickly opened up about the dark state of the organization and management of English football, the commercialization, financialization, and digitization of the sport, the avarice of absentee owners, and the existential exploitation of suffering but good-​humored supporters. The floodlight metaphor was a way into the multifarious “dark side” of an industry. The dark side metaphor as a combination of specific behaviors and deep fantasies has driven organizational research animated both by its enduring scope for rigorous specification, and by its continued vigorous fluidity in resisting such capture. The importance of developing our understanding of light and dark, literally and figuratively, is evidenced by Dunne and Edensor (2021) and Edensor (2017). One potential benefit offered by a metaphor with the plasticity of darkness and light, and its ability to evoke time, space, relationality, and intensity, is a means of transcending boundaries and linking concerns across disciplines as we have hinted—​this lateral metonymy of “seeing otherwise” works alongside metaphorization to mediate the “blindness of seeing” we have noted inhering in metaphor. O’Doherty (2017) detects, in his ethnographic study of a major airport undergoing renewal works, a broader social process of suspended transitioning that he calls “loungification,” to which the management of light and mood is essential. The airport itself is both a vast illuminated stage and a nest of shadowy nooks, crannies, and secrets, where serendipitous inter-​crossings can produce flash phenomena that turn a stray cat into a viral Internet sensation. As I write this, I am in the traditional fishing port

224   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD of Whitby, where 19th-​century Irish novelist Bram Stoker wrote the foundational horror novel Dracula, based on legends that prompted Marx to develop the metaphor of capitalism as vampiric, and where there is now a massive and highly elaborate cosplay-​based tourist industry focused on two visually spectacular “alternative” festival weekends per year (Ledgard 2019). On the TV, the latest series of the cult vampire comedy What We Do in the Shadows is showing. The four immortal but socially inept characters have just, somewhat accidentally, and ironically, become institutionalized as the executive board of the supreme Vampiric Council, at the same time as I am about to assume a seat on the council of the equally peak though less mythological body, the British Academy of Management. One of the series’ innovative twists is the introduction of the concept of the “energy vampire,” who drains his victims of the will to live rather than blood by quite simply boring them to torpor by his indefatigable lack of anything interesting to say and an inexhaustible resource of inconsequential detail to back it up. The surprising success of the program suggests that its numerous viewers are able to decode and self-​identify with the signified contemporary critical commentary that lurks beneath the occult metaphor, which light-​heartedly attests to the continuing relevance, utility, and variety of the dark side trope. In my personal situation, I can only hope that prophetic theory does not translate into and predict practice. This exegesis into film, and particularly film about the undead, is neither gratuitous nor accidental. Michael Shapiro (2013) considers that film, as our ultimate achievement in the manipulation of light and dark’s metaphorical potential, is perhaps also the ultimate transdisciplinary method. He demonstrates how powerful, nonrepresentational conceptual work can be done in this medium, as does Callahan (2015). The making of film as part of the research process—​indeed, as research in itself—​although widely accepted across other fields of social research is still underdeveloped within organization studies. Despite some important contributions (e.g., Goodman 2004; Wood and Brown 2011; Linstead 2018; Wood et al. 2018; Miko-​Schefzig et al. 2020) there remains much work to be done on the empirical art of potentiating the sophistication, shaded nuance, drama, delicacy, affective ambivalence, and range of the darkness/​light metaphor through the haunted house of cinema, which will enable disparate disciplines to productively “haunt” each other and more fully inhabit the Pandemonium in which we still exist—​alongside Blake, Burrell, Milton, Satan, and of course Gabriel. A metaphor dramatizes a new way of seeing, whether subtle or startling, and is immediately at risk of losing its vitality—​of whatever was inspirational or even shocking about it becoming familiar and comforting through incorporation via customary formulations and domestication into cliché or kitsch (Linstead 2002; Peters 2016). This happens to concepts too, and this chapter has followed Derrida in arguing against the absolute separation of metaphor and concept, recognizing differences but engaging their considerable ontological overlaps as forms of representation. Deleuze and Guattari (1991/​ 1994: 5) proposed that the (political) entropy of concepts should be countered by their constant novel regeneration by philosophy, responding to the shifting currents of desire and context that buffet meaning and may even render it a castaway. Although Deleuze and Guattari are insistent that their use of concepts is not as metaphors, this chapter has

FIFTY SHADES OF ORGANIZATION    225 understood this in terms of the context in which they were writing and their need to resist the reductionist structuralist and semiotic approaches that perpetuated a hierarchy of signifier and signified and a subordination of idea to code. Where then might organization studies look in the future to further generate conceptually fruitful metaphors around the theme of light and dark? Well, implicit in the question is the idea of “sustainable illumination”—​that progress is not to be assumed, that climate and environment are in crisis, and that learning and unlearning are necessary to sustain humanity as part of a viable planet. Metaphors are essential for the creation of the poetics of the sustainability narratives that are necessary for this to succeed. There is also the consideration of “organizational bedazzlement.” Light has always had the potential to be understood in terms of the electromagnetic spectrum, as rainbows or prisms, and this has included work in organization studies on color (Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman, Chapter 14 in this volume), but there remains much room for development here, especially as we become more familiar with the forensic use of ultraviolet light. Light as the means of creating illusion is familiar from a long range of historical sources. Ritzer shows its application in simulation in retailing and hospitality, and the creation of simulated experiences, even extending to holography, while at home we greenscreen exotic backgrounds for Zoom meetings. Light is deception as much as revelation here. Conversely, while the idea of a “black hole” has itself become something of a popular cliché, advances in astrophysics have led to significant shifts in our understanding of new referents to which that term can be applied, including the changing appreciation of space and topography. One useful feature is that in thinking about how connections are made between entities that co-​organize, we tend to use the term “networks,” which privileges the identity of a core or “node” that reaches out, from which connections emanate. But if we consider this as a point of intensity, a much better metaphor than net or mesh is that of two or more beams crossing—​where the node appears to originate is overlaid intensification, the light appearing to be a bright source from which beams emanate, but the reverse is true. This stimulates thinking of networks in organizational terms as intensive and dynamic rather than simply connective processes. Where the relation between the spectrum and the spectral is considered, we also have the emerging field of “organizational hauntology” across both the social sciences and the arts and humanities, enabling an interrogation of memory, time, and the transmission and attachment of affect. This underscores this final point: the fact that metaphor bridges areas of experience makes it an important means of translation between disciplines and subdisciplines within organization studies, and of establishing new transdisciplinary fields. Because darkness and light are epistemologically enveloping rather than root and branch, their potential is limitless. We can return to Milton for a final point, which relates to contemporary challenges facing organizations with regard to various forms of disability that affect both experience of and performance in the world. Because darkness and light are mixed, they can metaphorically sustain a sense of tension between consolations and discomforts, hope and despair, advantage and disadvantage, willfulness and the unwitting, clarity and

226   STEPHEN A. LINSTEAD contradiction, and present the dynamic of phenomena partaking in their opposite that is reflexively richer than the rationality of dialectics. Although organization studies tends to obsess itself with ability, actionability, and the “so what?” question, reflection is vital to understanding how radical variations in ability precondition, limit, and intensify experience in ways that are common and capable of accommodation, while intensely personal and unique. Milton, the great poet of light, lost his sight even before Paradise Lost. In his sonnet “When I Consider How My Light is Spent” (also known as “On His Blindness”), likely written before 1655 but first published in 1673, he reflects on the loss of his great ability, not only to see, but to do his job effectively as a translator of foreign documents for the government. Typically in dialogue between self and muse, he is memorably reminded how insignificant our diurnal scurryings appear through the wider eye of God: God doth not need Either man’s work or his own gifts; who best Bear his mild yoke, they serve him best . . . They also serve who only stand and wait. (Milton 1673/​2009: 304)

So even reflection alone can be passively purposeful. This metaphor usefully reminds us that how we wait in the darkness may be as productive as what we do in the light, and of the need to embrace both.

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chapter 14

on c ol or meta ph ors i n organiz ation st u di e s anders örtenblad and sumeyra alpaslan-​d anisman

Introduction Being widely used metaphorically, colors play an important role in conventional expressions like feeling blue (feeling sad), being in the pink (being in the best condition), and seeing red (rapidly becoming very angry) (Rasekh and Ghafel 2011). The colors “black” and “white” are often used to describe bad and good (Meier 2015), as in the expression “black-​hearted” (a cruel or evil characteristic of an individual) (Yu 2017). “Green” is often used to describe envy, “yellow” to describe cowardice, and “blue” to describe sadness (Meier 2015). In ordinary discourse, by “color” people are mostly referring to “the hues of natural surfaces” (Mollon 2003: 3). “Color” is a “mental experience that depends on neural codes from receptors” (Shevell 2003: 151) and could be defined as a highly complex perceptual experience that is an integrative product of numerous characteristics of the physical stimulus, the observer, and the environmental surround. (Elliot et al. 2015: 56)

Psychologists tend to agree that assignment of meaning is included (Gerrig and Zimbardo 2010) or at least tightly connected to (Robbins and Judge 2015) perception. Thus, color can carry important meaning (Elliot and Maier 2014) and color vision is intimately related to emotions (Kremers et al. 2016). Metaphors as word figures and symbols (Glucksberg 2001) and as a way of thinking about something in terms of something else (Semino 2008) can take the form of “color-​ coded” statements, or “color metaphors,” commonly used to describe different aspects of social life (Meier 2015). A color metaphor is employed when a color is used as the

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    231 more well-​known subject—​which we, in accordance with many other academics call “source”—​to understand a more complex, less well-​known subject—​which we call “target” (see, e.g., Löffler 2017). Color metaphors occur both as visual metaphors (El Refaie 2019; for more on visual metaphors, see Mitterhofer and Jordan, Chapter 16 in this volume) and expressed in verbal language (He 2011). We use the term “color metaphor” for all types of metaphors and metaphorical expressions where any particular color in relation to a target is used as a source—​both when a color is the sole source (such as in “black leadership,” e.g., Edwards 2012) and when a color is combined with another source (such as in “grey-​collar workers,” e.g., Hutchings et al. 2009). An example of a color metaphor in the area of organization and management is red ink behavior (Hollands 1997), which is based on the connection between red ink (source) and organizational behavior (target). The integration of these domains points out negative manners, habits, and styles in organizations, just like “red ink” once was used in budgets to put emphasis on negative figures, such as “debts, losses, or money that is owed” (The Free Dictionary Idioms 2021), or when teachers were marking spelling errors in pupils’ essays with a red pen (Rutchick et al. 2010). While some color metaphors in society in general could be assumed to be hard to misinterpret—​which driver, for instance, would not stop for a red light?—​far from all color metaphors are as universal as the red light metaphor. Color metaphors have hitherto not received much attention in the area of organization studies. In this chapter we review some literature in which color metaphors have occurred. Our effort has been to trace the meaning of the colors that occur in some of the most common color metaphors in the area. We also discuss how universal and context-​specific the meaning of any color could be assumed to be, as an input to and background for further studies on color metaphors in the organization and management area. The main objective of the chapter is thus to draw attention to and shed light on the occurrence of color metaphors in organizational studies, in order to offer insights as to how such metaphors, especially when used by organizational members who are studied, could be interpreted. The chapter is based on literature and other documents found in a nonsystematic literature and Internet search. We stick to the primary colors and mixes of these, and do not go into different shades of color. First, we go into detail on one particular group of color metaphors—​the “colored collar” metaphors, which are probably one of the most common groups of color metaphors in the area of organization studies. We discuss the meaning of various colors when occurring together with “collar” as well as plausible explanations for why the colors have been given these meanings. This group of metaphors dates back at least 100 years, when the expressions blue-​and white-​collar workers appeared (Sinclair 1919; Alden Times 1924). Second, we offer examples of the many different meanings that can often be traced to particular colors, and argue that the multitude of meanings is the general case rather than the exception. Toward the end of the chapter, we discuss the universality of the meaning of any particular color, and offer some guidance as to how color metaphors may be interpreted, especially in organization studies.

232    ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD AND SUMEYRA ALPASLAN-DANISMAN

Colored Collars One of the most commonly appearing color metaphors is when a color codifies “collar.” “Collar” is the part of a piece of clothing around the neck (Cambridge Dictionary 2021) or a band or strip worn around the neck (Merriam-Webster Dictionary 2021). In combination with various colors, it has been used as a metaphor in four main ways, for: 1. occupations, such as black(-​collar workers) for coal miners and oil workers (Silaški 2012); 2. categories of workforce, such as pink(-​collar workers) for female workers (Howe 1977; Basu et al. 2015); 3. social status, such as blue(-​collar workers) for the working class (Wickman 2012); 4. desirability, such as gold(-​collar workers) for computer engineers (Wonacott 2002). As we shall see, several of the colored-​collar metaphors have a more literal origin, and some are—​or at least were, originally—​more or less metonymic expressions, in that a certain part of people’s clothing came to signify the whole person or even a group of people (see Silaški 2012). The first mentioning of a color-​collar metaphor in writing that we have found is in The Brass Check, authored by the American writer Upton Sinclair (1919), in which “white collar” is mentioned: It is a fact with which every union workingman is familiar, that his [sic] most bitter despisers are the petty underlings of the business world, the poor office-​clerks, who are often the worst exploited of proletarians, but who, because they are allowed to wear a white collar and to work in the office with the boss, regard themselves as members of the capitalist class. (Sinclair 1919: 77–​8)

Another early and well-​recognized use of a color-​collar expression appeared on January 10, 1924, published in a newspaper called Alden Times. In an article on jobs and young workers, the two “collar-​colors” that probably are the most well-​known ones—​blue and white—​appeared: “if we may call professionals and office positions white-​collar jobs, we may call the trades [jobs requiring manual skills] blue-​collar jobs” (Alden Times 1924). The color “blue” has thus come to refer to the working class (Wickman 2012) and “blue-​collar” has become a metaphor for workers having physical and dirty jobs (Halle 1984). A plausible explanation for why the specific color of blue was used is the blue-​ colored, protective clothing that many physical laborers used to have (Halle 1984; Schreurs et al. 2011), and that some still may wear. “White-​collar workers” is a metaphor referring to wage workers with “skills [that] involve the handling of paper and money and people” (Mills 1951: 65) and work with numbers, words, symbols, ideas, concepts,

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    233 information, and knowledge (Schreurs et al. 2011). White-​collar workers can be referred to as those workers surrounding blue-​collar workers (Davis 1991), having administrative and clerical roles (see, e.g., Bain and Price 1972). Sometimes lower-​level managers are also counted as white-​collar workers (see, e.g., Kraut and Grambsch 1987; Seklecka et al. 2013; Baik et al. 2016). It can be assumed that first-​line managers and supervisors who are actively involved in “dirty” manufacturing work would not be referred to as white-​collar workers. The color “white” as in “white-​collar” refers to the color of shirts traditionally worn by office workers (Leonard 2012). Thereafter, several other colors have been used to codify “collar.” The term “grey-​ collar” has a Chinese origin, referring to (skilled) technicians (Wright 2021) whose job descriptions (Hutchings et al. 2009) or level of skills, education, salary, and social status (Qiu 2010) fall between white-​and some blue-​collar work. While Hutchings et al. (2009) do not offer any explicit explanation for the use of the specific color “grey” (although it seems to us that they may mean that “grey” was chosen because it is between white and [dark] blue), Qiu (2010) explains the choice of “grey” by the grey uniforms that such workers in South China often wear. The reason for choosing the color grey may have to do with the color of the Great Wall, representing objectivity and fairness—​at the least, this was the case when choosing grey as a color for the uniforms of technical officials for both the Beijing 2008 and Beijing 2022 Olympic Games (XinhuaNet 2021). The term “grey-​collar workers” has also been used for an aging workforce (Hanley and McKeown 2005), at least in Western nations (Hutchings et al. 2009). “Black-​collar” has been used for those having jobs that colored their collars black from dirt, such as coal miners and oil workers (Silaški 2012). Alternatively, “black-​ collar” sometimes refers to African-​American workers, such as when the National Black Worker Center Project (NBWCP 2011) offers a “Black collar award” to “an individual who inspires, supports and works tirelessly to achieve social and worker justice for African Americans.” Moreover, Silaški (2012: 403) claims that “black-​collar” has denoted “a group of workers who usually do creative jobs such as artists, graphic designers and video producers.” We have not been able to find any explanation that fully makes sense to us for why “black” has come to symbolize creativity, although there are indications that the reason could be that it is a color neutral enough to wear to avoid being overloaded by colors, something that could constrain people’s creativity. For instance, the illustrator Kirsten McCrea says, “maybe we go neutral so that the art can be the focus of attention” (Sparkboxstudio 2021). Black is, though, not the only color that has been used as a symbol for creativity. The color yellow has, when combined with “collar,” come to refer to creative professions, such as filmmakers and sculptors (Wijewickreme 2010), but also to emotional labor workers: that is, those in service industries dealing with angry customers, passengers, students, or patients (Lee et al. 2020). Both interpretations of “yellow” make sense in relation to the general meanings this color is sometimes supposed to have, as it is said to be associated with feelings, curiosity, creativity, mentality, and perception (Olesen 2021), and also frustration and anger (Cherry 2023). “Yellow-​collar workers” may also

234    ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD AND SUMEYRA ALPASLAN-DANISMAN refer to “Asian” labor within businesses such as laundry, dry cleaning, and restaurants (Park 1998). “Orange-​collar” work (Pandeli 2015) has been used for prison labor (especially privately contracted prison work) because of the orange jumpsuits that prisoners in the USA sometimes wear—​not least in movies (Pandeli 2015). A plausible explanation for why the jumpsuit is orange is that this color is easily identifiable and makes the prisoner stand out (Tofig 1995): “[i]‌n California . . . prisoners must wear orange or red when they’re being transported” (Beam 2010). “Gold” has also been used in combination with “collar.” Most people would probably intuitively agree that this color is a symbol for something desirable. It occurs as a metaphor in our daily life—​who, for instance, has not been offered or desired a “gold star” (see, e.g., Bourn 2010) for something they have accomplished (e.g., in school, at the dentist, or at work)? Similarly, “gold-​collar worker” has been used as a metaphor for knowledge workers (e.g., Toffler 1984; Kelley 1985). Such gold-​collar workers “hold the key to the future” (Kelley 1985: 8); the gold-​collar worker is one who possesses valuable assets such as “problem-​solving abilities, creativity, talent, and intelligence; who performs nonrepetitive and complex work that is difficult to evaluate; and who prefers self-​management” and may, for example, be computer engineers (Wonacott 2002: 2). Moreover, they work with their brains, not their backs. They are creative and independent—​and often know more about their jobs than their managers do. They demand participation in every phase of their jobs . . . [and] use machines or systems (mostly computers) as extensions of themselves. (Kelley 1985: 7–​8)

“Green-​collar” workers may, according to the Bureau of Labor Statistics (2010), refer either to (all) workers in “green” organizations—​that is, organizations within environmentally friendly or less environmentally harmful industries—​or to those specific jobs in any organization that are focused on tasks that are beneficial for the environment, such as those having positions as environmental coordinators in municipalities. The term “green-​collar” was used at least as early as the mid-​1970s (Heffernan 1976) and since then has become a frequently used metaphor (e.g., Pinderhughes 2006; Pearce and Stilwell 2008; Harvey et al. 2010; Renwick et al. 2013; Fernandez et al. 2017; Pettinger 2017; Knuth 2019). We have found three different interpretations of the color “red,” when combined with the term “collar.” First, “red-​collar” has symbolized government workers of all types: The “red collar” moniker actually derives from previous government labor compensation methods. Government workers used to receive their pay from what was known as the red ink budget—​and the nickname stuck. (Campbell 2021; see also Spring 2019)

Second, “red-​collar” has also been used for civil servants in the specific context of China—​it refers to party members

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    235 spreading and putting into practice the Party’s new theories in private companies. These Party publicity members are in charge of developing new Party members, setting up Party organizations and conducting political education in these companies. (Beijing Review 2007; see also Hajdú 2011)

“Red-​collar worker” is, thus, here referring to representatives of the revolutionary, “red” ideology—​red symbolizing the blood of the proletariat (see Ghosh 2011, for an interesting discussion on why the color red has come to be identified with left-​wing politics). Third, as red is the color of passion or love (Olesen 2021), which, in turn, may have its roots in the fact that many primate species “display red on their body . . . near ovulation” (Elliot and Pazda 2012: 1; see also Wynn and Coolidge 2011, who explain why women originally started to wear red lipstick, in a similar way), “red-​collar” has been used for sex industry laborers (Brewis and Linstead 1998). In the 1970s, the term “pink-​collar” was coined to refer to typically women-​occupied professional roles such as nurse, secretary, and elementary school teacher (Howe 1977; Wickman 2012). We assume that the color “pink” was chosen because at that time this color was, by many, regarded as a “girly” color. However, “pink” was not always the “girly” color that many—​at least in large parts of the world—​would claim that it is today: Sources from the early twentieth century prove that there was little agreement among manufacturers, retailers, or consumers on which color was feminine and which was masculine or whether they denoted gender at all. (Paoletti 2012: xviii)

At the beginning of the 1900s, “blue” was accepted as girly, while “pink” was thought to be a boyish color (Paoletti 2012). The best explanation we have found as to why blue was seen as a “girly” color is that it was strongly associated with the Virgin Mary (Frassanito and Pettorini 2008). In the 1940s, boys and girls started to be dressed with sex-​specific clothing and pink became the girls’ color, blue the boys’ color (Grannan 2021). Thus, by the 1950s, the color pink had come to be strongly associated with femininity (Paoletti 2012). We have failed to find any rational explanation of the “gender-​switch” between these two colors, or why pink came to be connected with femininity and blue with masculinity. It may be, though, that it all originated in Nazi Germany: the Nazis in their concentration camps use a pink triangle to identify homosexuals. The Nazi’s [sic] choice of pink suggests that, by the 1930s, it was a color that in Germany had become associate [sic] with girls. After World War II, blue was used extensively for men’s uniforms. Therefore, blue became associated as more of a masculine color. (Frassanito and Pettorini 2008: 881)

Today, pink is often regarded as a “feminine color” (Olesen 2021) that symbolizes: youth, good health, and playfulness. It’s the flush of first love and stands for nurturing femininity. It’s used as the symbolic color of the movement to support breast cancer research, and we think of pink as an innocent, cheerful color. (Smith 2019)

236    ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD AND SUMEYRA ALPASLAN-DANISMAN As a matter of fact, even at the time of writing, we have male colleagues who would never wear pink clothes, not even a pink-​colored t-​shirt . . .

On the Multiple Meanings of any Color Different colors are often used to differentiate between objects or phenomena of the same character. One of the most obvious examples is the different meanings that are given to “collar,” as was discussed above. “Worker” may still mean “worker,” but different-​colored collars evoke associations of different groups of workers, such as “white-​collar workers” for administrative employees (Alden Times 1924) and “blue-​ collar workers” for employees having work tasks from which one may get dirty (Alden Times 1924; Wickman 2012), or when the rainbow concept/​color (“rainbow culture”) symbolizes an inclusive and diversified organizational culture (Scott et al. 2011). In this sense, each color is given a clear, unique meaning, more or less different from the meaning of any other color. However, in our literature review, there are also cases where a color source is given different meanings when it is combined with different targets, cases where the same color has been given different meanings even when it is combined with the same target, and cases where the same target has been symbolized by various different color sources (cf. Schloss et al. 2018). Just as with any metaphor, several different meanings have also been given to color sources in organization-​related color metaphors. An example from the area of politics can help to illustrate this. In large parts of the world, the color “red” signifies left-​ wing politics, radical thoughts, and even communism (Ghosh 2011), something which plausibly has to do with the red color of the blood of workers who are lost during revolution and who build up the society thereafter (see, e.g., Main 2008; Ghosh 2011). Consequently, in China, “red management” has—​in contrast to more “Western” management thoughts—​come to symbolize a certain type of management that includes principles and ideas from communist ideology in general and from Mao Zedong in particular, and that involves the (communist) party in an active role (see, e.g., Feng 2006; Li 2012; Blanchette 2019). However, in the USA the color “red” symbolizes the conservative party, while the color “blue” symbolizes the more left of the two major parties: “red states are those carried by Republicans at the presidential level; blue states are those carried by Democrats” (Levendusky and Pope 2011: 227; see also Rothstein 2017). Thus, blue as the color of openness, peace, and tranquility (Mehta and Zhu 2009) has been the color of liberal ideology (Levendusky and Pope 2011), which is associated with change and reform (Lowi 1969) and, not least, freedom and tolerance (e.g., Waldron 1987). The core

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    237 dimensions of conservative ideology, on the other hand, are resistance to change and acceptance of inequality (Jost et al. 2003). It justifies established social order and passionately affirms the value of existing institutions (Huntington 1957). The same meanings as in American politics have been given to “red” and “blue” in some works within the area of organization studies: [S]‌ome firms lean “red” (conservative), some lean “blue” (liberal), and some are “purple” (moderate or mixed). (Gupta et al. 2017: 1019)

Gupta et al. (2017) suggest that conservative-​leaning firms (i.e., “red” firms) accept inequality, see responsibilities as individual, and prefer the status quo, while liberal-​ leaning firms (i.e., “blue” firms) favor equality, regard responsibilities as shared (e.g., implying an obligation to minimize harm to the natural environment), and desire social change. As suggested elsewhere in this chapter, the color “red” has, of course, many other meanings (on top of those suggested elsewhere in the chapter, one could add “fire engine and emergency,” Boland and Greenberg 1992: 124). There are many examples of the fact that different meanings are given to the same color when used for different phenomena. The color “black” appears, first of all, in the “black box” expression, not seldom used to refer to an organization in general, or any particular aspect of it, which is “unknown” (e.g., Berger and Mester 1997; Howard-​ Grenville 2006; Roome and Louche 2016). (In fact, “black” has not always referred to something unexplored, hidden, unknown—​a long time ago it meant that something was “pale,” not opaque—​see Weed 1998, who offers an interesting analysis of the “black box” expression and suggests an alternative interpretation of “black box” (14): “a pale window through which we peer, contemplating the complexities hidden inside ourselves and catching the pale reflections from the boxes surrounding us.”) In addition, “black” has been given meanings as various as African-​American (as in “black employment,” Davies and Huff 1972; Sigelman 1976), minorities (as in “black bank,” Brimmer 1971; Bates 1989), illegality (as, again, in “black employment,” Elek et al. 2012), and soiled by oil and coal (as in “black-​collar workers,” Silaški 2012). As we saw above, the color “blue” may refer to manual, dirty work when combined with “collar” (e.g., Alden Times 1924), or to liberal ideology when combined with (the ideology of) “organization” (Gupta et al. 2017). “Green” often refers to nature and being environmentally friendly, such as in “green-​collar worker” (Heffernan 1976), “green HRM” (Renwick et al. 2013), and “green leadership” (Eisen 2010), but occasionally refers to “inexperienced,” such as in “green workforce” (Jaremko 2005). In addition to more or less academic works, colors have been used in more consultancy-​ oriented works related to management and organization. Examples include various types of diagnostic and “how-​to” instruments, such as “Reinvent­ ing organizations” (Laloux 2014), the “Diversity icebreaker” (Ekelund 2019), and “Achieveblue” (Mitchell 2020). In some cases it seems that a color is given a similar meaning between instruments, such as when both Laloux and Mitchell seem to give

238    ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD AND SUMEYRA ALPASLAN-DANISMAN “red” the meaning of “aggressive.” However, in other cases there seems to be more incongruence, such as when Laloux lets “green” symbolize “vibrant cultures in which employees feel appreciated and empowered to contribute” (Laloux 2014: 33), while Mitchell lets it symbolize a culture where “employees, come in, lay low, hold back on discretionary efforts and ideas” (Mitchell 2020). The fact that it seems that they have not (always) given the same meaning to a particular color is not something that we hold against these instruments or their creators. All we want to say is that those who expect to find congruity between such instruments may be disappointed. Of these three instruments, in only one of them have we found an explicit explanation for the meanings that are given to the included colors; the colors in the Diversity icebreaker are based on the similarities with the political colours in the Norwegian political party structure: Blue (the conservative side, more concerned with economic conditions), Red (the social democratic/​socialist side, more concerned with social welfare) and Green (the environmentalists, more willing to take a global perspective). (Ekelund et al. 2013: 5–​6)

For the other instruments, it seems that the meanings of the colors have rather been “taken out of the blue.” As was indicated above, it has happened that even the very same metaphor (i.e., a metaphor with both the same source and target—​word-​wisely) is given different meanings. A single color in a metaphoric expression can imply multiple meanings: for example, the term grey-​collar worker is used to refer to an aging workforce (Hanley and McKeown 2005) or to a technical workforce (Hutchings et al. 2009); black employment may indicate hiring an African-​American workforce (Davies and Huff 1972; Sigelman 1976) or illegality in employment (Elek et al. 2012); red-​collar worker has been given several different meanings—​government workers in general (Campbell 2021), civil servants in China (Beijing Review 2007), and sex industry laborers (Brewis and Linstead 1998)—​ and white employment may refer to legal employment (Benedek et al. 2013) as well as to workers having a European, Caucasian, or Western origin (Kaufman 1986). One example of a case where the same target has been connected to different colors is creative work. Silaški (2012) reports that workers who do creative jobs have been referred to as “black-​collar” workers, while Wijewickreme (2010) claims that those creative workers have been referred to as “yellow-​collar” workers. Other, maybe not so convincing examples are the use of both “black-​collar” (Silaški 2012) and “blue-​collar” (Halle 1984) for dirty jobs, and the use of both “white-​collar” (Bain and Price 1972) and “gold-​collar” (Toffler 1984; Kelley 1985) for knowledge workers. Accordingly, any color—​just like any other metaphor—​is given different meanings in different situations and contexts. “Color” refers to frameworks as various as ethnicity (Williams 1966), legality (Smith 2019), gender (Frassanito and Pettorini 2008), and politics (Levendusky and Pope 2011), to mention just a few of the many dimensions and distinctions we have observed. The most widespread of the color metaphors—​such as white-​and blue-​collar workers—​may be more universal than other metaphors,

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    239 although there is no reason to believe that there are no diverging meanings even of these widespread metaphors. In the next section, we discuss the universality of meaning of any particular color, and we conclude with a few suggestions as to how researchers could go about interpreting the color metaphors they come across when studying management, organization, and working life.

On the Universality of Color Metaphors Color metaphors could be an exciting ingredient in organization studies. Nevertheless, studying color metaphors doesn’t come without problems. Generally, we believe that the context must function as the main adviser as to how to interpret what any specific color means. There are, though, those who would argue for a more general interpretation of any color. There are a variety of sources to be found online where “the” meaning of any particular color is described. For instance, Olesen (2021) claims that black is “the color of power and sophistication,” brown “the color of stability and reliability,” blue “the color of trust and loyalty,” and orange “the color of enthusiasm and emotion.” Smith (2019) suggests that red is “the color of heightened emotion, strength, and power” and that white stands for “everything good and right.” For some colors the different authors seem to agree—​at least implicitly and partly. Orange, for instance, is claimed as “the color of enthusiasm and emotion” by Olesen (2021) and as “fun, flamboyant, dynamic, and radiates warmth” by Smith (2019). For other colors, though, it is more difficult to see any logic in what a particular color is claimed to symbolize. For instance, Smith (2019) suggests that pink “symbolizes youth, good health, and playfulness,” while Olesen (2021) presents it as “the color of love and compassion.” Similarly, purple is described as “the color of spirituality and imagination” by Olesen (2021), while it is “associated with wealth and royalty” by Smith (2019). We have not been able to find any explicit explanations or sources for the meanings that these websites have given to the colors. For this reason, these and similar websites should be used with caution. Nevertheless, we have in this very chapter ourselves referred to such sources when analyzing the color metaphors identified in the literature review. Just as the research on color naming and categorization could be divided into a universalist view, claiming that color naming and categorization are shaped by pan-​human cognitive universals, a cultural relativist view, claiming that color naming and categorization are shaped by sociocultural evolutionary processes, and a third middle-​of-​the-​ road view, which acknowledges both of the first two views (Jameson 2005: 293), so could answers to the question of whether or not the meaning of any color is universal be categorized as “thesis,” “anti-​thesis,” and “synthesis.”

240    ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD AND SUMEYRA ALPASLAN-DANISMAN To begin with the thesis—​the universalist view—​there are those in (natural) science who suggest that our reaction to any color is not only culturally based but is, in fact, also physical: Red actually can trigger aggression . . . Being the longest wavelength, red is a powerful color. Although not technically the most visible, it has the property of appearing to be nearer than it is and therefore it grabs our attention first. Hence its effectiveness in traffic lights the world over. Its effect is physical; it stimulates us and raises the pulse rate, giving the impression that time is passing faster than it is. (Schauss 1979: 223–​4)

Löffler argues that color metaphors are acquired “very early in life . . . encoded in and retrieved from memory, thus likely operating automatic and subconscious, also across different cultures” (Löffler 2017: 54). Ou claims that “[d]‌iverse findings have been obtained regarding whether the observer’s cultural background has an impact on color-​emotion responses” (Ou 2015: 1531). Another argument for the universalist view is that we, after all, managed to make sense of and trace the origins of most of the color metaphors that were identified in the literature review. In most cases we could find more or less rational explanations of why the colors in the color metaphors were given their specific meaning. Color meaning may not be such a black box after all. Neither is it difficult to find support for the anti-​thesis: that is, the cultural relativist view. Gao et al. (2007) argue that “color emotion” and He (2009) that “connotation of color words” vary between cultures. We have seen, in our literature review, that the colors blue and red are given different political meanings in different parts of the world. Another example is the rainbow color, which has been given many different, culture-​ based meanings, such as “hope” (Christian culture), “thank you” (Aboriginal culture), and “solidarity” (an international symbol of the gay movement) (Vince 2020). In addition, color meanings may change over time. We saw, in our literature review, that blue was originally a feminine color while pink was a male color, but that this has switched over time. A fact that points in the direction of the anti-​thesis is how unfamiliar at least some of the color metaphors we came across are to us; not least did we find the “orange-​ collar worker” metaphor far-​fetched. Some go even further than this and suggest that there may very well be differences as to how any specific color is interpreted within any culture. Hutchings, for instance, claims that “[c]‌olors can have many ‘meanings’ even within one culture; hence, each color must be studied within its context” (Hutchings 2015: 1325). Things such as nurture, for instance, may also play a role in determining which meaning is given to any specific color (Hurlbert and Owen 2015). Even individual human characteristics may need to be taken into account to advise on why a certain individual perceives a specific color (Mokrzycki and Tatol 2011). This suggests that one would need to be much more accurate than sticking to a cultural level, to understand which meaning any color is given. We choose to stick to the third approach—​the synthesis—​where both the cultural relativist view and the universalist view are acknowledged, which could be called a “meta-​pragmatic” perspective. There is no reason, as we see it, to neglect the

ON COLOR METAPHORS IN ORGANIZATION STUDIES    241 psychological research, even if it is also correct to say that we generally have more faith in a context-​specific approach to color meanings. We are, thus, open to the existence of universal color metaphors (in the sense that they would be given the same or very similar meanings in any culture, by any individual), as well as to culture-​specific color metaphors. Furthermore, we are open to the existence of different interpretations of any given color metaphor within cultures, and—​which could be assumed to be the most recurrent—​that any particular color metaphor may rest upon universality, culture-​dependence, and more individual factors. There may even be occasions when color metaphors—​and, thus, meaning given to a particular color—​appear “ad hoc” (Cameron 2007; see also Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume; Cienki, Chapter 17 in this volume). For this reason, any organizational researcher who has identified color metaphors—​in organizational members’ talk, documents, manuals, or any other empirical material—​ and is about to interpret these, is recommended to have an open mind. The researcher has to advise from case to case whether the meaning given to a particular color is more universal, or if it is rather to be deduced from the culture, or even the specific individual, conversation, or situation. The researcher may want to ask for help in interpreting the color metaphors from the people who expressed them, or in any other way make use of the context in which the color metaphors appear in order to interpret them.

Conclusion We have in this chapter offered a review of some of the most commonly appearing color metaphors in the area of organization and management, and we have—​as far as it has been possible—​offered explanations of why a particular color has been given a certain meaning, in the color metaphors. As we have seen, a more universal meaning is sometimes given to a particular color, but the meaning of any color can generally best be made sense of in relation to context and time. For this reason, we have recommended that researchers who aim to interpret color metaphors always take the context into account, but remain open to universalist meaning. Our conclusion and advice for further studies and interpretation of color metaphors in the area of organization and management is not very different from what is often suggested for studies of other metaphors—​it is important to try to find a balance between universality and context (cf. Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume).

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pa rt i i i

T H E A P P L IC AT ION OF M E TA P HOR I N R E SE A RC H

chapter 15

using meta ph ors critically a nd reflexi v e ly in empiri c a l organiz ati ona l researc h mats alvesson, yiannis gabriel, and jörgen sandberg

Introduction The focus of this chapter lies in the metaphors that guide our thinking and our practices as organizational researchers, when we do empirical research. The chapter develops the argument expounded by Chia (1996), Alvesson and Sandberg (2021), and others that the process of generating, critiquing, merging, and demerging metaphors—​in short, metaphorization—​is vital for being able to generate more original and impactful research. In particular, we argue for a critical and reflexive deployment of metaphors in social research. By analogy to the ways that narratives can spawn counter-​narratives, we argue that each metaphor, instead of blocking alternative ones, may prompt a variety of counter-​metaphors. A careful scrutiny of these counter-​metaphors can reveal existing blind spots in different moments of the research process, including the initial planning, the fieldwork, the analysis and reflection, the writing, and subsequent dissemination and publication. We will encourage researchers to question and probe the metaphors that, explicitly or implicitly, guide the research process and to develop thinking about new and alternative metaphors that may promote original and probing insights into their subjects.

252    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG Researchers can, of course, consider metaphors in empirical research in a multitude of ways, such as studying the metaphorical expressions of people in research sites, or using metaphors as part of the theoretical framework to analyze organizations (Morgan 1997), leadership (Alvesson and Spicer 2011), or consumption (Gabriel and Lang 2015). As this is addressed in other chapters in this Handbook, we here concentrate on metaphors for the research process. The purpose of the chapter is, then, to discuss how metaphors can be used reflexively in the process of research to generate increased awareness and more informed choices that can result in the generation of more incisive, original, and imaginative research. We begin by briefly introducing the notion of metaphorical reflexivity. Against this background, we identify and discuss different metaphors of the researcher, who is often seen as the central element in the research process, particularly in qualitative research. We thereafter identify and discuss common and less common metaphors of the following key elements of the research process: literature review and theory; design and method; and analysis and writing. Finally, we provide some guidelines for how to use metaphors in research.

Metaphorical Reflexivity In order to question and probe the metaphors that underlie the research process, reflexivity is central. Reflexivity is to a significant degree a matter of directing attention to the assumptions, frameworks, and language that we work with and which guide our interpretations. Much of this goes beyond what specific metaphorical expressions in texts can capture, searching for the root metaphors that shape the thinking and practice of social research. Working with metaphors may sharpen reflexivity at the same time as reflexive exercises may lead to the clarification of metaphors in use and trigger ideas for new metaphors. We thus see metaphorical reflexivity as a good combination of resources for generating more informed and, in particular, more creative research. Metaphors illuminate the partial and, in a sense, arbitrary ways in which we approach phenomena and research ideas. The very idea of metaphor and the formulation of metaphors remind the researcher of the significance of perspectives and imagination. As Brown (1976: 173) writes, “the logical, empirical or psychological absurdity of metaphor thus has a specifically cognitive function: it makes us stop in our tracks and examine it.” Through the active and conscious use of metaphors, it becomes obvious that there are alternative ways of conceptualizing and relating to a phenomenon. This is often best indicated by other metaphors. Such awareness forces or, at least, encourages the researcher to be reflexive of this: to realize that the phenomenon under scrutiny is formulated in a specific way—​not The Way—​and that there are alternatives. At the same time, reflexivity suggests a careful consideration of the social, cultural, and theoretical forces that are in operation, and direct attentions to the images or metaphors that play key roles in these aforementioned forces (e.g., Alvesson and Sköldberg 2018;

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    253 see also Finlay 2002; Rivera 2018). The ideal of reflexivity makes it difficult to stick to just one metaphor—​or to avoid thinking about the existence and centrality of governing images. Reflexivity thus means—​or at least in principle it can mean—​awareness and exploration of the researcher’s metaphors, both for the phenomenon under study and for his/​her self-​understanding and the research community’s role in forming this understanding. Such reflexivity may involve considerable effort, particularly if the metaphor is taken for granted, which is often the case. Reflexivity thus includes awareness of the metaphor used and with this also a possible opening up for consideration of alternatives. Hence, a reflexive use of metaphors thereby implies a conscious scrutiny of the ways metaphors enter our thinking, our actions, and our writing, sometimes consciously, sometimes unconsciously. It also prompts a questioning of power and legitimacy entailed by different metaphors. Thus, for example, the family metaphor that features in some discussions of organization can be seen as implying a unitary, paternalistic power perspective. And yet, given the unhappy state of many families, it may also be subverted into a pluralistic or conflict perspective or even be seen as a neurosis. Metaphors are, of course, not the only way to work with reflexivity and, similarly, you can develop insights about metaphors without being specifically reflexive, but here we regard metaphors and reflexivity as natural bedfellows that can support each other.

Metaphors of the Researcher, Metaphors of Identity Researcher identity is widely regarded as one of the central elements of the research process, since the way researchers understand themselves often shapes what research they conduct and how. Occupational identities, such as the identity of the researcher, emerge as communities of employees deploy various rhetorical and other discursive devices to differentiate themselves from other occupational groups and support their individual identities (Fine 1996; Ashcraft 2007). These identities can be viewed as narrative webs blending elements from a group’s past successes and trials, entrenched habits and values, current challenges, and future aspirations. They also incorporate various idealized images and fantasies that shape the experiences and practices of each occupation’s members. In this connection, the metaphor of science as a vocation used by Max Weber (Weber 2004) has long captured something essential about the work of researchers. It links research to a calling akin to a religious one, which makes the metaphor especially effective as religion is often viewed as a set of faith-​based beliefs, which science opposes. The metaphor of science as vocation accords research many qualities that prima facie characterize the practices and experiences of its practitioners—​these include a dedicated apprenticeship, long hours devoted to learning and searching, a firm commitment to method (this is what differentiates scientist from dilettante in Weber’s view), and many

254    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG sacrifices and frustrations before dedicated work yields fruit. Yet, the figure of Faust, willing to sacrifice the noble but contingent values of the scientific enterprise for earthly success, power, and fame, emerges as emblematic of the concept of the scientist who realizes that noble ideals cannot put bread on the family table, let alone quench the deeper thirst for meaning, pleasure, and recognition (Alvesson et al. 2022). In recent times, a starkly different metaphor for the researcher’s identity, the game metaphor, has installed itself and perhaps even supplanted the vocation metaphor (e.g., Butler and Spoelstra 2020). The game metaphor is rooted in academic publishing, the arena where careers are forged, and departmental reputations are built. Research rankings of universities, nations, departments, and individual researchers dominate a scene that increasingly looks like the medals table in the Olympics. Young researchers must learn how to play the game effectively by collaborating with seasoned veterans, attending “Meet the editors” sessions that feature in every major conference and making themselves known to the big players in their field through networking ceaselessly. In sharp opposition to the religion-​inspired metaphor of vocation, the researcher as gamesman emphasizes opportunism, flexibility, and a constant screaming for attention. Winning is all that matters, and winning means getting “the paper” published in a high-​ ranking journal—​a virtual platitude that nearly every researcher today recognizes. The researcher as gamesman has gradually eroded the hegemony of the researcher as vocationist. At the margins of the discursive webs that constitute today’s researcher, however, a number of other metaphors surface. In the field of organization studies, older researchers are liable to envision themselves as intellectual craftspersons and lament the erosion of traditional research skills under regimes of Fordist production of research papers, calling for standardization, specialization, speed, and volume. Research as craft overlaps with the ambit of another metaphor that surfaces as a description of researchers’ identity, that of research as a labor of love, an image that has been explored in detail by Clarke et al. (2012), where research is an end in itself, an image not far from that of a vocation, except that love underemphasizes discipline and overemphasizes pleasure. Interestingly, these researchers found that research as a labor of love is sorely tested in our times by pragmatic instrumental demands, such as the need to put bread on the family table and maintain a position in the rat race. The instrumental demands on researchers’ identities have fueled the increasing prominence of two further metaphors—​researchers as part of an academic proletariat or even precariat, slaving away in constant insecurity, exploited and oppressed (e.g., Ylijoki and Henriksson 2017), and researchers as resisting or rebelling. Both of these metaphors surface frequently but not solely among early career academics, who are liable to cast older academics, mostly white and male, as their oppressors from the positions of power they occupy as deans, editors, reviewers, and so forth. Identifying with the underdog, exploited, or discriminated against—​the working class, the criminal or criminalized underclass, groups discriminated against on the basis of their gender, race, or sexual orientation—​has long been a driver of social researchers seeking to unveil social injustice and inequity in every form, explicit or implicit. Identifying with the underdog, as oppressed or resisting, is then liable to raise the profile of the researchers’ own

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    255 grievances, whether on the basis of age, gender, race, geographical location, or linguistic skills, and so forth. The metaphors above may describe the occupational identities of researchers in different life stages, by distilling and purifying various elements from other occupations or social positions. The individual identity of each researcher may involve hybrids or combinations of several of the above. These may, in turn, cross-​fertilize or hybridize with other identity markers, such as class, race, gender, ethnicity, sexual orientation, family, politics, religion, sports, consumption patterns, and so on. Academic identities, in line with current views on identity, are generally viewed as more or less transient, precarious, and deep-​seated (Knights and Clarke 2014). The metaphors themselves should therefore not be viewed as capturing something fixed or permanent, but may be viewed as consciously or unconsciously shaping the experiences and practices of different researchers. Different practices are imbued with different meanings depending on the metaphor that dominates a particular researcher’s self-​identity at a particular moment in time. Thus, a laborious and not very interesting piece of qualitative coding may be experienced as: 1. a necessary form of work discipline for a researcher working within a science as vocation metaphor; 2. the price to be paid for a successful hit for a gamesman researcher; also as the contribution to be made for a successful collaboration and networking with the star researcher in the field; 3. part of a time-​honored ritual, enjoyable in its own right, for a craftsperson researcher; 4. part of the labor of love, not always enjoyable but meaningful nonetheless, for a researcher who loves their work; 5. an activity that puts bread on the table for a proletarian researcher; 6. a subversive activity for the rebel researcher, one that brings to light the inequities and injustices of the system. Reflexive researchers will, as a matter of course, question their own assumptions, the interests served by their research, the ramifications of their findings, and the ethical foundations of their practice. They will also reflect on the way in which their own presence shapes the object of their investigation. Examining any identity metaphors that directly or indirectly shape the agenda and execution of their research enhance their claims to be reflexive. A researcher adhering to a Weberian ideal of value-​free vocation may question whether their values indirectly and invisibly seep into their research agenda, or conversely whether their value neutrality is blinding them to some patent injustices or introducing prejudices of its own. A gamesman researcher may usefully ask themselves whether their research has any value or meaning at all. A proletarian researcher may question whether they project their own disenchantment and alienation onto their subjects, just as a rebel researcher may question whether they envision resistance and rebellion where none exists. In this way, by questioning their own identity by

256    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG means of identity metaphors like those outlined above, reflexive researchers may reach a deeper understanding of their own influence and effect on what they are researching. And in doing so, they may problematize what appeared unproblematic and question what appeared unquestionable.

Metaphors of Methodology Methodology covers several central elements in the research process including deciding purpose, producing research questions, relating to earlier research, adapting a theory, producing a design, doing field work (e.g., data collection), handling data, doing analysis, relating to theory, producing research results (e.g., findings, contributions), and doing text work (writing up). Alvesson and Sandberg (2021) suggest a range of conventional and not so conventional—​perhaps even a bit weird—​metaphors for all these parts of the research process. Here we concentrate on metaphorizing the following elements: (a) literature review and theory; (b) design and method; and (c) analysis and writing, thus combining parts that could be addressed in more nuanced way.

Literature Review and Theory Most research takes off from a more or less thorough review of existing work within an area, in combination with some theory to structure thinking and empirical work. The literature review is commonly seen as “a critical evaluation of what is seen as relevant to the problem, what is known and not known about it” (Hesse-​Biber and Leavy 2011: 336). In other words, the literature review is supposed to provide a map-​like overview of the existing knowledge domain within which the researcher can position the study by highlighting some gap that needs to be filled. The metaphor of gap-​spotting is common here (Alvesson and Sandberg 2013). Literature review as gap-​spotting focuses on what (pieces) are lacking or missing in the current knowledge map of the world, as a way to point out what needs to be added to make the picture more complete. Elsbach and van Knippenberg (2020: 1277), for example, argue that “we advance knowledge through programs of research in which studies build on previous work and set the stage for future research.” Some researchers, however, fear that the literature review and a clear theoretical positioning will lead researchers into a predefined track, obstructing openness and the ideal of the data showing the way. Here the literature review appears to be a blinker, blocking the wide-​angle view and encouraging tunnel vision, or box thinking, and missing the open-​minded exploration of reality. Extensive readings within a specialized area mean a strong commitment to a specific perspective and that the dominant assumptions are taken for granted, leading the well-​read researcher to imitate others. Being specialized means the risk of becoming functionally stupid—​that is, being

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    257 competent within a narrow domain but incapable of thinking and dealing with issues outside this domain—​and thereby limits people’s reflexive abilities and imagination in research (Alvesson and Spicer 2016). The implication here is that reading not too much but somewhat broadly may be sufficient to get some interpretive support and avoid research reinventing the wheel, while working too systematically with reviewing earlier studies and optimizing the use of a specific theoretical perspective may act as blinkers. A somewhat different approach is to view the literature review as well as existing theory in a domain as an assumption digger—​an exercise in identifying and challenging assumptions (Davis 1971; Alvesson and Sandberg 2013). Here, the researcher does not look for gaps but digs down under the literature and theory to lay bare its footings and, based on this, to generate a new set of assumptions that form the foundation of an alternative theory. In contrast to the gap-​spotting review, which regards reviews as a knowledge-​building exercise, or the view of the review as a blinker, the assumption-​ digger review regards the process as an opening-​up project that enables researchers to imagine how to rethink existing literature in ways that generate new and better ways of thinking about specific phenomena. Ambitious readings are central here, but in order to selectively negate, rather than positively build upon, existing perspectives and to come up with alternative ideas. A methodology for such an assumption-​digger review could include the following principles: (1) identifying a domain of literature; (2) identifying and articulating the assumptions underlying this domain; (3) evaluating them and focusing on more problematic or limiting elements; (4) developing alternative assumptions with the potential to become the start of a novel theoretical contribution; (5) considering the new assumptions in relation to their audience (what is seen as new, credible, and interesting); and (6) evaluating the alternative set of assumptions (Alvesson and Sandberg 2013). The ambition is to come up with productive and interesting new assumptions that mean novel research questions and lines of theoretical reasoning. Relating to existing theory and studies in a field is always vital—​inductive work also needs to connect to existing literature—​and this can be done in different ways. Considering alternative metaphors—​we have here only pointed to three of many options (see Alvesson and Sandberg 2021 for more)—​may liberate some people from being stuck in certain “musts” and generally encourage alternative views that may work better for at least some researchers in some of their projects.

Design and Method A common metaphor of research design is blueprint (or master plan) for how to conduct research. In the words of Abutabenjeh and Jaradat (2018: 238), “a research design is a blueprint to guide the research process by laying out how a study will move from the research purpose/​questions to the outcomes.” This is particularly the case when research is seen as knowledge building, where design becomes the master plan for the knowledge to be built, indicating something fixed and solid to be executed. Some advocate a fixed

258    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG design: “choosing the appropriate design is critical to the success of a manuscript at AMJ, in part because the fundamental design of a study cannot be altered during the revision process” (Bono and McNamara 2011: 657). The design is then the principal input and structuring principle for execution. Similarly, Creswell (2009: 5) states that “research designs are plans and the procedures for research that span the decisions from broad assumptions to detailed methods of data collection and analysis.” The various aspects of the research process are understood as components or building blocks. An alternative metaphor of design is mystery creation. The researcher encounters or aims for an unexpected empirical observation to challenge dominant understandings in an area. This calls for a more flexible and open study than one informed by a strict design (Alvesson and Kärreman 2011). The mystery creation metaphor highlights that research can be about confronting or preventing a particular logic or modes of thoughts from being outlined, thus creating a breakdown in existing assumptions and beliefs, and calling for rethinking. Agar (1986) views some form of anthropological work as a matter of interaction between the researcher’s home culture and a foreign one, leading to (potentially productive) confusions and misunderstandings calling for investigation and learning. The knowledge-​creating process is one of encountering and learning to understand, and thus “solving” breakdowns in understanding. It is the unanticipated and the unexpected—​the things that puzzle the researcher due to the deviation from what is expected—​that are of particular interest to a reflexive researcher drawing upon the mystery (or breakdown of understanding) metaphor. The ideal research design then includes work allowing and encouraging two key elements: (1) to create a mystery; and (2) to solve it (Asplund 1970). Both elements call for imagination and a willingness to avoid the temptation to simply use a favored approach—​whether leadership, institutional theory, feminism, or discourse—​to order and explain what the researcher encounters. They call for an empirically flexible approach, more interested in what goes on when, for example, shadowing a manager or observing an organizational unit over a time period or asking fairly open and reflection-​triggering interview questions. Somewhat related but with even more emphasis on the creative element in research design is to approach it based on a beachcombing metaphor (Gabriel 2015, 2018). This means scanning a terrain in search of empirical material that may serve as golden nuggets and trigger ideas or valuable clues for developing something interesting. In this sense a beachcomber is in a quest not for objects themselves, but rather for the possibilities offered by different objects. To a beachcomber, a piece of driftwood may suggest things as diverse as a bonfire on the beach, an artistic installation, or the existence of a nearby shipwreck. A seashell may suggest an addition to a child’s mobile or may spark the inspiration for a collage or a painting. The key point of a design would then be to optimize possibilities for the creative and novel line of thinking. Similar to research design, method also refers to specific tactics or techniques for collecting and processing data. Perhaps the most common image of method is to regard it as a rational technique for developing valid and reliable scientific knowledge of reality. As a technique, method is seen to be made up of a set of specific tools and procedures for carrying out research (Hammersley 2011: 5). The metaphor of instruction

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    259 manual captures this. Many views have in common that method offer a set of principles, tools, and procedures for how to avoid researcher biases and prejudices or prevent them contaminating formal data and theory in the process of knowledge development. A rational and transparent procedure is key. Method may also be seen as a construction process, in the sense of how social reality is actively constructed: that is, being invented and shaped by the researcher through their language use, interpretations, and writing practices (Law 2004). In these methodological constructions of reality, the researcher is the central driver rather than the people studied. Construction indicates choice, uncertainty, and a level of arbitrariness. What others may refer to as codification would, given the construction metaphor, be less about reflecting data than about the interpretative inclinations of the construction-​ engaged researcher, informed by pre-​understandings, imagination, theoretical ideas, paradigms, societal culture, and other construction-​supporting elements. Another metaphor of method is picking someone’s brain. Here the assumption is that method is very much about finding and mobilizing qualified people who can produce not only relevant information but also analysis. Method as picking someone’s brain means that participants are assumed not only to offer data that can be used, but also to be qualified thinkers who can support the turning of data into insights as a vital in-​ between step to the final research results. Holmes and Marcus (2005: 1104), for example, address some informants as “experts” to be treated “not as collateral colleagues helping to inform fieldwork to occur elsewhere but instead as subjects fully within their own analytical ambit.” These subjects should be seen and worked with as collaborators or partners in research. The metaphor of method as picking someone’s brain may be used more broadly to inform work with all participants, who are viewed as being analytically skilled on the subject matter of the study. But the metaphor could perhaps more typically inform efforts to find and work with people who are highly suitable for insight generation and communication.

In the Field A more mundane use of metaphors in social research may involve their deliberate use as part of the research design. Metaphors can overcome the tendency of respondents to offer mundane or formulaic answers, and encourage them to move beyond factually accurate but symbolically barren responses. Respondents to an interview may be told, “People sometimes think of their workplace through an image or a metaphor—​here are some examples on a card. Does your organization feel like any of these on the card?” The card may include:

1. 2. 3. 4.

a machine; a family; a football team; a pressure cooker;

260    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG 5. an episode from a soap opera; 6. a nest of vipers; 7. a castle under siege; 8. a dinosaur; 9. a conveyor belt; 10. a prison; 11. an orchestra; 12. a rose garden. The researcher may read each line slowly, noticing how respondents react to each metaphor, perplexed about some, amused by others, strongly rejecting some, instantly alighting on others. It then becomes possible to explore the meanings and emotions raised by the appropriate metaphor, through follow-​up questions like: 1. a machine: Is it a well-​oiled one? Is it a creaky one? How often does it break down? 2. a family: What kind? A happy one? Who is the father/​mother? How do they treat their children? 3. a football team: Who are the stars? Who are the opponents? 4. a pressure cooker: Where does the pressure come from? How do people let off steam? A follow-​up question may then be asked that frequently elicits a story, revealing the emotional associations of the metaphor: “Can you think of an incident that illustrates how this organization works as a family/​pressure cooker/​prison etc?” (Gabriel and Ulus 2015). The use of metaphors during field research can probe some of the assumptions held by individuals by triggering their imaginative and symbolic abilities in ways that direct questioning often fails to do.

Analysis and Writing Up When data are approached as building blocks of reality, the analysis is typically seen as taking a reliable control over the often complex and messy qualitative material, made up of interview statements, field notes, and written documentary material. Key here are the ideal and practice of analysis as data coding, which is often not recognized as a metaphor. It involves classifying and sorting the collected data into distinct categories and gradually abstracting those categories into a new piece that will add to the never-​ ending theoretical jigsaw puzzle. Here one may somewhat ironically see the code as a way of turning the well known into something cryptic and secretive, as it tends to transform something that may appear to be natural, like interview talk, into something decontextualized, abstract, and standardized—​often with the loss of sensitivity for social context and meaning (Potter and Wetherell 1987; Brinkmann 2014). This loss is acceptable as the means of attaining rigor and reliability are viewed as more important —​loose

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    261 and uncodified texts may tempt the researcher to impose their own opinions or values on the data. Another common metaphor of data analysis is data processing, indicating a factory-​ like treatment of empirical material. The researcher then engages in a refinement project, where the raw material, through the analysis, becomes processed, filtered, refined, and combined, leading to knowledge products. Here, analysis is seen as a fairly straightforward production process, where the raw material is gradually transformed into something refined and sophisticated. But, of course, processing may also be understood in more complicated ways. A very different metaphor of data analysis is thick description. It means addressing “a multiplicity of complex conceptual structures, many of them superimposed upon or knotted into one another, which are at once strange, irregular, and inexplicit, and which [the researcher] must contrive somehow and then to render” (Geertz 1973: 10). Coding what interviewees say they mean is not seen as sufficient. Instead, thick description emphasizes the ambitious interpretative nature of the enterprise. Here, it is not so much the marshaling of a great body of data as the strength of the (ambitious) interpretation that matters, typically going far behind just presenting empirical detail. This is, in a sense, the opposite of codification; instead of reduction and standardization to reduce complexity and ambiguity, thick description embraces layers of meaning and celebrates complexity. When it comes to writing, language is commonly seen as a representation tool, a transparent medium for the objective transport of information about reality. In the words of Hatch (2002: 211), writing is about “turning the hard-​earned products of design, data collection, and analysis into findings that communicate what has been learned.” Writing is then the transmission medium between the analysis and findings from the researcher to the audience, an instrument “for mediating and communicating findings and knowledge” (Flick 2018: 569). This view of writing often leads to monological texts. Another common metaphor for writing is conversation, which indicates that writing should be dialogic rather than monologic in character by relating to ongoing talks between people wanting progress in a particular knowledge area. As Patriotta (2017: 753–​ 4) notes, “the conversation metaphor foreshadows a text‐building strategy that unfolds according to the following ‘moves’: 1) identifying a ‘good’ conversation, 2) analyzing the conversation, 3) adding to the conversation.” Hence, in contrast to text as a monologue, in writing as conversation it becomes central to how the text relates to other texts, considers earlier findings and arguments, and anticipates how the research text will add to these, such as offering critique, confirmation, or a challenge. It is also common to refer to writing through the metaphor of storytelling, which sometimes merges with the metaphor of research as a whole—​its overall purpose, method, and contribution—​as storytelling. Writing and research become one and the same thing. Van Maanen (1988) uses the notion of “tales of the field” to point to variations in ethnographic writing. He uses the term to highlight the “representational qualities of all fieldwork writing. It is a term meant to draw attention to the inherent story-​like characters of fieldwork accounts” (8). Van Maanen identifies three major tales: realist tales, where

262    MATS ALVESSON, YIANNIS GABRIEL, JÖRGEN SANDBERG the text is narrated in a dispassionate, third-​person way; confessional tales, which emphasize the fieldworker’s personal authorship and point of view; and impressionist tales, where the author is inspired by “the impressionists’ self-​conscious and, for their time, innovative use of their materials—​color, form, light, stroke, hatching, overlay, frame—​ that provides the associative link to fieldwork writing” (101). Storytelling suggests inspiration from literature and a clear presence of the author as ideals or norms for writing texts, somewhat different from just reporting findings.

Concluding Remarks In this chapter we have tried to show how one can metaphorize central elements of the research process for imagining a more varied set of options for thinking about and doing research. In most cases, it may be relevant to primarily consider and confront dominating metaphors with alternative ones, or for the person who is much into counter-​metaphors to contrast these with dominating metaphors or other counter-​ metaphors. Our issue is not with metaphors being good or bad per se, but with the tendency of researchers to freeze their understanding of themselves and their research processes and to let favorite or taken-​for-​granted metaphors control their work. Here, it is important to see taken-​for-​granted metaphors not only as dominant on a broader scale or in absolute terms—​dominating research as a whole—​but also dominant within specific research fields or groupings. Below we outline some general guidelines for how metaphors can be productively used in research. The guidelines are not to be read as a set of formulas or recipes, but as potentially helpful ideas for generating imaginative and impactful research studies. 1. Identify the current, taken-​for-​granted metaphors in use. This means stepping back and thinking through the varieties of meanings of what the researcher and their research tribe are doing in terms of their basic understandings of the research process. 2. Identify a set of counter-​metaphors as possible alternatives to the taken-​for-​ granted ones. This often involves going outside one’s own subfield and identifying other possible metaphors. 3. Identify useful metaphors for the specific research project. Far from all the metaphors that are identified are relevant and valuable for specific people in their specific projects. In conclusion, being aware of metaphors enables researchers to consider a range of different options for doing research, being more imaginative and thus capable of choosing paths that are likely to lead to more original and interesting results and texts.

USING METAPHORS CRITICALLY AND REFLEXIVELY    263

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chapter 16

using m etaph ors i n researc h Visual Metaphors in Organizations hermann mitterhofer and silvia jordan

Introduction Just as in everyday life, organizational actors in contemporary organizations continuously take part in visual communication. They design and consume logos, corporate reports, newsletters, and advertisements featuring pictures, graphs, and diagrams, they participate in social media debates using photographs, films, and memes, and they use visual media such as PowerPoint slides in order to communicate strategies and coordinate activities within and across organizational units. Visual forms of communication are thus omnipresent in organizational life and arguably shape organizational practices in specific ways (Bell and Davison 2013; Meyer et al. 2013; Jancsary et al. 2018). While organization studies tend to analyze metaphors primarily in the context of verbal language, nonverbal forms of expression such as static images, film, gestures and body language, sound and music, sculptures and architectural design can evoke a comparison in the form of a metaphor, a link between a nonliterally used source domain and the literal target domain, as much as verbal communication (Cornelissen et al. 2008). Drawing primarily on Lakoff and Johnson’s conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Lakoff 1993), and the proposition that the primary locus of metaphor is not language, but “in the way we conceptualize one mental domain in terms of another” (Lakoff 1993: 203), linguistic, social, and cultural studies on metaphors increasingly focus on nonverbal, and in particular visual, modalities of expression (e.g., Steen 2018). The growing attention to visual metaphors can be seen as part of a wider development in a variety of disciplines, indicating a shift from the “linguistic turn” (Rorty 1979) to the “pictorial turn” (Mitchell 1994; Kress and van Leeuwen 1996). Scholars associated with the “pictorial turn” recognize the explosion in the prevalence of the visual in

266    HERMANN MITTERHOFER AND SILVIA JORDAN contemporary society and develop methodologies that acknowledge not only the ever-​ increasing quantity, but also the particular quality, of visual language. They analyze the performativity of visual modes of expression: that is, how visuals create, maintain, and defend particular forms of practice, and the particular forms of knowledge that underpin them (Meyer et al. 2013). In their review of visual management studies, Bell and Davison (2013) argue that while the visual has been well-established in social sciences such as anthropology (e.g., Ruby 2006) and in sociology (e.g., Emmison and Smith 2000), the field of management and organization studies has been slow to respond to the “visual turn.” Accordingly, thus far, with the exception of marketing research only a relatively small body of management and organization studies focuses on visual metaphors. In this chapter, we discuss different types of research questions, conceptual tools, and methods for analyzing visual metaphors in organizations. We specifically focus on visual metaphors in the context of everyday organizational life. We propose that besides advertisements, visual metaphor analysis can be fruitfully applied to a range of other visual practices in organizations, where certain visual metaphors might be less openly “disturbing” than in creative artwork and advertisements, and rather have come to be taken for granted and normalized. Especially when organizational actors are not puzzled by visual metaphors, but enact them as natural and normal, research might “denaturalize” their use and investigate the ways in which certain visual practices translate particular discourses and come to shape shared ways of thinking and acting in organizational contexts. In this regard, we illustrate two different types of analysis of visual metaphors in organizations, focusing either on the interdiscursive relations of visual metaphors per se (independent of their use in a specific context) or on the production and consumption of visual metaphors in specific organizational contexts, and we outline directions for further research.

Defining Visual Metaphors Similar to linguistic metaphors, visual metaphors are defined in different ways depend­ ent on the theoretical and methodological approach chosen (Rimmele 2020: 67). For instance, approaches that draw on Lakoff and Johnson’s cognitive metaphor theory argue that the cognitive understanding of one thing in terms of another (e.g., “argument is war”) can be instantiated in linguistic expressions as well as other modalities, such as visual images, gestures, or three-​dimensional objects (e.g., Forceville 2002, 2003; Sonesson 2003; Jacobs and Heracleous 2006). Sonesson (2003) argues that an image is metaphorical if it represents an object in terms of a type of objects to which it does not belong. A denim advertisement, for instance, depicts a pair of jeans with an umbilical cord that is being cut by a nurse, thus representing the pair of trousers as a “newborn baby,” and thus in terms of a living being (Schilperoord 2018: 22). Similarly, Forceville (2003) argues that a visual metaphor is characterized by some sort of (intended) anomaly. Furthermore, Forceville distinguishes monomodal from multimodal

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    267 metaphors, where the latter draw on different modalities (e.g., text, image, sound) in the source domain versus the target domain. The first systematic attempts to develop a theory of visual metaphors—​that is, conceptual tools that explicitly focus on figurative modes of expression that are conceived as metaphorical—​can be found in art studies (Rimmele 2020: 68). In the late 1960s, Aldrich was the first scholar who discussed in-​depth the relation between metaphoricity and the content of images, primarily in relation to the visual art of Picasso’s paintings (Aldrich 1968). Drawing on Barfield’s (1962) and Wittgenstein’s (1953/​2001) philosophies of language, Aldrich developed a theoretically informed concept of visual metaphor which he positioned between simile on the one hand and symbol on the other. While the simile explicitly formulates a comparison in the form of “A is like B,” the form of the symbol is simply “B.” The symbol B’s meaning is A, but A is almost liquidated in the symbol B so that it is not readily distinguishable from B. In contrast, the metaphor comes in the form “A is B,” where this is literally false and the resemblance is veiled and metamorphosed into a sort of identity (Barfield 1962; Aldrich 1968). Based on Wittgenstein’s theory of “aspect seeing,” Aldrich proposes the concept of “seeing as,” where seeing A as B (metaphor) differs significantly from seeing A like B (simile) (for similar conceptions to Aldrich’s “seeing as,” see Goodman 1968, and Danto 1981). Seeing A like B only involves a dyadic relation, the relation of resemblance between A and B. However, seeing A (target domain) as B (source domain) involves a triadic relation between (1) A (the thing to be seen, the subject matter), (2) B (what A is seen as, the material of the seeing-​as experience), and (3) a third factor that A and B are transformed in, an image that B embodies (the content of the seeing-​as experience). This third factor is sometimes also referred to as “Tertium comparationis.”1 Let us illustrate the theoretical debate on visual metaphors by means of Thomas Hobbes’ frontispiece of his Leviathan (Hobbes 1651/​2006), an example that leads us to the tropes of modernity as well as to the first analyses of one of the most powerful organizations since the Middle Ages: the modern state. Characterizing the interaction between cities, Thomas Hobbes prominently applies in his political theory the linguistic metaphor of homo homini lupus (“man to man is an arrant wolfe”) in order to argue for the need of a social contract and of citizens’ subjection to sovereign power. To draw on Thomas Hobbes in order to illustrate visual metaphors is relevant for two reasons. First, Max Black draws on the homo homini lupus metaphor in a central point of his seminal text Metaphor in order to illustrate his interaction theory of metaphor (Black 1954). According to Black, the meaning of a metaphor is created specifically if a person recognizes a system of associated commonplaces. Second, in Leviathan, Hobbes uses an image as the prominent starting point of his analysis, an image which precedes the text and which has been “quoted” later on probably to a greater extent than the text itself: the frontispiece (see Figure 16.1).2 1  Latin =​the third [part] of the comparison (referring to the quality that two things which are being compared have in common). 2  For the purpose of this chapter, we cannot analyze the historical context of Leviathan’s origin, the English civil war in the mid-​17th century, and its relevance for the political philosophy of modernity.

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­figure 16.1  Frontispiece of Leviathan (Hobbes 1651/​2006: title page)

The frontispiece is a highly complex visualization which comprises a variety of forms and contents in the tradition of baroque emblematics (Henkel and Schöne 1967; Agamben 2014: 11). The latter is characterized by a three-​way division into pictura (image), inscriptio (image inscription) and subscriptio (caption). While the inscriptio of this image is the quote from the Book of Job—​“Non est potestas Super Terram quae Comparetur ei. Iob. 41. 24” (There is no power on earth to be compared to him)—​the

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    269 text on the curtain acts as subscriptio (“Leviathan Or The Matter, Forme and Power of A Commonwealth Ecclesiasticall and Civil”). All theories of (visual) metaphors stress the relevance of a transfer of meaning that occurs by means of metaphors. What kinds of meanings are transferred in the frontispiece? And can we identify a Tertium comparationis à la Aldrich in this case? Let us first look at the figurative elements in the lower part of the frontispiece, on the left and on the right of the “curtain.” We can see at least four dichotomously placed symbols (“B” according to Aldrich) which visualize secular and clerical power: (1) castle and church as sites/​locations of power, (2) crown and miter (a tall headdress worn by bishops and senior abbots as a symbol of office) as insignia of power, and cannon and the lightning of excommunication as power of action, (3) weapons and tools of logic (of syllogisms) as instruments of power, and (4) two images which combine in a complex way most of the symbolism depicted above: the scenes of a battlefield and a Council. These latter two representations can be regarded as allegories, as they represent a narrative extension of other symbols and as they depict a complex and abstract issue by means of an image which shows a specific and concrete scene. The upper part of the image is taken up by the dominant figure, a giant wearing a crown, and holding in his hands insignia of secular and clerical power: a sword and a bishop’s crook, thus mimicking the dichotomous representations in the lower part of the image. The sovereign’s body consists of numerous bodies which turn their backs on the observer. Two visual anomalies characterize this part of the frontispiece (Agamben 2014: 19). An influential hypothesis in the scholarly debate on visual metaphors is that some sort of anomalousness is a necessary feature of a visual metaphor. There should be something odd present in an image, a departure from viewers’ expectations and their understanding of reality to incite metaphorical interpretation (e.g., Burke 1954; Forceville 1996; Schilperoord 2018). Following this line of argument, we can say that the frontispiece leaves the realms of symbolism and allegory and becomes metaphorical when we regard it as an ambiguous, anomalous, and incongruent image. The sovereign is situated outside of the landscape, in the void. His “location” does not coincide with the site of his power, the city. The city offers a further irritation as it is almost deserted. Taking a closer look, we can recognize an element which explains the function of the few characters in the city: they are medieval plague physicians, as they wear beak-​like face masks as protection from infection. There are thus two visual elements which serve a metaphorical function. The sovereign being positioned outside of the landscape and the plague physicians refer to a level of meaning which is present in the image, but which can only be understood by means of a transfer of meaning. That is, we can identify a system of interrelated commonplaces/​ topoi (Black 1954) which contain a common level of meaning in terms of “seeing-​as” (Aldrich 1968). Prominent topoi in the frontispiece are “the sovereign as protector” and “the citizens being subordinated and obedient to the sovereign.” These topoi are interrelated in order to conceive of the political in a specific way (the image invites us to see the political as a strong body), arguing for the necessity of a strong state. These topoi can be interpreted in a number of different ways, depending on the historical context

270    HERMANN MITTERHOFER AND SILVIA JORDAN and the particular perspective that an observer takes when interpreting the image. For instance, focusing on the sovereign, the observer might see specific aspects of protection and obedience; focusing on the “citizens” and the plague physicians, the observer might think of issues of inclusion and exclusion, the interrelation between an epidemic and sovereignty along with the question of governing during a “state of exception” (Schmitt 1922/​1996; Agamben 2014). Following Aldrich, the figure of the sovereign can be seen as a visual metaphor of the state monopoly of the use of force, and the empty city as state of exception, the hallmark of sovereignty.3 Following from the discussion above, we can speak of a visual metaphor if a visual element can be read as a commonplace/​topos, whose meaning, however, is not fixed, but can change over time and dependent on the context of an image’s (re)construction and consumption. Visual metaphors are thus characterized not only by a potential irritation, but also by interpretive flexibility so that their meaning remains to a certain extent open and adaptable, while the “original” element A is still present in B (in terms of seeing A as B). Consider in this regard the example of John Heartfield’s fist against fascism published in 1934 (Figure 16.2). Here Heartfield (1934) visually refers to Hobbes’ frontispiece by means of a number of fists that are clenched into one. Just like Hobbes’ image of the sovereign, the political is depicted as an organic body that contains multiple bodies (à la Aldrich 1968: seeing the political as an organic body). However, instead of arguing for the need of a strong state (the metaphorical “third” à la Aldrich), Heartfield’s image suggests an alternative tertium comparationis, the need of resistance (in this case, toward fascism). While the citizens in Leviathan form part of the sovereign’s rigid armor, Heartfield metaphorically stages the clenched fist as response to the (wrongful) sovereignty of the state. That is, the visual metaphors are not primarily characterized by simply transferring specific linguistic metaphors in a visual form, as this would neglect significant cognitive processes in the transfer of meaning (Rimmele 2020: 71). To visualize “man as a wolf,” for instance, would simply translate the linguistic metaphor in a visual form, but it would not transfer a wider set of meanings as is done by the complex visualization of the Leviathan frontispiece. Rather, visual metaphors function in such a way that an element of one field of experience/​imagination is projected to a considerably different one (i.e., the natural body versus the political). This transfer of meaning and projection allows for a certain degree of interpretive flexibility, historical displacement, and complexity (polysemy), which also allows visual metaphors to cross-​reference each other and build a system of interrelated visual imaginations (Mitterhofer 2016).

3 “Souverän

ist, wer über den Ausnahmezustand entscheidet” (Schmitt 1922/​1996: 13) (in English: “Sovereign is he [sic] who decides on the exception”).

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    271

­figure 16.2 John Heartfield’s “All fists clenched into one” (John Heartfield, AIZ, Workers’ Illustrated Magazine, 1929–​34, © The Heartfield Community of Heirs/​Bildrecht, Vienna 2022)

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Visual Metaphors in Organization Research Visual metaphor studies have thus far focused primarily on the analysis of static visuals in the genre context of advertisements, cartoons, and artwork (Steen 2018). Due to this genre background, the analyzed images are typically regarded as innovative and they are deliberately designed to disturb commonly shared viewing habits in order to perform communicative functions like attracting attention, persuading, explaining, or instructing (Schilperoord 2018). The analytical focus on creative visuals also prevails in management and organization research, where visual metaphor analyses concern to a large extent the investigation of advertisements in marketing research (e.g., Phillips and McQuarrie 2004; Jeong 2008; van Mulken et al. 2014; Mohanty and Ratneshwar 2015; Chang et al. 2018). Experimental marketing studies on visual metaphors typically analyze the persuasive effect of particular design choices of advertisements. Consequently, these studies focus on the ways in which viewers respond to visual metaphors. They often argue that visual metaphors tend to be more implicit than verbal metaphors (e.g., Phillips 2000) and that they are more persuasive as they require a greater degree of mental participation, inviting viewers to spend more time thinking about the argument and to process the message actively (e.g., Bulmer and Buchanan-​Oliver 2004). Building on this line of argument, Jeong (2008), for instance, finds that visual metaphors without verbal anchoring/​explanation are more persuasive (i.e., lead to stronger product belief and purchase intention, among other things) than those with verbal explanations. Besides experimental studies, some marketing scholars also engage more critically with the conscious or unconscious ways in which advertisements use visual metaphors. Drawing on theories such as critical semiotics (Barthes 1972), some studies seek to uncover the arrangement of an image and the manipulation of conventional codes privileging a certain “reading” of the image, thus critically interpreting visual signs in relation to broader structures of cultural meaning (Bell and Davison 2013). For instance, Buchanan-​Oliver et al. (2010) discuss how metaphorical associations between the body and the machine are used in the marketing of high-​tech products as a visual rhetorical strategy to anthropomorphize technology, and how these images are informed by broader societal discourses of liminality and “posthumanism.” Outside the realm of marketing, the relatively scarce management and organization studies of visual metaphors differ primarily (1) with regard to the investigated visual modality (e.g., photographs, charts, and diagrams, or sculpted artifacts), (2) with regard to how and why visual metaphors are produced (using researcher-​generated or researcher-​ incited visual objects for the purposes of research and intervention versus analyzing preexisting visual material created by organizational actors), and (3) with regard to the analytical focus (analyzing the discursive relations and potential meanings of particular visual objects “per se” versus analyzing practices of producing and consuming visual objects in particular contexts) (for a similar classification with regard to the study of

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    273 metaphors in organizations more generally, see Cornelissen et al. 2008, and with regard to visual management studies, see Bell and Davison 2013): 1. The majority of studies investigate visual metaphors in terms of the modality of static two-​dimensional visuals such as photographs, charts, and diagrams (e.g., Bell 2012; Jordan et al. 2013, 2018). An exception is the study of Jacobs and Heracleous (2006) who analyze the use of “embodied metaphors” in organizational development. During a strategic workshop, managers were invited to use toy construction materials in order to build models of what a recently developed strategic concept meant to them. 2. Some studies draw on visual metaphors as research devices either by encouraging organizational actors to produce and discuss visual metaphors in the course of organizational development (OD) (e.g., Jacobs and Heracleous 2006; Andriessen et al. 2009) or by asking organizational actors to produce visual metaphors and using this material as data in the research process (e.g., Oswick and Montgomery 1999; Schachtner 2002; Warren 2002). In the context of OD, Jacobs and Heracleous (2006) argue that the sculpted artifacts that managers of a bank constructed about the recently developed strategic concept “I know my banker” invited them to surface their pre-​reflexive knowledge, assumptions, and experience. The physical differences of “embodied metaphors” of different actors and groups made politically contentious conceptual differences tangible and discussable. On the other hand, using visual metaphors as additional data to more traditional data such as interview material has been argued to provide a better access to organizational actors’ experiences that are difficult to describe by words alone. In this regard, for instance, Warren (2002) argues in the context of organizational ethnography that photographs taken by organizational actors of their work environment helped them to express largely ineffable aesthetic experiences. Photographic images do not, of course, automatically constitute visual metaphors, but they can turn into visual metaphors under certain conditions. For instance, if a photograph of an office’s grey carpet is used to express the dull working experience, the image can be regarded as metaphoric. Studies that draw on visual metaphors as data typically combine visual and verbal data: for example, by inviting informants to talk about visuals in interviews. 3. Management and organization studies also differ from each other with regard to the lens used when analyzing particular visual metaphors. Some studies investigate potential metaphoric meanings and effects of visual objects by exploring discursive relations of the visual object per se: that is, relatively independent of its particular use and consumption in a specific (organizational) context (e.g., Davison 2004; Mitterhofer and Jordan 2016; Jordan et al. 2018). On the other hand, analyses can focus on the production and consumption of visual metaphors in a specific organizational context (e.g., Jordan and Mitterhofer 2010; Bell 2012; Jordan et al. 2013).

274    HERMANN MITTERHOFER AND SILVIA JORDAN As the chosen analytical focus is strongly interrelated with the use of particular theories and methodologies, we primarily draw on the third classification (analyzing visual metaphors in their wider discursive context versus analyzing the use of visual metaphors in particular organizational contexts) in the following section, where we discuss in more detail how the study of visual artifacts in organizations may proceed. We focus here deliberately on examples of visual metaphors from organizational practices outside the realm of advertising: that is, the more mundane, and apparently less creative and innovative, visual objects that feature visual metaphors that have often come to be taken-​for-​granted and naturalized in everyday organizational life. Visual metaphor analysis then may attempt to denaturalize common ways of producing and consuming mundane visual objects in organizations, and explore the different ways in which visuals perform rather than neutrally represent organizational processes.

Denaturalizing Visual Metaphors in Organizations: Discursive Relations and Specific Organizational Enactments In this section, we describe and illustrate two analytical approaches that both seek to critically explore the ways in which visual metaphors may come to construct and shape shared ways of thinking and acting in organizational contexts. Both analytical approaches stress that visual metaphors are not simply visual representations of existing verbal metaphors. At the same time, both approaches depend heavily on not only visual, but also verbal modalities of expression. First, the analysis itself proceeds in a verbal mode. Second, interrelations between visual and verbal representations form a major object of study in both approaches.

Analyzing Visual Metaphors in Their Wider Discursive Context The study of visual metaphors in organizations can focus on identifying metaphors that are used across organizational contexts, and on abstracting cognitive meanings and repertoires of metaphors that are shared across such contexts. The research objects could be typical visual metaphors that are used, for example, in external representations of organizations (e.g., organization charts, financial reports, or corporate sustainability reports), in consulting companies’ material, in specific managerial technologies of strategic management or risk management, or in office design. Taking a broader analytical lens, the methodology involves the identification of prominent visual metaphors and of

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    275 the genre context in which they are used (e.g., reports, logos, presentations in meetings, management guidelines and standards, etc.). The prominence and relevance of particular visual metaphors can be analyzed by quantifying their use across specific contexts (e.g., their frequent appearance and use in social media) and/​or by identifying visual metaphors that are promoted by particularly powerful actors such as the International Organization for Standardization (ISO) or prominent, internationally operating consulting companies. Particular visual metaphors can then be analyzed in more depth, according to their modality, principle structure and composition (e.g., with regard to the use of colors) and text–​image relations. The analysis of the visual metaphor’s content (tertium comparationis) can be based on the detailed description of the visual object, including its date, location, and context of origin, the identification of its sources in literature and art history, and thus the visual object’s references, including references between visual objects (Mitchell 1994). Finally, the analysis proceeds to the interpretation of how the visual metaphor transfers meanings (the latent content “underneath” the manifest level of what is visible) and what this may mean for the shared ways in which specific organizational issues (e.g., economic progress, organizational “performance,” leadership, strategic management, risk management, etc.) are constructed. Here, taking a critical lens, the analysis can suggest that these ways of seeing and acting are not “natural” and “could be otherwise,” and consequently the analysis may denaturalize common ways of conceiving of organizations and their management. This analytical lens thus mainly draws on analytical concepts and methods of hermeneutics and discourse analysis. We will now illustrate this approach by means of a short analysis of organization charts and two exemplary studies, the first of which analyzes the use of images in financial statements (Davison 2004), and the second of which investigates a prominent risk representation technology (Jordan et al. 2018). Organization charts are nowadays omnipresent and they are to a large extent taken-​ for-​granted visualizations of organizations, depicting in a simplified way organizational structures, responsibilities, and accountabilities. While contemporary organization charts typically visualize organizational hierarchies by placing the board of directors and top management at the “top” of the diagram (for an example, see Figure 16.3, on the right), earlier organization charts had a somewhat different outlook. The first reported organization chart was developed by cartographer Daniel Craig McCallum in 1855 in the context of the expansion of the US railroad network for Erie Railroad (see Figure 16.3, on the left). McCallum’s organization chart for Erie Railroad is characterized by straight lines which evoke the image of railroad tracks, combined with squiggly lines that resemble branches of bushes or trees. The organizational center is not positioned at the top of the image, but at the bottom, just like a flower’s stigma and calyx. This visualization thus metaphorically represents the organization as a combination of mechanical-​technical elements and biological organisms. The visual references to technology as well as organisms also characterize contemporary organization charts (as in Figure 16.3, on the right). The tree metaphor is still visible. However, the tree is positioned upside down,

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Board of Directors CEO General Department

Finance

Marketing

Administration

Tax

Strategy Support

Human Resources

Management Accounting

Business Development

Data Management

Risk Management

­figure 16.3  Left: an early organization chart—​Daniel Craig McCallum’s organization chart for Erie Railroad in 1855; right: a template of a contemporary organization chart (right, authors’ own illustration)

with the trunk at the top, replacing the rhizomatic structure of early organization charts. The tree metaphor itself has a long history. The book of Genesis mentions the “tree of life,” which the Jewish tradition refers to as the Sephiroth tree of life. Since antiquity, the tree has served as an epistemological classification system, and not least Darwin used the tree of life as a model for his theory of evolution (Hellström 2012). Since antiquity, and specifically since the Scholastic era in medieval times, and later in baroque emblematics, the tree metaphor has represented an orderly world—​be it as natural order willed by God or as truth generated by scholarly activities (tree of knowledge). By visually enacting the tree metaphor, organization charts thus connote a “natural order” that is organically grown. In addition, by moving the tree upside down, contemporary organization charts visually refer to common representations of family trees, and thus to the natural succession of generations. In this way, the organization chart condenses a diachronic perspective (succession of generations, organic growth, and knowledge production) to a synchronic image: “natural” hierarchical organization structures. In his Mythologies, Barthes (1972) argues that such kinds of representation are ideological in

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    277 that they naturalize social processes and thus hamper the critical discussion and imagination of alternative perspectives. Let us now turn to two exemplary studies which investigate visual metaphors in their wider discursive context. The first study by Davison (2004) highlights that financial statements contain not only numbers and text, but also a variety of visual templates in which numbers and text are arranged as well as photographs and images. Davison (2004) provides an example of a critical inquiry of common and largely taken-​for-​ granted visual practices in financial reporting, as she investigates how images in corporate annual reports recall the religious symbolism of ascension. Davison identifies a number of images used in annual reports of diverse companies which depict a variety of “stairways to heaven.” For instance, British Telecommunications’ annual report of 2001 prominently features on the front cover a mass gathering of people, where the crowd is divided by an infinite staircase rising into the clouds and toward a triumphal arch (Figure 16.4). This image does not depict the company or any of its organizational processes directly, but rather draws upon the stairways to heaven as a source domain in order to understand the target domain of the company, its “performance,” and its “prospects.” Furthermore, as in Leviathan’s frontispiece, an organization is depicted by means of human bodies, in this case positioned on an infinite staircase. The stairways to heaven allude to the notion of ascent to heaven bringing salvation, to the effort of ascent, and the belief that virtue, privation, and industry will be rewarded. Davison argues that using such images in annual reports appeals to the collective unconscious of its mass readership by deploying a recognizable symbol of possibly difficult passage and religious ascent which is comprehensible across different cultures. Extending Davison’s analysis, we might say that such imagery alludes to potentially infinitive “progress” and is discursively linked to economic concepts and visualizations of continuous growth (e.g., by means of growth curves). It is therefore embedded in a wider system of interrelated myths and symbols by means of which we have come to know the economy and the firm. The repeated use of such symbols in annual reports and elsewhere thus draws upon and reinforces specific idea(l)s of organizational “performance,” while undermining alternative ones. As a second exemplary study, we draw on our own work on risk matrices (Jordan et al. 2018). In this study, we analyzed how this particular technology of risk representation and management has come to be so widely used across different disciplines and application contexts. Risk matrices depict a variety of risks on a Cartesian coordinate system along the dimensions of probability and impact, and rank the mapped risks into more or less critical risks, typically using traffic light colors (see Figure 16.5 for an example). In our analysis, we argued that the widespread appeal of risk matrices is fundamentally constituted through their semantic connotations by means of which complex and potentially not-​well-​understood processes come to appear simple, imaginable, and “manageable” (Jordan et al. 2018). The metaphoric traffic light colors play an important role in this regard. Traffic lights have been used in traffic regulation since the 1920s. By using traffic lights in risk matrices, the abstract concept of organizational risk management is

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­figure 16.4 Front cover of a BT shareholder communication, September 2001 (Davison 2004: 484)

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    279 Very likely

Probability

Likely Less Likely Unlikely Very unlikelt Negligible

Minor

Moderate Impact

Major

Huge

­figure 16.5  “Traffic light” risk matrix format (authors’ own illustration)

“seen as” a relatively straightforward path regulated by stop and go signals. The taken-​ for-​granted use of “traffic light” risk matrices has a number of consequences for the ways in which organizational risk management processes are conceived of (tertium comparationis). Different kinds of risks (e.g., environmental versus financial) appear to be comparable and commensurable as the traffic lights integrate the two dimensions of the risk matrix (impact and probability) into a ranking system by setting thresholds as to which probability–​impact combinations are more or less “normal” or “tolerable” (green, amber, or red). At the same time, the risks ranked as either green, amber, or red risks appear to be clearly distinguishable and unrelated among each other. Furthermore, traffic lights as semantic-​symbolic (rather than mathematical-​statistical) markers of thresholds between more or less critical or “acceptable” risks suggest that the borders of criticality and normality can be flexibly adjusted. As such, this and similar kinds of managerial technologies (re)create and solidify ideals of flexible entrepreneurial self-​ management, even in areas where potentially a wide array of stakeholders outside the confines of individual organizations is concerned (e.g., environmental pollution or health and safety issues).

Analyzing the Production and Consumption of Visual Metaphors in Specific Contexts As Cornelissen et al. (2008) note with regard to metaphors more generally, taking informed interpretations about the specific uses of a particular metaphor in situ may range beyond cognitive uses (understanding) to sociological uses such as impression management, normative judgments, and legitimacy. This approach acknowledges that the uses and meanings of a specific visual metaphor may differ across speakers and

280    HERMANN MITTERHOFER AND SILVIA JORDAN contexts, therefore one needs to consider the locally specific reasons for the choice and appropriation of one metaphor over another and the ways in which metaphors may link together. The analysis may, for instance, focus on how visual metaphors are actively employed to “manage” interests in social interaction and how specific visual metaphors are recreated and reinterpreted by different actor groups. In order to analyze the production and consumption of visual metaphors in specific contexts, discourse analytical concepts and methods need to be combined with ethnographic methodologies or in-​ depth interview studies which attend to the ways in which different actors make sense of specific visual metaphors and how they employ them in their discursive strategies and practices. We will again illustrate this approach by means of two exemplary studies. The first investigates the organizational enactment of risk matrices (Jordan et al. 2013) and the second analyzes visual representations of organizational death and their role in workers’ resistance (Bell 2012). In the course of our own work on risk matrices, we not only analyzed the (inter) discursive relations in which risk matrix visualizations per se are implicated, but also investigated how this tool is constructed and applied in the particular context of inter-​ organizational project management in the petroleum industry (Jordan et al. 2013). We analyzed how the particular graphical elements of risk matrices interrelate with the ways in which these matrices were constructed and interpreted in the course of a technical upgrading project. We identified some problematic uses of risk matrices related to the traffic light metaphor, in the sense that their use inhibited (rather than increased) attention to early warning signals and was seen by some actors as impeding attention to relevant risks: risk matrices were constructed by organizational actors in such a way that they featured abstract risk objects, were oriented toward short-​term objectives (focused on passing decision gates), and converged over plants and organizations (ignoring plant-​ or organization-​specific risks) in an effort to associate and identify with the “project” and its progress over time. While not explicitly analyzing “metaphors,” Bell’s (2012) study of the Jaguar motor manufacturing company and the closure of the organization’s last vehicle production facility in the UK provides a nice example of how the creation and the consumption of visual metaphors in specific contexts may also involve a recreation of company images by actors who seek to resist managerial action and managerial efforts of sensegiving. Bell (2012) explores the interpretive processes involved in the closure of the production facility and the way that employees and the local community responded to managerial attempts to shape meaning in relation to it. Images of a murderous death were used to construct a visual narrative (as a counter-​narrative to the managerial one) that expressed the loss of a fundamental structure of meaning. For an example see Figure 16.6, which shows the logo of the workforce and union’s campaign of action that sought to get Ford to reverse its decision to close the production site. The campaign logo uses the Jaguar brand logo and reverses its typical connotation of the strong and healthy Jaguar wildcat by illustrating how Ford (depicted as a malicious American man, “Uncle Sam”) kills the wildcat by ripping the heart out of the crying animal. In both studies described above, the authors draw on in-​depth ethnographic

USING METAPHORS IN RESEARCH    281

­figure 16.6  Logo of the Transport and General Workers’ Union’s protest campaign by the artist Peter Millen (Bell 2012: 10)

and interview data in order to follow the ways in which visual metaphors were (re) created, interpreted, and employed by different actors.

Conclusion In this chapter, we have highlighted important characteristics of visual metaphors, we have discussed the relevance of visual metaphors in organizations, and we have presented different ways of approaching the study of visual metaphors in organizations. We argued that visual metaphors do not simply visually represent or “translate” linguistic metaphors. Visual metaphors occur if a visual element can be read as a commonplace/​topos, whose meaning, however, is not fixed, but can change over time and dependent on the context of an image’s (re)construction and consumption. Visual metaphors are thus characterized not only by a potential irritation, but also by interpretive flexibility so that their meaning remains to a certain extent open and adaptable. We argued that the analysis of visual metaphors in organizations may focus not only on

282    HERMANN MITTERHOFER AND SILVIA JORDAN visual metaphors that are seen as innovative and creative (such as in advertising), but also on visual metaphors that have become to a certain extent taken for granted and seen as “natural,” such as the use of tree metaphors in organization charts and “decision trees,” the use of traffic lights in technologies of performance and risk management, or allusions to the ideal of “infinitive progress” as represented in growth curves and “stairways to heaven.” Visual metaphor analysis may then seek to denaturalize common ways of seeing, thinking, and acting, and suggest that “it could be otherwise.” These kinds of critical analyses of visual metaphors in organizations are currently rather scarce. Given the ever-​rising relevance of visual communication in organizations, the potential for further research in this area is significant. Further research may focus not only on static visuals, but also on other modalities such as interactive web pages and the use of “memes” in the context of “nethnographies” or “webnographies” (Purli 2007; Rouleau et al. 2014) as well as lived media: that is, media that we live and work in, such as dress and architecture (Bell and Davison 2013). In regard to modalities, scholars could focus more thoroughly on the ways in which different modalities interact (e.g., on the interplay between text and images). Besides the analysis of commonly used and taken-​for-​granted visual metaphors in the context of, for example, strategic management and consulting, it could be also worthwhile to perform a critical inquiry into the visual practices of management education/​textbooks and organization research itself. Finally, scholarly attention may not only focus on critical analysis of dominant visual metaphors, but also want to engage in the creation of alternative visual metaphors so as to offer a forum for alternative ways of seeing organizations and their management.

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chapter 17

metaphor in g e st u re in an organi z at i ona l c ont e xt alan cienki

Introduction Imagine a business meeting in a boardroom in which one of the people sitting around the table is trying to make a point about the situation in the company up to now, as compared to how things could be in the future. The speaker’s hands are on the table and are open and facing each other, as if she were holding a small object between them. She moves her hands to a space to her left when talking about the past, and then to the right when talking about the future, and does this several times. A pattern is set up, a metaphor in the physical space in front of her, where the past is to her left and the future is to her right. We cannot know for sure whether the speaker planned to do this or not; it could be that it was a spontaneous act, in which this imagery was formative for the speaker, helping her think through and reason about the issues she was talking about. The imagery might also potentially have been seen by those sitting around the table. Consciously or not, some of them might understand her argument better because they have seen the distinction spatialized in front of her. Some of them may even employ this imagery themselves in following up on her point, either making those left-​and-​right gestures themselves, or pointing to the left and right spaces she used in order to refer to the ideas she discussed when making those gestures. This kind of scenario plays out countless times in organizational settings every day. It demonstrates how certain metaphors (here: past is to the left and future is to the right, and more generally, time is space) can take on visual form in our gestures with speech. Unlike the normatively codified forms of expression in the words of the language we speak or write, speakers’ gestures move back and forth from being something we are aware of doing to something that constitutes unwitting behavior. Spatialization

METAPHOR IN GESTURE    287 of metaphor in gesture can make us more aware of the imagery involved, because gesture makes it available visually. In that regard, gesture allows us to express metaphor in multiple modalities, visibly (in movement and forms) as well as audibly (in words). In turn, this imagery may be seen, even if only in peripheral vision, by our audience, which could be stakeholders of various types, clients, patients, students, etc. The imagery involved may be employed by them consciously or unconsciously, and play a role in their reasoning about the ideas expressed in the talk accompanying the gestures. While speakers may occasionally use gesture without accompanying speech, this is not the major means of face-​to-​face communication for people who can hear each other. In that regard, any metaphor used in gesture only and not in speech would require sufficient background knowledge from the interlocutors involved to be able to make sense of the metaphor. Witness the metaphors for processes being characterized in gesture as movements through space (noted in Cienki 1998), even when in speech no spatial metaphors have been used. Interestingly, though, the imagery that materializes in gesture is not as explicit or detailed as what is possible in a drawing. It is also not as explicitly intentional in its production as compared to drawing abstract ideas in visual form on paper or on a computer screen. For example, following up on the example above, one could pursue the argument that was presented by drawing two circles, one to the left and one to the right, and write words for ideas in each one, representing the past and the potential future. This is a much more explicitly intentional exercise than the spontaneous gesturing the original speaker produced when explaining her idea. This small thought experiment raises questions about what metaphor in gesture is, how one can study it, and what it can reveal when studied in organizational contexts.

What Is Metaphor in Gesture? How Is “Metaphor” Being Understood Here? Here we are following the basic tenets of conceptual metaphor theory (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999), but with some qualifications. We adhere to the basic view of metaphorical expressions (verbal, gestural, or other) as potentially expressing our experience and understanding of one conceptual domain in terms of another (see Croft 1993 on factors relevant for distinguishing different domains), but with the qualification that the concepts in question can function in various ways. The relevant concepts could be ones that are associated via systematic metaphors (Cameron and Maslen 2010) in the culture that the speaker is not even conscious of, as in the way speakers of English and many other languages conventionally frame communication itself as a passing of ideas in texts as containers from one person to another (the conduit metaphor explicated in Reddy 1979/​1993). Alternately, the concepts could be ones that the speaker is actively

288   ALAN CIENKI thinking with in the moment; in this case, a pairing of the concepts could be more conventional in the given culture, as with the time as space example above, or it could be based on idiosyncratic, creative ways of thinking that the speaker may even only use once and never again—​as in Kyratzis’ (1997) example of someone comparing being in a monogamous relationship to always buying only one brand of biscuit (or cookie in American English), and therefore being “monobiscuitous.”

How Is “Gesture” Being Understood Here? The study of metaphor in gesture should begin with the issue of what we mean by “gesture.” While the broad definition of gesture can be taken as encompassing visible, distinct, effortful movement of part of the body (drawing upon Kendon 2004), we will focus here (as in most research on metaphor in gesture) on gestures of the hands and forearms (manual gesture). The reason for this has to do with the expressive capabilities of the hands, given the range of forms and movements they can produce (see Streeck 2009: chap. 3), versus those of other body parts; the head, the knee, and the foot, for example, are much more limited in terms of their potential for depiction. Though gestural movements consist of a series of phases (Kendon 1980, 2004: chap. 7; McNeill 1992: chap. 3; Kita et al. 1998), we will focus on the main stroke phase of the gesture and any “hold” of the hands after the stroke. The stroke is the most effortful movement in the production of a gesture and the part in which the shape of the hands is most tense, allowing for the greatest capacity to depict some form or movement shape. As this explanation already begins to make clear, how the hands can represent and “be” different ideas is at the heart of metaphor use in gesture.

What Is Metaphor in Gesture? Gestures can depict physical objects, relations, and actions/​movements using different modes of representation, as explained below. They can also depict one entity in order to make a comparison with another idea, as when moving one’s two open, palm-​up hands up and down in alternation (one up while the other is down) like the pans of an old-​fashioned scale, while talking about weighing the consequences of a decision that one has to make. One could interpret this as a case of the metaphor of considering as weighing (Grady 1997) at work. As is usually the case, such metaphoric use of gesture functions by representing an abstract target domain in terms of the physical form of the gesture, which can be seen as depicting elements of a source domain. The physical can also be represented gesturally as if it were some other physical thing. Imagine someone talking about someone else behaving like an animal and then putting their upright fingers on either side of their head to stand for the animal’s ears. The speaker is representing the animal (a physical entity) to metaphorically stand for the person (also physical) (Fricke 2007: 180), probably with derogatory implications.

METAPHOR IN GESTURE    289 However, this use of physical representation of the physical as metaphorical appears to be extremely rare in practice, judging from the existing literature. Normally it is an abstract notion that is being metaphorically rendered in some spatial form via a gesture. Note, also, that the fact that gesture is a physical medium in space means that nonspatial referents cannot serve as source domains for metaphors in gesture—​unless they are also spatialized in some way; witness the example of speaking of a “black and white” difference by showing two different spaces with one’s hands (Cienki 1998), since the hands themselves cannot depict colors or light and darkness. While the focus in this chapter is on speakers’ gestures, it should also be mentioned that signers (those communicating in a sign language of the deaf) also sometimes gesture in combination with the signs of the given sign language they are using (S. Wilcox 2014). This can occur in different ways: for example, interspersed between conventional signs, or as an “overlay” on signs, as when the signs are made in a different signing space or with a different movement quality in order to indicate altered meanings (Okrent 2002; Liddell 2003). Sometimes these gestural elements can have metaphorical meanings (P. Wilcox 2000; Taub 2001). Metaphors used in a sign language can be different than ones used in the spoken language in the given environment, or may be similar but used more or less frequently than they are by the speakers around them. These facts add new layers onto the study of metaphor use in organizational contexts, in which some or all of the interactants are deaf users of a sign language, and they open the door to many other research questions which go beyond the scope of the present chapter.

How Metaphor in Gesture Has Been Studied in Organizational Contexts While the research area of metaphor in gesture is one in which a limited number of scholars have expertise, there are some examples of research in this domain concerning different organizational contexts. Several relevant studies concern the spoken discourse of entrepreneurs. One finding here concerns the role played by the level of experience of the entrepreneur and the kinds of metaphors the entrepreneur uses in both words and gestures. In a study concerning how a set of British entrepreneurs described their work, Cornelissen et al. (2012) found that the more experienced entrepreneur drew upon more detailed, rich visual imagery in his metaphoric use of gestures (e.g., describing the business cycle in relation to an actual journey that was traced in the air), while the less experienced one used more general categories verbally and less specific source domains as the basis for his gestures (e.g., referring to technology to be developed as “stuff ” and using gestures in which the hands appeared to hold some substance of unspecified shape). The difference in gesture styles could be attributed to the differing amounts and kinds of experience that the two kinds of entrepreneurs could draw upon as source domains for describing the abstract processes involved in their work (the target domain

290   ALAN CIENKI in the given instance). In terms of the effects of using metaphor in gesture, Clarke et al. (2019) found a positive effect of the use of what they called ideational gestures in pitches, these being representational gestures, some of which were metaphoric, expressing abstract notions (e.g., a gestural movement to indicate “cash flow”). Politicians’ discourse comes from another organizational context in which metaphor in gesture has been studied. In an analysis of debates by candidates for president in the USA, Cienki (2004) found the candidate for the Republican Party frequently repeating the same gestural pattern of a flat hand in the vertical plane, interpreted in the study as a way of showing a solid barrier, suggesting political strength and stability, versus the varied gestural forms used by the Democratic candidate, which aligned more with the speaker’s structure of presenting arguments. Cienki and Giansante (2014) found more use of metaphoric gesture by more populist candidates in debates before elections in the USA and Italy than by their less populist counterparts. Wehling (2017) discusses how politicians in interview and debate settings actually engage in gestural discourse management in addition to verbal discourse management, establishing their “floor time,” making points of substance, and even taking part in conflict management through the use of various gesture forms and the use of space that metaphorically serve to demonstrate abstract processes of assertion. Lecturers and professors also make use of metaphor in gesture in their explanatory discourse. Mittelberg’s (2008) analysis of professors explaining linguistic theories shows a rich interaction between diagrammatic imagery traditionally used in explaining the theoretical concepts and the forms taken by the speakers’ hands and arms. However, other metaphors were particular to gestural expression, such as those objectifying word categories (parts of speech) as if they were objects that could be held in the hand. Other research demonstrates how temporal and mathematical concepts are sometimes objectified in gesture by academics (Núñez 2008), including even primary school teachers (Williams 2008), with movements of the hands sometimes capturing quite abstract quantitative processes in a conflated form, bringing them to human scale (through conceptual and formal integration; see Fauconnier and Turner 2002). Metaphor in gesture has also been studied in the organizational context of healthcare. Koch et al. (2012) includes several studies which indicate the value of studying metaphor in gesture in therapeutic approaches working with bodily experience and memory. Birnbaum (2017: chap. 3) points out not only the value of observing the use of metaphoric gestures of patients engaged in talk therapy, but also of exploiting the potential of having patients in therapeutic settings take part in activities which encourage the use of gesture, which can allow them to express ideas and feelings metaphorically in ways which might be impossible or uncomfortable for them to put into words. Likewise, metaphoric use of gesture is employed in dance therapy, in which bodily movement is used “to gain access to covert psychological processes usually inaccessible by verbal means, and to act upon them” (Dascal 1992: 151). Metaphor use in gesture appears (as informed by the analyses of the co-​occurring speech) to visualize the imagery that speakers are thinking and reasoning with, as speakers embody the ideas they are presenting. In many of the cases, the use of metaphor

METAPHOR IN GESTURE    291 in gesture by the participants in the discourse analyzed appears to have been unwitting, in the sense that it was apparently not used with conscious awareness by the speakers in the moment. Even if the speaker was trained in advance to use certain kinds of imagery or forms in the gestures with their speech (as might be the case with politicians), normally these patterns become assimilated as part of the speaker’s repertoire (just as certain metaphoric ways of talking about a subject become part of a speaker’s verbal repertoire) and thus need not be employed in every instance with intentional awareness. In fact, using gesture in a conscious, intentional way when speaking is something that is difficult for even good actors to do in a seemingly natural way: it is difficult to replicate the natural timing with which gestures occur with speech. Kendon (2004), McNeill (1992), and others, as well as much empirical research, make clear that gestures in spontaneous talk are often initiated somewhat before any words are uttered with which they might be co-​expressing an idea. This fact makes experimental research on the effects of gesture use difficult if invented video stimuli are used (video of a speaker intentionally producing certain gestures). See also Clarke et al. (2021) for an excellent protocol considering some of the practical issues around researching gesture in naturalistic organizational settings, and Viney et al. (2017) for a special focus on business pitches.

A Method for Analyzing Metaphor in Gesture At the heart of the research is the question of how one can identify metaphor in gesture. Despite the growing amount of research in the area of gesture studies, surprisingly few explicit procedures for gesture analysis and the interpretation of gesture functions have been published to date (notable exceptions being works like Mittelberg 2007; Bressem 2013). There are even fewer specifically concerning metaphoric gestures. Cienki (2017), building on Cienki (2010) (which, in turn, builds on Müller 1998a), and inspired by the Metaphor Identification Procedure of the Pragglejaz Group (2007), provides one set of guidelines for metaphor identification in gesture, the so-​called MIG-​G. The following is a summary of the procedure (Cienki 2017: 137):

1. 2. 3. 4. 5.

Identify the gesture strokes. Describe the four form features of each stroke. Identify if the gesture serves any referential function. If so, Identify the mode(s) of representation. Identify the physical referent(s) depicted in the gesture(s) (the potential source domain). 6. Identify the contextual topic being referenced (the potential target domain). 7. Is the topic being identified via a resemblance in experience to the referent depicted via the gesture? If so, the gesture can be identified as metaphorically used

292   ALAN CIENKI via the mapping that the topic [this target domain] is being likened to the referent depicted [this source domain]. Step 1 concerns the most effortful movements phase of gestures, described earlier. Step 2 involves four parameters which have become customary to use in much gesture research. These derive from the methods of analyzing manually produced signs in sign languages, originally proposed in Stokoe (1960). They consist of the hand shape, the orientation of the palm of the hand (which direction it is facing), the form of the gesture movement (which itself can include subcategories for movement quality, direction, and shape of the path of movement), and the location of the gesture in the space in front of the speaker (for which a grid proposed in McNeill 1992: 378 is often used). (See Bressem 2013 for further specification of each of the details of these parameters.) Step 3 involves making a decision about the gesture in relation to the accompanying speech, and whether the gesture may involve depicting some aspect(s) of an idea or entity, relation, or process referred to verbally or understood from the context of the talk, or pointing to such an entity or a space representing the referent. The basic distinction used here is one between referential gestures (those depicting or pointing) and pragmatic or discourse-​related gestures. The latter involve, for example, making emphasis with rhythmic beat movements along with stressed syllables, or expressing one’s stance toward what is being talked about (e.g., rejection, doubting, asserting, etc.). Step 4 entails identification/​confirmation of the means by which depicting gestures (as opposed to pointing gestures) accomplish reference via representation of some features of the referent. As proposed in Müller (1998a, 1998b, 2014) (see also Kendon 2004), four modes of representation with gesture are possible. Though different names have been used in different characterizations of them, they can be summarized as: • enacting, where the way the hands move is reminiscent of how they might actually engage in a functional act, such as turning one’s gripped fist as if opening a bottle; • embodying, in which the hand stands for some other object, as when one’s two extended fingers open and close as if they were the blades of a pair of scissors cutting something; • holding/​touching, where the open palm side of the hand is shaped as if touching something, sometimes even moving as if stroking the surface of it; and • tracing, whereby the hand moves as if to draw a form, usually with the tip(s) of the finger(s). Gestures engaged in depiction may use one or more modes of representation at the same time: for example, an open hand that is slightly curved, as if touching the surface of a ball, might in some moments appear to be embodying the surface of that ball. Note that the singular form “hand” was used above, but the speaker’s two hands can also be engaged together in a mode of representation—​or even in different modes, as when a speaker enacts writing with a pen with one hand and uses the other hand to embody the piece of paper written on.

METAPHOR IN GESTURE    293 Step 5 involves interpreting the pointing or depicting in relation to the speech and/​or the context in order to determine the physical referent that is being invoked gesturally. Step 6 entails identifying the contextual topic, which may be in the concurrent speech, but may recall earlier talk or background knowledge. For this step, the more the researcher is familiar with the context in which one’s video was recorded (including the topic of the discourse), the easier it will be to identify the contextual topic with greater certainty. Step 7 brings the results of Step 5 in juxtaposition with those of Step 6. It calls for interpreting a resemblance in experience between the source domain, depicted or pointed to with the gesture, and the target domain, derived from the discourse or the context. With “resemblance in experience,” we are evoking Lakoff and Johnson’s fundamental claim that “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 5, emphasis in original). To return to the example at the beginning of the chapter: the speaker demarcated one area in the space in front of her versus another by first holding her hands around one area to the left, with the palms of her curved open hands facing each other, and then another to the right in the same way, while speaking about the situation in the company up to now as compared to how things could be in the future. In this case, the source is not a specific object, but simply the spaces demarcated with her hands as each having a boundary (as in some span of time in each case). The target was also broad: one time period versus another. In some cases, the target might entail an overlap of a time period with a situation that plays out in that time (as in this case, the situation in the company inherently covers a certain period of time). How one characterizes the metaphor mapping (as times as spaces or as different situations as different spaces) will depend on the larger context of one’s research, including what else the speakers were discussing in the context that is being analyzed, and even one’s research focus: if one is interested in any way in which the speakers’ discourse related to time, the former interpretation of the metaphor would be more pertinent, whereas for an analysis focusing on situations and processes in the context, the latter interpretation might be more revealing. A useful reference for many of the most common conceptual metaphors that have been found to be used across a variety of cultures is the appendix in Grady (1997), part of which also appears in Lakoff and Johnson (1999). Once one has analyzed metaphor in individual gestures, it may be useful to group them for further analysis according to target domains to see how they were characterized by different source domains in gesture (and in speech). For this, ELAN serves as a useful tool since the results from any file can be exported to Excel for sorting and grouping. In addition, the methods (and theoretical underpinnings of them) outlined in Cameron and Maslen (2010) provide a useful way of analyzing patterns in terms of what Cameron (2007) and Cameron et al. (2009) call systematic metaphors—​connections of collected linguistic (or also, in this case, gestural) metaphors that are semantically related to each other. Cameron (2007: 201) points out that the “coherence among systematic metaphors may be of various types, including schematic, narrative (Keller-​Cohen and Gordon 2003), or thematic.” Cameron (2007: 201) adds, “Musolff [2006], working with political

294   ALAN CIENKI discourse, has pointed out that systematic ‘framing metaphors’ often have a narrative or explanatory coherence about them. He calls these coherent and systematic sets ‘metaphor scenarios’.” In addition, Cameron (2007) notes the relation of systematic metaphors to what Schön (1979/​1993) called “generative metaphors”—​ones which frame problems from a particular perspective, and in doing so, can predetermine not only answers to policy questions, but even what the questions themselves could be about.

The Value of Studying Metaphor in Gesture in Organizational Contexts Metaphor can be studied in gesture for what it can reveal about individuals’ ways of thinking while speaking and/​or about groups’ culturally shared ways of framing topics. Regarding the former, Slobin (1987, 1996) proposed that thinking for speaking is different than thinking for performing other activities (e.g., playing a piano or driving a car), and some of its particular features can be seen in how speakers accommodate their expression of “the same” idea differently when speaking different languages; a prime example he used was the description of motion events, and whether the path or the manner of movement is normally explicitly lexicalized, which is a consequence of the grammatical structures which are used more often in the given language. McNeill and Duncan (2000) extended the notion of thinking for speaking to gesture and revealed how the same biases for highlighting the path or manner of motion carried over to how speakers of different languages gesture about motion events (see, e.g., Özyürek and Kita 1999; Özyürek et al. 2005). The degree to which this carries over to metaphoric gestures is an open question, and an important one, given the frequency with which speakers of many languages frame abstract events and situations metaphorically in terms of motion event descriptions (Gruber 1965; Jackendoff 1983)—​involving a metaphoric model which has been called the Event Structure Metaphor (Johnson 1993; Lakoff 1993). In terms of gesture, we clearly see gestures tracing paths as a way in which speakers regularly characterize processes and change (e.g., Calbris 2008; Cooperrider and Núñez 2009). In addition, while different metaphoric mappings may be traceable to metaphoric expressions being used in speech and the accompanying co-​speech gestures in the moment, the difference likely has to do with the different affordances of speech and gesture: see the example discussed earlier of a speaker talking about a “black and white” difference, yet showing a dividing line between spaces in gesture. Gestures have been argued to reflect speakers’ mental simulation of actions (Hostetter and Alibali 2008, 2019), and the prevalence of metaphoric gestures with speech suggests that ways in which speakers gesture metaphorically about abstract ideas and processes provide insights into their ways of “envisioning” them. Compare McNeill’s (1992) claims about gesture as being a window onto thought, and even the claim that “Gestures, together with language, help constitute thought” (McNeill 1992: 245, emphasis in original).

METAPHOR IN GESTURE    295 In turn, interlocutors seeing these gestures receive input (on a conscious or subconscious level) from the imagery so presented, contributing to their own mental simulation in the process of comprehending the speaker’s utterances (Marghetis and Bergen 2014). This means that even metaphors seen in others’ gestures, and not heard in speech, can provide input for listeners’ mental simulations as they construct cognitive models of what others are talking about. Witness our original example of two spaces being gestured for two different time periods; there was no verbalization about spaces or of them being to the left or right, yet those listening and watching may have ended up with a clearer understanding of the two time periods as being distinct from having seen this distinct spatialization of them in gesture. Beyond reflecting individuals’ ways of thinking in the moment, which they might be more conscious of, gestures can also reflect culturally shared patterns for ways of thinking, which speakers might not even be aware of. Calbris (1990: 196–​8) points out how gestures sometimes reflect metaphors which are deeply engrained in a culture. An example cited was how speakers of French might talk about a process of evolution while making a cyclic rotating gesture in a line outward from themselves; yet many speakers of French are probably not aware of the Latin roots of the word évolution as coming from Latin ex-​ +​ volvere, “to roll out.” The motivation for this is that the underlying metaphor that prompted the historical development of such a word in French and many other European languages is a pattern of thinking of a process (even an abstract one) as something in motion (e.g., something rolling forward), and this pattern is still alive for members of the culture. Analyzing speakers’ gestures can thus help bring to light similar or different patterns and cultural models that speakers are using in their reasoning (Cienki 1999)—​patterns which may differ between different groups who come in contact with each other in organizational settings, such as management and employees. In this way, the study of metaphor in gesture in organizational contexts provides a tool which can supplement the analysis of metaphors in verbal language.

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METAPHOR IN GESTURE    299 Stokoe, William. 1960. “Sign Language Structure: An Outline of the Visual Communication Systems of the American Deaf.” Studies in Linguistics Occasional Papers, No. 8. Buffalo, NY: Dept. of Anthropology and Linguistics, University of Buffalo. Streeck, Jürgen. 2009. Gesturecraft: The Manu-​ facture of Meaning. Amsterdam: John Benjamins. Taub, Sarah F. 2001. Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Viney, Rowena, Jean S. Clarke, and Joep P. Cornelissen. 2017. “Making Meaning from Multimodality: Embodied Communication in a Business Pitch Setting.” In The SAGE Handbook of Qualitative Business and Management Research Methods: Methods and Challenges, edited by Catherine Cassell, Ann L. Cunliffe, and Gina Grandy, 298–​312. London: SAGE. Wehling, Elisabeth. 2017. “Discourse Management Gestures.” Gesture 16 (2): 245–​75. Wilcox, Phyllis Perrin. 2000. Metaphor in American Sign Language. Washington, DC: Gallaudet University Press. Wilcox, Sherman. 2014. “Gestures in Sign-​Language.” In Body–​Language–​Communication: An International Handbook on Multimodality in Human Interaction, edited by Cornelia Müller, Alan Cienki, Ellen Fricke, Silva H. Ladewig, David McNeill, and Jana Bressem, 2170–​6. Berlin: De Gruyter Mouton. Williams, Robert F. 2008. “Gesture as a Conceptual Mapping Tool.” In Metaphor and Gesture, edited by Alan Cienki and Cornelia Müller, 55–​92. Amsterdam: John Benjamins.

chapter 18

e nsu ring va l i di t y a nd rel iabilit y in e mpi ri c a l stu dies on meta ph or i n organiz at i ons elena bruni and claudio biscaro

Introduction For decades, metaphor has been a topic of analysis in disciplines other than organization studies, from cognitive linguistics (e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980) and cognitive science (e.g., Gentner 1983) to philosophy (e.g., Black 1962) and literary studies (e.g., Ricœur 2003). Since the 1980s, however, following Morgan’s seminal works (1980, 1986), metaphor has gained centrality in our discipline for its impact on various aspects of organizing—​internal and external communication (Amernic et al. 2007; König et al. 2018), human resource management (Heracleous and Jacobs 2008a), and learning (Audebrand 2010)—​becoming an integral part of organization theory and business management in general (Inns 2002; see also Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume; Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). However, as management scholars import from other disciplines a methodological apparatus to study metaphor, there are complications in applying it to the study of empirical data, as clear criteria for metaphor elicitation, identification, and analysis are missing (Cornelissen 2012), the implications of which are multifold. Empirical research may suffer from representativeness, reliability, and validity problems. Representativeness refers to the fact that the metaphors which are part of the empirical data may not

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN STUDIES ON METAPHOR    301 represent subjects’ original interpretations but could be ex-​post rationalizations, especially if subjects—​the organizational actors—​are asked to reconstruct facts retrospectively. Reliability refers to the fact that the metaphors identified in an empirical context should be the same regardless of the background or number of researchers. Hence, methods should be well-​specified and designed to allow the computation of a reliability index. Validity refers instead to the groundedness and the generalizability of the cause–​ effect inferences drawn from the metaphors. On the one hand, these representativeness, reliability, and validity problems lie in the fact that researchers are not always temporarily or spatially detached from the empirical material as astronomers are from the stars, but they may greatly influence and shape the very same data they will study through interviews, probing questions, or other empirical choices: to what extent are these findings valid, reliable, and representative of the process of organizing? On the other hand, the problems emerge because the communication modes in which metaphor may appear in the empirical contexts of management research may differ (e.g., speeches, company reports, company logos, symbols, technical images, or other physical objects), and researchers need to tailor their methods to these different modes. This chapter, therefore, addresses the need for methodological clarity in using metaphors in empirical studies and responds to a call for “greater attention to methodological issues around metaphor identification and analysis” (Cornelissen et al. 2008: 15). Guided by the question, how can empirical research on metaphor be representative, valid, and reliable? we center our chapter on metaphors of the field (Manning 1979) and critically evaluate some of the existing methods for using metaphors in the study of management. From the trove of methods available, ours will indeed be a selection, by no means comprehensive, which aims at equipping management scholars with a flexible methodological toolkit to increase reliability, validity, and representativity when using metaphor in empirical studies. The chapter is organized as follows. We will first present two archetypical examples of empirical studies on metaphors: one in which metaphors are elicited and one in which they occur naturally in the text. We will continue by illustrating methods to elicit metaphors that are representative of past interpretations and by showing how to bolster reliability in metaphor identification, separating what is and what is not a metaphor (e.g., Grady 2007) while keeping low the “variability in intuitions and lack of precision about what counts as metaphor” (Cornelissen et al. 2008: 15). Then, we will show ways to derive valid inferences in the analysis, building on two alternative epistemological views on metaphors (e.g., Black 1962; Tversky 1977). With this toolkit, researchers will be well prepared to approach their empirical material and conduct robust qualitative research on metaphor.

302    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO

Starting Empirical Research on Metaphors A metaphor is a figure of speech associating two domains, in which one (i.e., the source) serves to color, render, or describe the other (i.e., the target). With the metaphor “life is a journey,” life (target) is ascribed to (some of the) properties and/​or features of a journey (source) (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). These could be superficial features, such as adjectives like “exotic,” but they can also be structural properties, such as “a journey with problems that need to be coped with” or “unexpected routes leading to unknown destinations.” Because metaphors enter many organizational activities, from formulating strategic decisions and explaining new concepts and ideas, to designing company logos and solving problems, empirical researchers who aim to study them need to be equipped with a methodologically sound toolkit to elicit, identify, and analyze them. For empirical researchers, the way into metaphors can be summed into two polar archetypes of empirical research. One archetype sees researchers approach the empirical world starting from a research question. Then researchers go on collecting data in the field to address their question. In this case, researchers may find themselves in the position to elicit metaphors, chosen as keys to access particular aspects of organizing, from organizational members, stakeholders, or other relevant individuals (hereafter, subjects). This could occur during training seminars or workshops moderated by researchers, or interviews (e.g., Vaara et al. 2003; Clarke and Holt 2017), occasions in which researchers actively interact with subjects to obtain primary data. In context, they invite subjects to elaborate such issues by means of metaphor. We will characterize this as the eliciting metaphor archetype. The alternative archetype is the one in which researchers cannot (or do not) alter the empirical material, which is given to them (e.g., in the form of past interviews, archival data, press data, and even ethnographies in which researchers limited their role to those of observants). In this case, researchers may stumble into metaphors (or other figures of speech) while analyzing patterns in existing data. For instance, König and colleagues (König et al. 2018) sought for metaphors in a large textual corpus composed of quarterly earnings, journalists’ statements, and analysts’ earnings forecasts to analyze CEOs’ metaphors. We will characterize this as the naturally occurring metaphor archetype. The difference between the two archetypes lies in the degree of interventionism of the researcher. In the former archetype, researchers may manipulate the field and field subjects to obtain data, including metaphors, while in the latter archetype researchers cannot. In either case, however, researchers need to take precautionary steps—​ summarized in Table 18.1—​to ensure that the metaphors they elicit are representative of organizational members’ interpretations, that methods for metaphor identification are reliable, and that the analysis allows the researchers to reach valid and generalizable inferences. In the following sections, we will pragmatically explain the problems and solutions.

Solution Elicited

Archetype

Identifying root metaphors

Disclosing a transparent Showing metaphoric analysis of metaphors features

Drawing valid and general inferences from metaphoric data

Ensuring that metaphors Assessing raters’ are reliably coded agreement qualitatively

and elicited

Naturally occurring

and elicited

Naturally occurring

occurring

Naturally

Ensuring that metaphors Assessing raters’ Naturally are reliably coded agreement statistically occurring

Addressing the Relying on a collective Elicited representativeness of process of metaphor collective interpretations elicitation

Addressing the Exposing subjects to representativeness of moments from the retrospective metaphoric past accounts

Problem

E.g., Biscaro and Comacchio (2018); Clarke et al. (2019); Lefsrud et al. (2020).

The concept of blind lawyer—​conveys the meaning of a courageous lawyer but being brave is related neither to “blind” nor to “lawyer” (Tsoukas 2009).

E.g., Gibson and Zellmer-​Bruhn (2001); Amernic et al. (2007).

Identifying metaphorical patterns of justification given by bankers involved in their banks’ bankruptcy: bankers as victims, bankers as penitent learners (Tourish and Hargie 2012).

E.g., Tourish and Hargie (2012); Biscaro and Comacchio (2018); König et al. (2018).

Researchers sharing a protocol for metaphor identification and then discussing disagreements until agreements are reached.

E.g., Cornelissen (2012); Clarke et al. (2019).

The different contextual and basic meanings of the lexical units in utterances such as if you use that strategy, they’ll wipe you out drive metaphor identification. Inter-​rater agreement can be established by applying one of three indices: Cochran’s Q, Cohen’s Kappa, or Fleiss’s Kappa (Steen et al. 2010).

E.g., Vaara et al. (2003); Heracleous and Jacobs (2008a, 2008b).

Asking entrepreneurs (subjects) to represent with an image or symbol or to draw on paper what their business means to them (Clarke and Holt 2017)

E.g., Biscaro and Comacchio (2018).

Supporting subjects/​interviewees’ reconstruction of past events—​including metaphors’ elicitation—​by exposing them to snippets of data of the past.

Examples and representative studies

Table 18.1  Overview of how to ensure representativeness, reliability, and validity with metaphor in empirical data

304    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO

Ensuring the Representativeness of Metaphors In the eliciting metaphor archetype, researchers exploit the capacity of metaphor to express ideas, beliefs, and emotions that are difficult or too technical to articulate with literal language. This has two ends. Researchers can tap into subjects’ latent and unconscious beliefs and feelings, diagnosing situations that are sensitive or not fully elaborated. They can also tap into subjects’ memories of how they conveyed technical ideas to others who did not share the same background, hence facilitating communication. For example, researchers might ask employees to compare the organization they work for to an animal or a car, as in the study by Oswick and Montgomery (1999) who, by doing so, were able to unpack some of the problems related to organizational change. Alternatively, employees and managers could be asked to represent metaphorically their organization before and after being merged with a foreign company, as in Vaara et al. (2003). However, methods of eliciting metaphors have drawbacks that may render the empirical research on metaphor synthetic, detached from reality, in much the same way as laboratory experiments with students simulate how experts or professionals make decisions in real contexts. The first drawback lies in the fact that elicited metaphors serving to tap into retrospective accounts or reconstructions may not be accurate representations of what the experienced situation truly was. Retrospective accounts may be partially overridden or simply altered to construe the situation more positively (see Golden 1992). The second drawback instead concerns the contextual differences between the setting created by the researchers and the natural one. The setting created by the researcher who wants to elicit metaphors may influence the dynamic of metaphor elicitation, as in the case of strategists representing their company strategy with Lego bricks, in a seminar room, before a researcher (Heracleous and Jacobs 2008a). In fact, in the natural setting, subjects may experience different power dynamics and have different expectations. Knowing the drawbacks connected to metaphor elicitation, it is nevertheless possible to limit their effects by following the steps set by other researchers. Compensating for the natural lack of accuracy of retrospective metaphoric accounts (Golden 1992) and obtaining metaphoric representations that are not made up or invented on the spot by the subject, but are true to the ones used in the natural setting, is key if researchers want to make inferences about how organizational actors made sense of a given situation. Often retrospective accounts are not accurate as they are reconstructed, rationalized, partially deleted, and altered (for the same reason, a forensic expert would argue against incriminating an individual based on a retrospective account) (Golden 1992), and the same may apply to metaphorical representations, particularly if they are generated ex-​post. Thus, when eliciting metaphors that allow researchers to delve into sensemaking, methods of metaphor elicitation need to be accompanied by methods of data triangulation (Ramsay 2004).

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN STUDIES ON METAPHOR    305 One way forward is to expose subjects to moments from the past to sustain a vivid reconstruction. For instance, finding ways to have interviewees “time-​travel” to past situations, by exposing them to snippets of data, quotes, videos, or pictures, helps them refresh their old interpretations. While researching collective creativity, Biscaro and Comacchio (2018) asked scientists (i.e., their subjects) to open and access their logs, booklets in which they collected the results of their experiments, figures, diagrams, sketches, and also their annotated interpretations, to elicit the metaphors used at the time. In this way, subjects were thrown back in time and their past sensemaking was brought alive. As a consequence, the elicited metaphors, which at times were even written in their notes, were more representative of past sensemaking. A second way forward, which also applies to eliciting representative current interpretations, is to rely on a collective process of metaphor elicitation. For instance, Heracleous and Jacobs (2008a, 2008b) reconstructed how individuals and groups interpreted their organization’s strategies by letting them collectively build them with Lego bricks. Then researchers sought to obtain representative reconstructions by engaging in repeated conversations with the subjects both individually and collectively. Such conversations were repeated in different moments. While building the strategy with Lego bricks, subjects individually expressed how they framed (and were framing) the strategy. In a second step, subjects cooperated with the other group members to build a final and single artifact that metaphorically condensed the individual as well as collective framing of the events. This collective process of metaphor elicitation eased the emergence of metaphors that were representative of individuals’ and groups’ sensemaking.

Addressing Reliability in Metaphor Identification In the naturally occurring metaphor archetype, researchers explore existing data in search of metaphors. Existing metaphors can shed light on organizations’ and organizational actors’ framing, legitimizing activities, communication, or sensemaking. By examining how metaphors are used by actors and organizations in a corpus of data, researchers can reconstruct and comprehend the symbolic universe and social context in which organizations and organizational actors are embedded. However, operating within this archetype has one major drawback. Identifying metaphor is a subjective activity, influenced by researchers’ knowledge, expertise, and energy. Indeed, far from being a simple task, identifying metaphor requires skilled researchers who approach texts by asking themselves a few, but crucial questions, such as what a metaphor is and what it is not, and how large is the unit of text (or other symbolic form of data) where a metaphor can be found. Only after addressing these questions can researchers identify metaphors reliably and then proceed to the following phase of analysis. We suggest two ways to address this drawback.

306    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO One way to identify metaphors reliably in a corpus of data is to follow the Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP), which is a protocol that supports scholars to identify metaphors in a textual corpus (Pragglejaz Group 2007), such as press or archival data, or a set of interviews. If the researcher is the only coder, then following the MIP steps is sufficient to produce a reliable method for metaphor identification. The MIP requires researchers to break down a text into a list of lexical units, which are single words or idioms that compose the text. Each lexical unit is a unit of analysis, whose basic and contextual meaning will be scrutinized by the researcher. Basic meaning denotes the primary and self-​contained meaning of that lexical unit. In its basic meaning, chicken denotes a large, feathered, egg-​laying bird, which does not fly long distances. Contextual meaning refers to the meaning ascribed to the lexical unit in the specific context of the empirical material. When the basic and contextual meanings differ, the lexical unit is considered a metaphor. For instance, the lexical unit “chicken” in the larger textual context “the manager is a chicken” is unlikely to connote the manager as a large, feathered bird, but rather a cowardly individual who does not take responsibility for their action. In this case, the basic and contextual meanings of chicken differ, thus the lexical unit and the expression will be considered metaphors. The MIP’s steps are as follows: 1. Read the entire text-​ discourse to establish a general understanding of the meaning. 2. Determine the lexical units in the text-​discourse. 3. (a) For each lexical unit in the text, establish its meaning in context, that is, how it applies to an entity, relation, or attribute in the situation evoked by the text (contextual meaning). Take into account what comes before and after the lexical unit. (b) For each lexical unit, determine if it has a more basic contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in the given context. For our purposes, basic meanings tend to be —​ More concrete [what they evoke is easier to imagine, see, hear, feel, smell, and taste]; —​ Related to bodily action; —​ More precise (as opposed to vague); —​ Historically older. Basic meanings are not necessarily the most frequent meanings of the lexical unit. (c) If the lexical unit has a more basic current-​contemporary meaning in other contexts than the one in the given context, decide whether the contextual meaning contrasts with the basic meaning but can be understood in comparison with it. 4. If yes, mark the lexical unit as metaphorical. (Pragglejaz Group 2007: 3)

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN STUDIES ON METAPHOR    307 With this procedure at hand, researchers analyze each lexical unit and can identify even the metaphors that are easy for the trained eye to miss. By applying the MIP, Cornelissen (2012) was able to identify more than 4,000 metaphors in his empirical material, including some metaphors that might be easy to overlook, for they are so common in everyday language: “There were new ways of working and change programs being dropped on them . . . they [the staff in the Clinical Division] had just gone through this restructure” (Cornelissen 2012: 123, emphasis added). A drawback of this method is that its application is particularly time and energy consuming. While it is hard to make estimations of the time needed to go through a corpus or even a document, as that greatly depends on researchers’ reading speed and knowledge of the basic meaning of each lexical unit in the text, the procedure demands a researcher to stop at every single lexical unit, reflect on its meaning, and report whether it is a metaphor. Such a time-​consuming analysis seems inappropriate to identifying metaphors in large corpora, which instead would require sophisticated methods of computer-​assisted content analysis (e.g., Su et al. 2017) or a large battery of researchers. Yet, for large corpora that require multiple coders, the MIP lends itself to the possibility of computing statistical assessments of raters’ agreement. Thus, metaphor identification can be shielded from the subjectivity of different coders, as their agreement in coding metaphors can be measured. In fact, by forcing coders into making simple binary choices on the lexical unit of a text, the task of identifying metaphors in a corpus can be assigned to multiple coders and the inter-​coder reliability can be subsequently checked. For instance, researchers can apply Cohen’s Kappa index of the inter-​rater agreement to the shared portion of lexical units they have independently coded to verify whether metaphors were identified reliably by them. Using indices such as Cohen’s K, Cochran’s Q, or Fleiss’ Kappa if coders are more than two, provides objective values of the agreement among coders and bolsters the reliability of the methodological choice for metaphor identification (Steen et al. 2010). A second way forward is to assess raters’ agreement qualitatively. While we have acknowledged the MIP’s robustness originating from its systematic approach to the text, much of the empirical research on metaphor in management has flexibly adopted some of the MIP steps for metaphor identification (e.g., Biscaro and Comacchio 2018; König et al. 2018). For example, König et al. (2018: 1205) identified metaphorical expressions and their frequency in the text by “first count[ing] all words belonging to a coherent sentence structure (i.e., subject, predicate, and object) that were necessary to make sense of a given metaphorical expression, and [then] classify[ing] those words as metaphorical communication.” Clarke et al. (2019) adapted the MIP’s principles to identify metaphors from hand gestures, proposing the distinction between “literal” and “metaphoric” gestures. The literal gestures were the iconic or beat gestures, while the metaphoric gestures were inferred from directional hand/​arm movements. For example, arm movements elevating the arm were interpreted as improvements, according to the metaphoric idea that “up is good.”

308    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO What is common in these studies is using a strict internal protocol to ensure reliability in metaphor identification. A good illustration is provided by König et al. (2018: 1204) who shared a common scheme with preliminary .  .  . instructions, including concise definitions of the rhetorical ingredients of metaphorical communication. . . . We provided anchoring examples, coding criteria, and intersubjectively comparable guidelines that illustrated how to identify metaphorical communication reliably.

Following precisely these passages and starting with a preliminary identification process that worked as a test, authors could reliably identify and separate the metaphorical language from the nonmetaphorical one in their empirical data. Therefore, the internal protocol allowed researchers to identify metaphors reliably, negotiating and settling their disagreements.

Enhancing Validity in the Analysis of Metaphors After researchers have identified metaphors in the empirical materials, either elicited or naturally occurring, they aim to draw general inferences from metaphoric data to build theory. Yet, drawing general inferences from metaphors may expose researchers to critiques, as they try to generalize from something whose interpretation is subjective and—​oftentimes—​even ambiguous (Ramsay 2004). Thus, we will show how researchers can pursue two strategies to draw valid inferences. First, they can code the already identified metaphors that share similar features to derive second-​order themes (Gioia et al. 2013): more abstract labels that refer to patterns in the data. At times, they could even use metaphors to code metaphors (e.g., Tourish and Hargie 2012), if these may best encase the mechanisms to advance theory. Second, they can show the mapping of the domains that metaphors associate, displaying the semantic activity of the metaphor to reduce the ambiguity of the reader. These strategies can be pursued by researchers aiming at establishing the validity of their analysis. Once researchers have identified metaphors in their data, they need to ask themselves how to analyze them to make sense of them. One common approach is to group or code the metaphors that are similar, either because they are “structurally similar” (e.g., sharing similar sources/​targets) or because they accomplish a similar function that is relevant in organizing (e.g., they all legitimize). Identifying such patterns in the metaphors may lead to the emergence of root metaphors. Root metaphors are the metaphors shaping the individual interpretation of events (e.g., Örtenblad 2017), thus the metaphors that they comprise necessarily share the same worldview or might use

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN STUDIES ON METAPHOR    309 similar source–​target associations. This way of condensing metaphors is often used by empirical researchers to draw more general and valid inferences. For instance, alternative approaches to leadership are characterized as the “commander” and the “pedagogue” (Amernic et al. 2007)—​two metaphors. Root metaphors can also be derived by metaphors with similar source domains. One example is proposed by Cornelissen (2012), who clustered the previously identified metaphors that shared similar source domains, such as the metaphors “gone through” and “up to that point,” whose source is movement. Then, he treated them as one category in the subsequent analysis. Alternatively, root metaphors may cluster the metaphors with shared underlying assumptions. Tourish and Hargie (2012) were able to show bankers’ worldview and justification activity following a financial crisis and the subsequent banking crisis by identifying the root metaphors in the metaphors they used in court. Metaphors displaying alternative overarching assumptions were grouped—​ “bankers as impotent” or “bankers as victims”—​and together reflected bankers’ public framing of the financial crisis and their role in the bankruptcies. Analytically, the two studies conducted by Cornelissen (2012) and Tourish and Hargie (2012) share an iterative, data-​grounded, and inductive approach (Gioia et al. 2013) to derive second-​order constructs. Tourish and Hargie (2012), for example, created a broad set of second-​order categories in which text excerpts were included. Then categories were iteratively revised and negotiated. Similarly, Cornelissen (2012) created general categories from the metaphors that were used more frequently. He then constructed the categories by extracting the source domain of each metaphor, following established principles in cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980). In this way, first-​order categories remained close to individuals’ framing and sensemaking, while the second-​ order categories, the root metaphors, provided abstraction. Yet if by identifying root metaphors, researchers can draw more general inferences and address the problem of validity in theory building, can they also build useful theory by using root metaphors? Current theorizing on the use of metaphors in theory building (e.g., Cornelissen 2005; Oswick et al. 2011) suggests that using dissimilar metaphors may provide useful traction for theory building, as once the chosen root metaphor accurately captures the phenomenon, inferences and subsequent theorizing are more original—​and useful—​if the sources of the root metaphor are “unusual” or distant from the phenomenon that they are chosen to represent. Tourish and Hargie (2012), for example, chose to describe bankers with root metaphors intendedly selected from distant domains, such as that of religion—​in the metaphor of bankers as penitent learners—​to draw inferences that would contrast with the mainstream interpretation of their financial role. Another way to address the problem of validity in drawing inferences from metaphors is by showing metaphoric mapping and/​or features. Researchers often analyze how meaning emerges through metaphors to build theory. Analyzing the emergence of meaning, however, can be done in two alternative ways that build on different traditions and epistemic approaches to metaphor (Black 1962; Tversky 1977). One epistemic approach

310    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO characterizes the two domains of metaphor—​one as a source of meaning and the other as a target—​and, as the metaphors’ “source” and “target” suggest, meaning is mapped from source to target (Tversky 1977; Lakoff and Johnson 1980). Reasoning within this epistemic approach, metaphors are considered as generating more meaning and larger insights if targets are dissimilar to sources. Thus, researchers can proceed by analyzing the source–​target distance to infer or theorize on metaphors’ effects. As an example, Dunbar and colleagues (Dunbar 1997; Dunbar and Blanchette 2001) studied how solutions emerged in a scientific laboratory. Metaphors were the keys used by scientists to solve their research problems and the source–​target distance of metaphors was one factor that helped scientists reach the solution. Interestingly, the metaphors with a short distance between source and target (i.e., both source and target were the same biological organism) were the most frequently used to solve problems. Only a few times were solutions reached due to intermediate-​distance metaphors (sources linked to other organisms) or long-​distance metaphors (nonbiological entities). This method has been also used by Franke et al. (2014) in another study on metaphors and problem solving. A second mode of showing the metaphoric features to analyze the emergence of meaning in metaphors draws on the interaction view of metaphor (Black 1962), which postulates that meaning not only is transferred from source to target but can be produced through a mental elaboration, produced by the mere association of the two domains—​thus, we should no longer speak of source and target. Building on this epistemic approach, researchers have analyzed the emergence of metaphoric meaning by adopting the conceptual combination theory (Fauconnier and Turner 1998). The conceptual combination theory provides an easy-​to-​operate and clear diagrammatic model that renders the analysis of metaphors transparent. In an exemplary study on collective creativity, Biscaro and Comacchio (2018) mapped how different metaphors occurring in the dialogues and individual exchanges of the scientists they were studying produced different types of conceptual innovations (Tsoukas 2009). They saw that certain metaphors, such as the electric wires metaphor, ended up altering the meaning of the concept that they were associated to. Other metaphors had a more limited effect. What matters to us is that the analysis of variation in the meaning produced by metaphor was made possible by the conceptual combination theory, which also made it transparent as the authors used the suggested diagrams. In another study, Clarke et al. (2019) built differently on the conceptual combination idea, theorizing and testing whether the combination of metaphors in different modes of communication (e.g., in talk and gestures) had different effects on recipients than metaphors employed in one or no communication modes (see also Cienki, Chapter 17 in this volume). They studied entrepreneurs’ pitches and found that investors’ willingness to fund entrepreneurial projects was impacted by how metaphors were used during the pitches. In the qualitative part of their study, Clarke and colleagues argued that gestures can be used not only to highlight the meaning expressed in words, but also to expand and even alter it. For instance, during a pitch on how to prevent organs for transplants from degenerating, the entrepreneur talked with the metaphor of “window

VALIDITY AND RELIABILITY IN STUDIES ON METAPHOR    311 of opportunity.” This was accompanied by the metaphoric gesture of a square drawn with the hands. The combination of verbal and gestural metaphors produced the meaning of running out of time, prodding investors into imagining how the solution proposed could expand that tightly constrained temporal window and allow organs to be preserved intact for longer.

Conclusions Because metaphors are commonly employed figures of speech, they often appear in the empirical data of management research. Thus, whenever a researcher senses that a figure of speech may be the key to answering an important research question, revealing some hidden aspect of organizing, it is critical that the approach to its analysis is methodologically sound. Yet, because of the methodological confusion surrounding how to use metaphors in empirical research (Cornelissen et al. 2008), researchers may decide to stay away from them, never to unlock those aspects of organizing whose keys were the metaphors. This chapter provides researchers with actionable support when approaching metaphors in empirical material, suggesting how to tackle them to distill knowledge that is representative, reliable, and valid. The writing of this chapter has been inspired by this situation. We put ourselves in the shoes of a researcher who is looking for actionable indications of how to address the problems related to empirical research on metaphor. We then distinguished the archetypes of empirical research in which metaphors may appear—​one in which metaphors (and data) are elicited and one in which metaphors naturally occur in the data—​and moved on within this distinction to address questions of the representativeness of the metaphors elicited in the data collection, reliability in metaphor identification, and validity in the analysis of metaphor. By addressing these questions, we have provided actionable answers to navigate—​ and draw generalizable inferences from—​metaphors in empirical data. This chapter leaves some questions open, however, especially regarding the neutrality of the researcher with respect to the metaphors that are elicited. In fact, we have discussed how researchers may intervene in the process of metaphor elicitation, affecting both which metaphors are elicited and, perhaps, also subjects’ interpretations. For instance, metaphor elicitation can occur in contexts such as training seminars or workshops, yet the interactive dynamics among participants are moderated by the presence of the researcher and by the power dynamics established in the seminar or workshop room. How those contextual differences affect metaphors’ elicitation and interpretation are open—​and important—​questions if we aim to draw useful inferences for organization studies. We therefore encourage researchers to be mindful of and reflective about their role in order to establish the representativeness of metaphors elicited, the reliability of metaphors identified, and the validity of inferences drawn from metaphors.

312    ELENA BRUNI AND CLAUDIO BISCARO

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chapter 19

j u st like a fre e fa l l The Freedoms and Pitfalls of Critical Metaphor Analysis lorin basden arnold

For decades, scholars have examined metaphor as an organizing principle of understanding (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Engel 1988), a mental schema of interpersonal conflict (Hocker and Wilmot 1991), a foundation of rhetoric (Booth 1978), and a key to understanding organizations (Weick 1979; Morgan 1997). While metaphor has long been part of qualitative and critical methodologies, that use has not been untroubled by potential pitfalls. In this work, I examine some ways that critical organizational metaphor research both serves and potentially disserves us and those we study. By engaging this topic, I do not suggest that critical use of metaphor, whether elicited or applied, in the study of organizations is inappropriate. Nor do I suggest that there are no scholars working to minimize potential problems. My goal is to join others encouraging us to attend to the complex human ethics, benefits, and costs of our work. In this chapter, I discuss the critical theory perspective regarding organizational metaphors and power, the benefits and drawbacks of utilizing a critical frame for organizational metaphor research, and suggestions for maintaining the benefits while reducing the problems.

Metaphor, Language, and Power From social constructionist and critical perspectives, language both reflects and creates our experience in the world (Berger and Luckmann 1966; Mumby 2016). It impacts how we develop and sustain our relationships and the ways we see the world. Our organizations and organizational experiences are constituted and reconstituted through an iterative communicative process. As human actors, we enter the always-​ already-​present stream of discourse and participate in that process of sustaining social realities.

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    315 Scholars argue that metaphors are of particular importance in the shaping of our social reality, as they allow us to map elements and understandings of items or concepts that we have more grounded experience with onto items and concepts that are less clear or concrete (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Morgan 1997). Metaphors direct our attention to particular elements of a concept or object and simultaneously exclude other elements from notice (Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume; Inns 2002; Tourish and Hargie 2012). Metaphor is not only a way that we understand the world, but also part of the formation and enforcement of power structures at the center of organizational life. From this standpoint, critical scholars examine the ways in which the communicative shaping of reality is embedded in the “issues of power, control, and resistance [that] are endemic and defining features” of organizations (Mumby 2019: 430). Critical scholars argue that our organizational lives are a primary locale for the creation and maintenance of our sense of self; thus “we are all subject to processes of corporate colonization” (Mumby 2019: 432), and the precarity of the modern neoliberal economy creates continual threats to self-​identity. Critical scholars also view emancipation as an important part of scholarly work (Alvesson and Willmott 1992). There are many ways metaphor has become part of organizational research. Örten­ blad (2017) provides a typology of approaches to organizational metaphor research based on characteristics related to the intention of the research, the starting point of the study, and the place from which metaphors arise, among others. Here, I will be speaking primarily about two approaches to metaphor research. Örtenblad describes (2017: 64–​6) the “colored lens” approach to organizational metaphor research as being the use of a generative root metaphor selected by the scholar and applied to an organization as a way of seeing the familiar in an unfamiliar way. He also discusses (Örtenblad 2017: 66–​70) the “pigeon-​hole” approach. In one style of the “pigeon-​hole” approach, the scholar categorizes and analyzes organizational members’ elicited or observed discourse and then applies metaphor theory to reach conclusions regarding the members’ root metaphors for the organization. In the remainder of this work, I focus my attention on how those two types of organizational metaphor analysis are utilized in service of critical research, as a significant amount of organizational metaphor analysis has taken a critical stance (Jermier and Forbes 2011). I consider the benefits, potential issues and unintended consequences, and strategies of such approaches to critical organizational metaphor research.

Benefits of Using Organizational Metaphors in Critical Research Utilization of a metaphor approach to the study of organizations provides an opportunity for bringing to the surface new ways of understanding organizational life. As we apply or elicit metaphors, we foreground some aspects of the organizational experience

316   LORIN BASDEN ARNOLD by connecting to the organizational domain characteristics and understandings of other domains. Metaphor scholars argue that this work may allow us to see elements of organizational life that exist at the cusp of our awareness but are rarely brought into full consideration (Cornelissen 2005; Johnston and Hausman 2006; Heracleous and Jacobs 2008; Jacobs et al. 2013). The process of metaphor research is an act of creation. Scholars such as Cornelissen et al. (2005: 1548; see also Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume) argue that the language of metaphor encourages “semantic leaps” that “evoke the imaginative capacities of meaning construction, and that eventually lead to the production of a new, emergent meaning.” Thus, metaphor research can be a freeing and creative endeavor. It allows us to leap from the standard framework of understanding organizational life into new possibilities.

Making Space for Unheard or Suppressed Voices For critical scholars, one of the values of discursive research is that it allows for silenced voices to be heard and valued. As seen from a Marxist or Foucauldian grounding, systems of power act to silence voices of those who are marginalized. In this way, the homeostasis of the system is maintained, as there are limited vocalizations of alternative positions that might upset the prevailing “truths.” By holding space for alternate voices to be heard, critical scholars argue, creation of new understandings that may lead to reduction of disenfranchisement becomes more possible (Johansson and Lindhult 2008). In one example of this work, Chan et al. (2014) examined metaphorical and semi-​ metaphorical language elicited in interviews and conversations with women of color teaching in a university setting and their students. The authors argue that use of metaphor can make the familiar unfamiliar and function to portray complex realities. Utilizing a pigeon-​hole approach for their thematic analysis of the discourse, they identify five root metaphors related to faculty roles indicating invisible, inescapable expectations and standards that confine and challenge nonwhite instructors: curator and choreographer of emotions; tour-​guide; puzzler; instructor as “book”; and s**t disturber and catalyst. The authors argue that, through naming these issues of power, they can disrupt current practices and potentially open new possibilities.

Highlighting Systems of Oppression From the perspective of critical research, by hearing other voices or providing new ways of seeing and understanding organizations, taken-​for-​granted systems of domination and oppression can be revealed (Inns 2002; Johansson and Lindhult 2008). Because power structures are intertwined with our discursive practices, thus woven into our known realities, it is possible to participate in and be impacted by systems of domination with little awareness of them. They exist as part of “truths” regarding our social world. Eliciting or applying metaphors can ideally trouble these truths sufficiently to

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    317 make structures of oppression more obvious and allow us to engage in critique and possibly even aid organizational stakeholders in changing existing power structures. In one example, Müller (2018) examines discourse about the value of internal branding present in academic and practitioner texts. The texts promote internal branding as an organizational culture strategy in which employees align “their behaviors, attitudes, demeanours, outward appearances and language use with the company brand” (Müller 2018: 44). Employees then become a representation of the brand to others. Müller notes that advocates talk about internal branding as empowering employees or developing their passion and commitment to the brand. Müller uses a pigeon-​hole approach (Örtenblad 2017) to conduct thematic and semiotic analysis of metaphoric and semi-​metaphoric language in 89 texts. She identifies three metaphor groups—​activation metaphors, influence metaphors, and living metaphors—​that imply the brand’s ownership of employees, even while explicit claims in the texts suggest that internal branding is empowering and authentic for employees. Ultimately, Müller argues, this relationship results in the brand becoming “the financially valuable central element, whereas employees are seen as exchangeable resources and vessels for the brand” (Müller 2018: 60). Seeing these rhetorical constructions can be beneficial to employees as it can empower them “to unveil and problematize the power effects inherent in the language around such management ideas” (Müller 2018: 61).

Creating Possibilities for Change Creation Carpenter (2008) and other scholars argue that metaphor research can enable us to suggest interventions to aid organizations and organizational members. As we apply new understandings and uncover taken-​for-​granted meanings, we can reveal the cracks in the system that may be used to establish support for change, show managerial and other stakeholders more equitable ways of engaging their organizational mission, and free organizational actors to think more creatively about their work. There are many examples of naturally occurring “emergencies” (e.g., the COVID-​19 pandemic) that have shocked organizations into developing new ways of being that organizational members might have previously said were impossible. Critical metaphor research can similarly, on a smaller scale, disrupt understanding and acting enough to open a space for more creative considerations of organizational work. In their study of organizations and water resources, Jermier and Forbes (2016) utilize a “colored lens” approach (Örtenblad 2017) to apply the “organizations as instruments of domination” (Morgan 1986, 1997) root metaphor. Using the metaphor provides the impetus to “consider what may be found behind the veil: systemic disadvantage; widespread damage and destruction; and pervasive pain and suffering” (Jermier and Forbes 2016: 1005). In this case, that includes environmental degradation, destruction, and depletion. Elaborating the metaphor leads to consideration of institutions as “water exploiters” (Jermier and Forbes 2016: 1009). Using the extended metaphor, Jermier and Forbes (2016) analyze the company Patagonia, and argue that revisioning the role of

318   LORIN BASDEN ARNOLD organizations from “water exploiting” to “water keeping” along with a value-​system of ecocentrism creates new ways of understanding the relationship between organizations and the natural world that lead to new behaviors. From even this brief discussion, and certainly from the breadth of the work in this volume, it is clear there are benefits of engaging in colored lens and pigeon-​hole organizational metaphor research, as well as in doing so from a critical perspective. However, like most research practices, this type of scholarship is not without potential perils.

Issues with Using Organizational Metaphors in Critical Research While scholars have identified issues particular to metaphor research practices in terms of validity, reliability, and other assessments of scholarship worth (Örtenblad et al. 2016), in this section, I focus on the position of the critical researcher vis-​à-​vis the researched and how that relationship may impact research findings and organizational actors.

Understanding from a Distance Most organizational research, including critical metaphor analysis, is conducted in organizations that are not the workplace of the researcher. In academia, we tend to view this as leading to a more objective or neutral research effort. However, this perspective means that the scholar is always understanding the organization from some level of remove. There are multiple outcomes of this distance that may have a problematic impact on scholarship. First, researchers are typically “outsiders.” Organizational actors, whether engaging in everyday work behavior under observation or participating in structured interviews, will see the researchers as “other.” As Goffman (1959) argues, humans enact different parts of the self for different audiences; thus, the presence of outsiders is not a neutral force and is likely to impact behavior, including discourse, of organizational members. This is not an issue limited to metaphor research, but is important to consider in all research where we are making claims about the organization based on discourse (or behavior) of researched members. Second, as outsiders, researchers enter a system in which much meaning-​making has occurred and continues to occur; yet, they do not have the background knowledge to fully appreciate those meanings. Metaphorical understanding, whether arising from discourse elicited from organizational members (a pigeon-​hole approach) or applied by the analyst as a tool for creating new understandings (a colored lens approach), requires a developed awareness of both organizational practices and beliefs of organizational

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    319 members. Researchers may find it challenging to devote the extended time and presence it would take to truly understand a complex organization. Finally, organizational researchers are not neutral observers. Like all scholars, they have opinions and preexisting impressions that may impact the research. Tosey et al. (2014) argue that metaphor research may be inadvertently impacted by the scholars’ preexisting beliefs affecting how they ask questions or interpret data. As an example, they discuss a study in which the interview included the question, “What is the image you carry around that drives your actions today?” (Tosey et al. 2014: 633). As this sentence contains at least three potential types of metaphoric language (images, carrying a weight, driving), it may make respondents more inclined to invoke similar metaphors in their answers. If the researcher is then utilizing respondent discourse as the basis of the analysis (e.g., the pigeon-​hole approach), the wording may impact the results. Thus, even if metaphors have been elicited from the participants’ discourse, it is possible that in the process of gathering discourse or interpreting it, the researcher applies understandings that do not reflect experiences of the organizational members. As Cornelissen (2002: 267) puts it, care must be taken in the use of metaphor research, because it “may smuggle hidden or unconscious assumptions into organizational theory from its domain of origin,” and “may even carry a hidden cargo of dubious implications.” This is not a problem unique to metaphor research; however, the creativity of the form discussed previously and what Sackmann (Chapter 22 in this volume) refers to as the “seductive nature” of metaphor make it particularly relevant to this work.

Ignoring Multiplicity In her examination of “internal branding” metaphors, Müller (2018) argues that metaphors are powerful because they give stakeholders multiple ways to attach to an organization’s discourse. Similarly, in their discussion of using metaphors to analyze organizational change, Palmer and Dunford (1996) remind us that seminal scholars in the field, including Lakoff, Johnson, and Morgan, argue that multiplicity is important in organizational analysis, and overcommitment to a single metaphor used as a lens is problematic. Carpenter (2008) notes that the use of metaphor can illuminate, but also distort. This is important to critical scholars who believe that the use of metaphor not only reveals preexisting attributes; it creates new features and meanings (Cornelissen 2005). If we utilize metaphors in research without attending to the multiple meanings that those metaphors may have or create, we risk reaching overdetermined conclusions about the meanings that are not reflective of the varying experiences and understandings of organizational members, even if the metaphor itself arose from the organizational members. For example, in an analysis of discourse of medical workers during the COVID-​19 pandemic, a researcher may find healthcare workers referring to a “battle.” In considering the impact of that metaphor, the researcher may focus on the hard work, the exhaustion, the dangers, and the existence of a dangerous enemy (the virus). While all of these may

320   LORIN BASDEN ARNOLD reflect how some respondents were understanding that metaphor, others may have been thinking more about the commanders who are giving orders from a safe location, the lack of care for the foot soldiers, the country’s seeming disregard for what was really going on in the trenches, etc. The overarching metaphor might be the same, but the meanings for some organizational members might be very different. Wray-​Bliss (2002) argues that, as of the early 2000s, a significant number of critical organizational scholars, including those utilizing metaphor analysis, had ignored the specific intersectional realities impacting the experience of workers, and instead focused almost entirely on economic identity, without attention to the lived experience of women. In a meta-​analysis of metaphor research, Kemp (2016) found that studies utilizing Morgan’s (1986, 1997) metaphors rarely explicitly addressed the experience of women. Instead, the genderless metaphors functioned as “a mask of reality” (Kemp 2016: 992) for understanding women in organizations. More recent critical organizational research utilizing metaphor analysis has attended to a wider variety of identity dimensions (Tracy and Scott 2006; Ollilainen and Calasanti 2007; Chan et al. 2014). However, intersectionality theorists suggest that there are many domains of being that interact in how individuals understand their experiences and enact their roles (Crenshaw 1991). Failure to attend to the multiplicity of meaning and experience significantly reduces our ability to accurately represent metaphorical or other organizational understandings.

Elitism In a response to Mumby (2019), Aldag (2019: 485) argues that critical scholars “see workers as passive, impotent victims of management greed but provide no guidance on how they can attain voice or power.” Similarly, Johansson and Lindhult (2008: 106) argue that scholars of critical theory “seem to start with the assumption that people are fooled by ‘the system,’ by dominant interests, or are generally snared by unrecognized restrictions that they think are inevitable.” These critical perspectives imply that most employees are incapable of seeing or effectively responding to their own domination. In this way, much as in the organizations they critique, where they argue that managers occupy positions of domination and the workers hold positions of subjugation, critical organizational metaphor researchers run the risk of positioning scholars as the experts/​ knowers and the organizational members as the unknowing. This issue can occur whether the research is accomplished through the colored lens approach, via arguing that the system is characterized by domination even if the organizational members aren’t aware of it, or the pigeon-​hole approach, by interpreting participant discourse as revealing systems of domination when respondents believe otherwise. Wray-​Bliss (2004) notes that subjects are rarely awarded a right of response regarding published research. Research produced often appears in venues that participants cannot even access, not being at institutions of higher education with vast library holdings. While Wray-​Bliss is not speaking specifically about organizational metaphor research, this field of study is no less implicated. If respondents do not agree with the

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    321 representation of their organization or experience, or if the metaphor developed from participant discourse or selected by the analyst does not resonate with them, they may have no mechanism through which to challenge the claims or may feel their intellectual capacity to do so has not been respected.

Ignoring “Other” Voices Wray-​Bliss (2002) encourages organizational scholars to more thoughtfully involve participants in the research and embrace the idea that the “scholars” are not the sole knowledge producers. This effort may lead us to ponder whether we are inadvertently selecting respondents who will provide discourse that supports our assumptions. If a set of critical scholars approach an organization believing they will find reflections of a psychic prison metaphor, is it possible that they might select employees working under high levels of surveillance and stress as participants? Wray-​Bliss (2004: 104) notes that, if this is the case, there is a possibility of researchers, intentionally or not, suppressing or silencing voices that “dissent from this subject position.” Similarly, Carpenter (2008) argues that organizational scholars of all types must be careful that their work does not supersede the subjects by making assumptions about their experience or their understandings. Even in instances where we utilize a critical frame to bring to light oppression and contribute to emancipation of organizational members (e.g., Chan et al. 2014; Bochantin 2016; Müller 2018), care must be taken. Aldag (2019) argues that critical theorists tend to utilize the darkest of Morgan’s (1986) eight root metaphors, looking for metaphors of psychic prisons, systems of domination, or political systems. This, Aldag (2019: 483) states, is likely to result in an untended consequence of only finding the bad: “when all one has is a dark hammer, everything looks like a noir nail.” Scholars researching from a critical perspective often work from a position that the commodification of individuals is so naturalized that people in the system cannot see it (Mumby 2019). Thus, semi-​ metaphoric language in respondents’ talk may be taken to suggest a system of domination or psychic prison even if the metaphor is not clearly invoked by the respondents. However, it remains possible that the organizational members’ language really was not referring to a system of domination or psychic prison, not because they “can’t” see it but because that is not what they experience. While it is true that all organizations are sites of power and negotiation, Wray-​Bliss (2003) reminds us that, from a Foucauldian perspective, power is multifaceted and held by everyone. Power is not a binary of have or have not. Every member of an organization holds a variety of power types in relationships and alliances within the organization. Workers “lower” in the organizational structure may have knowledge not held by those at the “top.” Workers in nonmanagerial positions lack access to some organizational information and decision making; however, they may be paid for overtime work and be represented by unions. With more workers participating in a knowledge economy, we may be less likely to see overt examples of slowing down the production line, but similar actions are possible even within the neoliberal economic frame. Power is not a unitary

322   LORIN BASDEN ARNOLD concept, and thus metaphors such as “organizations as instruments of domination” need careful reflection in use. Attention to the ways in which organizational metaphors exhibit or reveal power relationships should proceed from a perspective that does not expect power to exist only at the top or only in certain forms; if it does not, there is a risk of misrepresenting the experiences and understating the power of some organizational members. Lacking a grounded perspective, ignoring multiplicity of meaning, exhibiting elitism, and suppressing some organizational voices are unintended consequences that can emerge in our work while utilizing a critical metaphor approach. However, there are some strategies that we can utilize to reduce the significance of their impact.

Doing Better Not all critical organizational metaphor scholars, including those working from a colored lens approach or a pigeon-​hole approach (Örtenblad 2017), have experienced the pitfalls spoken of here, and some scholars are already engaging in the suggestions below. Thus, I do not provide these suggestions in an assumption that they are fully unique or that they will be beneficial to every study every time. Rather, I offer them for the utility they may have for individual scholars.

Highlighting the Position of the Scholar While there remains a cultural belief that “good” research should be “objective,” most critical scholars using metaphor analysis work from the viewpoint that we react to what we study from our intersectional positions. As Alvesson (1995) argues, it is particularly appropriate in interpretive studies such as these to explicitly address our subject positions as scholars, as well as how those “frames of reference affect the presentation in various respects” (Alvesson 1995: 52; see also Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). For colored lens approach work, this helps the reader understand the selection of a lens and the underlying beliefs that impact the analysis. For a pigeon-​hole approach analysis, this provides the reader with an awareness of why/​how the scholar might interpret semi-​metaphoric language as being representative of one metaphor rather than another, or might see the implications of a metaphor in a particular way. Such expressions of positionality can be seen in work by scholars including Amernic et al. (2007) and Gershenson (2003). Nonetheless, it remains a challenge to have the “space” in a publication to do this work, as the academy continues to privilege objectivity. However, the prioritization of the standard of objectivity will not change without ongoing testing of the limits and normalizing the act of being more explicit regarding the individual biases and experiences that impact both our knowledge and our ways of being in the world as scholars and organizational members.

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    323

Examining Exploitation and Silencing within the Research Practice Wray-​Bliss (2004) argues for the importance of investigating and acknowledging ethical dimensions of critical research in organizations. He notes that, because silenced voices are often laid bare in the research, there should be a clearly articulated exploration of “how relations of trust were established, what negotiation for consent was undertaken, what limits of consent were established, and how the authors embodied their ­accountability to [the] research subjects” (Wray-​Bliss 2004: 107). For example, in a study utilizing a pigeon-​hole approach, a scholar is likely to ask organizational members to discuss their experiences. Those reflections may include information that shows the individual, the individual’s manager or coworkers, or the organization in a negative light. Even if attempts are made to hide the identity of respondents in publication, there could be repercussions for them. While processes related to consent, establishing trust, etc. may have been part of a human subjects’ review, that material is often excluded from the publication and thus from consideration by readers. Driver (2017) similarly encourages scholars researching organizational metaphor to engage in reflexive analysis about their research practices vis-​à-​vis subjects. Scholars using a colored lens approach may need to analyze what they are asking to observe, how their observation may affect organizational members, whose privacy or autonomy is impacted, etc. Scholars using a pigeon-​hole approach may need to consider how the discourse is being elicited or selected, how they are being introduced to organizational members and what that plan of introduction implies about their relationship to the organization, the precarity of the employees participating in the study, the potential psychological impacts of drawing employees’ attention to silencing or disempowerment, etc. Such examinations of the power dimensions that occur in our research run counter to the expectations of publishing venues regarding content of methodology discussions. We may hear that the information is extraneous. However, we know that the potential for inadvertent effects on participants’ communication and behavior exists. We know that the possibility of participants accidentally being “outed” for what they say about their place of employment exists. We owe it to our participants and each other to expect careful reflexive discussions of the research process and to engage in this work until it becomes a normalized part of publication.

Embracing the Mess The nature of critical metaphor research as a creative and constitutive endeavor calls us to attend to issues of voice and multiplicity. Incorporating paradoxical or dissenting voices, even if this creates a more chaotic picture of the organization, should be considered an important part of our scholarly agenda. When engaging in a pigeon-​ hole approach, scholars should avoid generalizations that oversimplify the findings and

324   LORIN BASDEN ARNOLD should also include in publication the metaphorical expressions that occurred rarely, but did occur. Similarly, researchers engaging in critical analysis of metaphor in language may consider utilizing naturally occurring discourse rather than, or in addition to, interview data. This effort may reduce the chance of unintentionally smuggling our own understandings into interview questions in a way that leads respondents to our anticipated answers. Considering such efforts may also help us to, as Wray-​Bliss (2002) argues, ask what may have been left out of the account. We must simultaneously attend to the potential problems of expecting disenfranchised organization members to carry all the weight of speaking their truths, and appropriation of voice by the expert academic speaking for those previously silenced. This is a difficult but crucial task that demands we provide organizational members with the opportunity to speak, as well as the opportunity to respond to, reframe, or reject our analyses. Driver (2017) reminds us that, in allowing subjects to reject or reframe the metaphors we apply (i.e., the colored lens approach) or those we identify (the pigeon-​hole approach), it is possible to make space for both a more complete discussion of the relationship between researchers and the researched and also new organizational meanings in a way that is “not only more relational but also ethical” (Driver 2017: 560).

Moving Beyond Talking to Ourselves Finally, one of the values of generative or descriptive metaphor research in organizations is new understandings that may provide tools for creating more successful, more effective, or more equitable organizations. Critical organizational metaphor research may even support resistance to organizational oppression (Alvesson and Willmott 1992). Yet, organizational research, including metaphor research, is often not published in venues that organizational members can access. This makes it unlikely that our participants can respond to our claims regarding their organization or use the findings for change efforts in the organization. Additionally, as Aldag (2019) notes regarding critical research, writings frequently do not include any specific guidance for those who the work has suggested are experiencing oppressive conditions. We might begin to improve these concerns with tactics that expand the audience for our research. First, in addition to giving participants a chance to respond to our claims before publication, their feedback could be incorporated into the work. Second, we could engage the academy in embracing open-​access publication as valuable, and develop the availability of open venues in which we might publish organizational metaphor work. This will mean being available as reviewers, editors, etc. for such publications, even though they have less cachet in higher education. It may also mean this work has to start with scholars who have little to lose by not publishing in top journals—​those who have job security and have achieved promotion. If we can do this on a consistent basis, we might see a shift in scholarship expectations and publishing venues, which will enable organizational researchers at all levels to engage in open-​source publication. Third, if our organizational metaphor work proceeds from a critical stance, we need to

JUST LIKE A FREEFALL    325 struggle, as argued by Alvesson and Willmott (1992), with what it means to contribute to emancipation and how we might do so more effectively.

Conclusions Metaphor research in organizations, whether utilizing a colored lens approach or a pigeon-​ hole approach (Örtenblad 2017), acknowledges the power of language in our lives. It can be utilized to bring to the surface unstated ideas, implicit power relationships, and diverse understandings. In some cases, it may allow voices to be heard that are often dismissed or silenced. Metaphor research also gives us the opportunity to utilize creativity in scholarship as we identify or apply metaphors. However, there are potential problems including elitism, outsider perspective, failure to acknowledge multiplicity of meaning, and suppression of dissenting voices. With careful attention to the position of the scholar relative to the organizational participants, embrace of the uncertainty that comes with multiple meanings and voices, and true dialogic sharing of perspectives and findings with the stakeholders who participate, we can safely navigate the “semantic leaps” (Cornelissen et al. 2005: 1548) that promise benefits both for the field of study and also for organizations and their members.

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pa rt i v

T H E U SE A N D A BU SE OF M E TA P HOR S I N SE T T I N G S OT H E R T HA N R E SE A RC H

chapter 20

metaphors i n t h e creative jou rney Using Metaphors in Practice claudio biscaro and elena bruni

Introduction For most people who hike in the mountains, cockleburs are an annoyance. They stick to socks and clothes, sometimes even scratching the skin. George de Mestral, a Swiss engineer, after returning home from one of his hikes, looked under the microscope at the cockleburs that had clung to his stockings and his dog’s fur. Fascinated by the myriad of tiny hooks at the extremities of the cockleburs, he realized that that system could be replicated for industrial use to fasten stuff together. That is how the fastening technology patented by and known as Velcro was created. The Velcro story is one of the many accounts where a creative idea is inspired by a mental association. At the basis of mental associations is the metaphor, which is a cognitive and a linguistic operation (Lakoff and Johnson 1980; Feldman 2006), whereby an entity or domain that we call source is mapped onto a different one, called target. Through a metaphor, the target is seen in the light of the source. In the Velcro story, a fasting technology (target) starts to be seen as cockleburs’ hooks (the source). Research on creativity has almost univocally extolled metaphor’s value. In science (Hoffman 1980; Dunbar 1997), arts (Lingo and O’Mahony 2010; Catmull and Wallace 2014), and manufacturing (Nonaka and Takeuchi 1995), metaphors have helped individuals and collectives respond to problems in unexpected ways, offering new perspectives that have led to groundbreaking ideas and successful products. The reasons why metaphors support creativity are multifold. They can alter the perspective on a problem, reframing it (Schön 1993), support conceptual expansion and conceptual combination (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018), and provide a meta-​structure for creative synthesis (Majchrzak et al. 2012; Harvey 2014). However, while metaphors receive

332    CLAUDIO BISCARO AND ELENA BRUNI almost unconditional praise, research focusing on metaphor in creativity has too often attended to the very first moments of creativity, the ones in which the effect of metaphor is most evident: the generation of ideas, the moment of ideation, the “aha.” In this chapter, however, we take a processual approach to creativity and consider it as a long-​lasting journey—​note the metaphor—​that extends beyond the moment of idea generation to include the phases in which ideas get polished, pitched within an organization to become an innovation project, to then enter the market. In the creative journey (Perry-​Smith and Mannucci 2017), ideas compete for attention and resources, need to garner support, and might be ostracized if they are not comprehended. In this journey, many of the most outlandish ideas get abandoned and forgotten (Simonton 2010). Few get elaborated, fewer turn into products, and even fewer have success. Such a processual stance on creativity compels us to look beyond the metaphors uttered on production floors or within laboratories and attend to them also in the wider scope of activities revolving around the creative journey. In doing so, we shall see that metaphors loom large in the development and fate of creative ideas. We shall consider different ways of using metaphor by the individuals involved in the creative process (Örtenblad 2017). While all metaphors covered in this chapter are deliberately uttered, their aim wavers. At times they aim at presenting or categorizing targets as something else to facilitate comprehension, create common ground, or persuade. Other times, metaphors take up multiple roles. Used to describe, they end up being eye-​openers and instruments for conceptual innovation. Yet, they may also lead to confusion. We now move to the characterization of the creative journey to understand the needs of a creative idea in each of its phases. Then, drawing on the literature on metaphor in organization studies, we will dispel the notion that metaphors are just igniters of creative sparks and show the various roles they play in support (or hindrance) of the effort of the individuals involved, henceforth creators, to move creative ideas through the journey. Ultimately, we will outline practical implications.

Creativity in Organizations—​the Creative Journey Creativity refers to the process of generating or producing novel and useful ideas (Amabile 1983, 1996; Oldham and Cummings 1996). Because of this dual nature, creativity lies at the core of several organizational activities, varying from problem solving and increasing operational efficiency to the development of new products (Hargadon and Sutton 1997; Perkins 1999; Burroughs and Mick 2004). Most research on creativity in organizations shows that creativity can be fostered through work, knowledge, and dedication (Amabile 1983; George 2007), and, importantly, is influenced by the social context in which creators operate. Such context offers sources of inspiration, feedback,

METAPHORS IN THE CREATIVE JOURNEY    333 and validation, and may support or thwart the development and diffusion of ideas (e.g., Perry-​Smith and Shalley 2003; Hargadon and Bechky 2006). Situating creativity within a social context, such as an organization, foregrounds the fact that metaphor is not just a trigger for mental associations, but may enter the collective moments of creativity in which ideas are shared, negotiated, elaborated, and communicated. Hence, we borrow the characterization of the creative process advanced by Perry-​ Smith and Mannucci (2017), who described creativity as a journey where some of the ideas that arise in the mind of individuals are successively elaborated before receiving the support of a group. As ideas get increasingly refined, they turn into products, which will ultimately be cast in the market. In this journey, ideas may also be abandoned if they fail to receive sufficient attention or are not deemed convincing. The creative journey commences when novel and useful ideas are generated. This phase, connoted as idea generation, starts with the generation of multiple ideas and concludes when one single idea is selected because it seems more promising, valuable, or useful than the others (Perry-​Smith and Mannucci 2017). At this stage, the creative task is not to generate the highest number of ideas, which might be similar to one another but not useful (Paulus and Dzindolet 1993), but to generate ideas that are relevant and could offer a new solution to a problem, a new perspective on a story, or a new application that adds value. Idea generation has been described as an unconscious, hard-​to-​ control, and hard-​to-​anticipate process affected and oriented by external stimuli, such as stories, pictures, and even music (Zhong et al. 2008). However, idea generation is not entirely serendipitous, as creators can find ways to analyze, juxtapose, and compare even ideas that may be conceptually distant to stimulate the emergence of new ones. The second stage of the creative journey refers to the idea elaboration phase, where ideas are evaluated, clarified, and developed. In this phase, inconsistencies need to be removed for the idea to stand the test of evaluation by gatekeepers, who will, later on, decide whether to unlock the resources needed to develop the idea further. To illustrate, in this stage a research proposal gets refined before being submitted to a funding agency, a paper gets fully drafted, or the details of a movie storyline start to be defined. As this process is fraught with uncertainty because creators cannot ascertain whether the idea is sufficiently new and useful (Lingo and O’Mahony 2010), both social support and existing exemplars are needed to continue refining the idea, knowing that it is on a good track, shielding it from negative feedback, and developing its details (Harvey 2014). Next is the phase of idea championing, where the idea is pitched to obtain the support of the organization or the field’s gatekeepers and secure the resources such as funding, time, labor, or political cover that are necessary to continue the development of the idea. In this stage, creators need to articulate a compelling argument that stresses the impact of the idea, even when it is new and its value hard to assess by gatekeepers who are unfamiliar with the idea at stake (Elsbach and Kramer 2003). Moreover, the high potential and the legitimacy of the idea need to be displayed before the evaluators, who might otherwise decide to stop it.

334    CLAUDIO BISCARO AND ELENA BRUNI Last is the phase of idea implementation, which consists of two subphases. In the first subphase, the idea is transformed into a tangible object, such as “a finished product, service, or process” (Perry-​Smith and Mannucci 2017: 59). In this stage, a common understanding of details and a shared vision of higher-​order goals aid the integration of the activities, performed in various departments of the organization (Bechky 2003), to turn the idea into a tangible object. Subsequently, the idea—​now a product, service, or process—​needs to be accepted, recognized, and adopted by the external audience. Here the understanding of and a sense of familiarity with the product help its adoption by lessening resistance and suggesting a purpose for the idea (Hargadon and Douglas 2001).

Metaphor in the Creative Journey Metaphor can help inventors and creative organizations push their idea through the journey in a variety of ways. It unlocks new interpretations of a problem or idea, it may serve as a platform to promote a shared understanding, and it can be used to persuade important stakeholders and gatekeepers. Yet, despite its great power, metaphor is not always useful. Not only can metaphors fail to inspire new ideas (Gick and Holyoak 1980), they can also backfire if misused or if they are used abundantly in the process (Seidel and O’Mahony 2014). We, therefore, review what we know about metaphor in each phase of the creative journey (summarized in Table 20.1) to suggest how to harness its power.

Metaphor in Idea Generation In the idea generation phase, creators need cognitive flexibility to address a problem through multiple perspectives, coming up with new ideas among which to select one that is sensible and potentially useful for future development. In this phase, metaphor has great power, which is arguably the reason why it is even called “generative metaphor” (Schön 1993). Metaphor not only unlocks creative associations in the creator’s mind, but is an entry point for others into the creator’s mind, revealing the structure of their idea, allowing, therefore, a meeting of minds and co-​creation. Metaphors provide cognitive flexibility by enabling three different generative operations: conceptual expansion, conceptual integration or combination, and conceptual reframing (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018). We talk of conceptual expansion when an element is added to an existing idea or concept. To illustrate, the concept of coffee, originally referred to as a plant (target 0), is expanded via metaphoric associations with targets other than the original one: its beans (target 1), its grounded beans (target 2), its grounded-​beans brewed beverages (target 3), and even the places where the grounded-​ beans brewed beverages are consumed (target 4; e.g., in France and Italy, cafeterias are called café and caffè, target 0) (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Metaphors yield conceptual

Editability of ideas expressed metaphorically, making ideas malleable

Necessity of gaining expertise in the source domain to leverage source–​target structural Providing clear abstract models similarities and meta-​structures for idea refinement and elaboration

Persuading gatekeepers by rendering tangible the value of an idea

Idea elaboration

Idea championing

Negative evaluations of expert gatekeepers who expect precision

Anchoring cognition and leading to cognitive fixation (Gick and Holyoak 1980)

Scarce generative power of metaphors highlighting superficial similarities

Providing cognitive flexibility through conceptual expansion, conceptual combination, and reframing

Idea generation

Drawbacks of using metaphors

Advantages of using metaphors

Phase of the creative journey

Table 20.1  Metaphor in the creative journey

Deliberate description of the target as something else

(continued)

“In the Groupon-​like coupon business . . ., we can all expect a rolling thunder of new products from AOL.” Tim Armstrong, AOL’s CEO in 2011, talking to the public (König et al. 2018: 1199, emphasis in original)

Carbon nanotubes as tiny electric wires form a network with neurons whereby electric current can percolate between Serving as a benchmark against which to confront layers (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018) the developing idea Serving as an editable abstract model for the development of the idea

A categorization and selection of the properties of a target to highlight

Unconscious mental associations

Deliberate description of The paintbrush is a pump a target as something else (Schön 1993)

Ways of using metaphors Illustrative examples

Presenting new ideas/​products with features of existing products to establish a sense of familiarity with consumers

Persuading consumers by evoking meaning of source domains deemed of high value while hiding source–​target dissimilarities

Idea implementation—​impact subphase Cognitive costs in processing metaphors make distant sources not persuasive (Gkiouzepas and Hogg 2011)

Creating shared vision within a Multiple coexisting metaphors team of creators lead to confusion

Idea implementation—​ production subphase

Drawbacks of using metaphors

Advantages of using metaphors

Phase of the creative journey

Table 20.1  Continued

“We don’t sell watches. We sell dreams” (Raffaelli 2019: 592)

“We put silk in the bottle,” a shampoo advertisement (Mullainathan et al. 2008: 589)

Rendering the Toy Story 3 mutiny credible was possible when producers thought of Lotso as Stalin and the other toys as the dictators’s army (Catmull and Wallace 2014)

Electric lightbulbs designed to resemble gas lighting Attempt to disguise the technology (Hargadon and target, lower its perceived Douglas 2001) novelty, and increase the feeling of familiarity with it by borrowing features of a widespread source

Deliberate attempt to transfer meaning from a loosely related source

Deliberate provision of conceptual bridges to cherished and valuable sources

Tangible exemplar of what the target should be, how it might work, or how it might be done

Ways of using metaphors Illustrative examples

METAPHORS IN THE CREATIVE JOURNEY    337 expansion when a source’s properties become part of the target. Scientists use this property of metaphors to come up with solutions to problems. In particular, by comparing objects that share many properties, scientists borrow, apply, and adapt existing solutions (Dunbar 1997). Moreover, they also use metaphors as probes, to explore new dimensions of a concept, such as the scientists studied by Biscaro and Comacchio (2018) who relied on the metaphor of scaffold to explore carbon nanotubes’ three-​dimensional characteristics. Metaphors permit conceptual combination (Fauconnier and Turner 1998) when the systematic mapping between source and target leads to the emergence of entirely new properties. If conceptual combination is exploited by top chefs to create new dishes (Leschziner 2016), at times this happens thanks to metaphors. To illustrate, the dish Croccantino of foie gras served at the world-​class restaurant Osteria Francescana comes from the idea of croccantino, which in Italian metaphorically refers to a crunchy little appetizer. The dish then combines the concept of the croccante, an Italian ice cream bar with a crunchy surface and a soft core, with that of the foie gras terrine, a French preparation of duck liver (Due Vittorie 2011). Again, scientific breakthroughs and entirely new properties often emerge from the association and systematic mapping of concepts that had been separate, such as sound and waves or electricity and magnetism (Thagard 2012). Metaphors may also enable conceptual reframing. In conceptual reframing, the relationships between the elements of the target are remodeled after the relationships connecting the elements in the source. As an example, Schön (1993) describes a group of product designers grappling to make a synthetic paintbrush work. What helped them break through was the metaphor that one of the designers uttered, “the paintbrush is a pump.” The metaphor forced the group to reconsider the function of the various elements and their relations. It was clear that bristles had to create ducts for the paint to be sucked and released rather than hold on to the paint. However, metaphors differ in their generative power. A metaphor’s generative power is affected by the distance between source and target, by the amount of knowledge available of the source, and the depth of the mapping that source and target allow (Gentner 1983; Cornelissen 2005; Biscaro and Comacchio 2018). As to the source–​target distance, metaphors that compare similar concepts, situations, or ideas lead to less novel but more useful ideas, whereas higher source–​target distance leads to more novel, but less useful ideas (Franke et al. 2014). This might explain why viable solutions are more likely to emerge from metaphors comparing similar objects (Dunbar 1997), while the rare distant associations, when working, can break new ground (Thagard 2012). Moreover, spotting distant metaphors is far from trivial. In an experiment, Gick and Holyoak (1980) showed that subjects failed to transfer the solution from a military problem (source) to a medical problem (target) unless they were told to focus on the stories’ similarities—​a situation that in practice hardly occurs. The difficulty of recognizing distant metaphors reinforces the fact that they are rarely seen in practice. Second, extensive knowledge of the source allows one to “distill” more generative “juice” out of metaphors and even “stack multiple metaphors” on top of each other to

338    CLAUDIO BISCARO AND ELENA BRUNI further the interpretation of the target—​the reader has surely noted that metaphors are hard to escape. As structure-​mapping theory suggests, the generative power of a metaphor is connected to the profundity of the mapping between source and target (Gentner 1983; Tsoukas 1991). Thus, knowledge of source is positively associated with extensive source-​domain mapping, unleashing the creative potential of a metaphor. Specifically, Biscaro and Comacchio (2018) have shown that the hiring of an expert in electric engineering enabled a group of scientists to exploit for several research projects the metaphor of carbon nanotubes as electric wires (carbon nanotubes are tiny carbon fibers with many properties, one of which is conducting electricity). Moreover, not only could the group of scientists find deeper mappings between source and target, they also encapsulated the electric wire metaphor into other metaphors, such as networks and percolation—​stacking metaphors on top of each other—​to generate new ideas.

Metaphor in Idea Elaboration During idea elaboration, creators need support, autonomy, and protection to develop an idea, remove its discomfiting and noncoherent elements, while highlighting its essence. In this phase, metaphor’s contribution is limited but still valuable. While scant research links metaphors to social support and protection, some interesting findings link metaphor to autonomy—​albeit indirectly. First, by offering a blueprint, an abstract and not too complex representation of an idea, a metaphor can serve as a boundary object (Koskinen 2005), in the sense suggested by Star (2010), serving as a guiding principle that maintains creators’ bearing steady on a goal and to which they can return if they mess up with the idea. In this way, autonomy may be a consequence of a metaphor that helps establish a goal that is clear and easy to follow. Moreover, the metaphor can facilitate creators to enter a “creative flow” (Csikszentmihalyi 1996), the psychological state that increases attention and channels energy toward the enhancement and refinement of an idea. Examples of such use of metaphor can be found in architecture: for example, the famous architect Mies van der Rohe kept his bearing by holding on to the simple metaphor “less is more” (Carter 1999), where “more,” the source, refers to elegance and value, and “less,” the target, refers to the shape of buildings. If considered literally, on the other hand, less is more would raise more than one pair of eyebrows. Moreover, metaphors can facilitate idea elaboration because of their editability. At this stage, ideas need to evolve, guided by simple principles, which need to be flexible and adaptable to follow the pace of the idea. Creators often adopt so-​called epistemic objects (Ewenstein and Whyte 2009), which are evocative to suggest further modifications and improvements and are editable. Typical examples are sketches or technical drawings that stimulate discussion and can be adjusted to accommodate emerging interpretations. Metaphors stimulate discussion and are editable too. A useful illustration comes from the study mentioned previously (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018), where a group of scientists working on fixing spinal cord damage edited several preexisting metaphors

METAPHORS IN THE CREATIVE JOURNEY    339 (network and electric wires), originally used to describe certain material properties, to elaborate a more refined metaphor (percolation) that led to a new scientific idea and experiment.

Metaphor in Idea Championing In idea championing, the goal of the creator is to receive approval from the gatekeepers within the organization or the field to obtain the resources necessary to turn the idea into a product. In this phase, creators need to make a convincing argument and metaphor can be deployed as an instrument of persuasion. However, creators need to bear in mind that metaphor does not always achieve what it is used for. Key in this phase is to assess gatekeepers’ expertise and how they might evaluate ideas. Knowing whether gatekeepers are technical experts who care about the details, or generalists interested in the larger picture, or if they attach more significance to the prospects of an idea than to its immediate consequences is critical to understanding how to package the message that illustrates a creative idea. This matters because metaphors, by their nature of juxtaposing nonidentical domains, are ambiguous and open to different interpretations (Ramsay 2004), and research has shown that the reception of ideas communicated with metaphors is mediated by gatekeepers’ expertise of the target (e.g., König et al. 2018). Gatekeepers who possess expertise of the target value technical explanations more positively than metaphoric ones, finding them more useful. König et al.’s (2018) study of companies’ quarterly earnings communications finds that journalists respond positively to metaphoric communication, especially when metaphors are used to describe negative results. Instead, expert business analysts value the same communication negatively, as if metaphors were hiding the problems. When gatekeepers are less technically competent, metaphoric language drawing on familiar sources can help convey complex ideas effectively. For instance, Clarke et al. (2019) show how a combination of different metaphors describing familiar technologies, such as windmill and airplane wings, facilitated conveying the value of a complex energy-​providing technology to a nonexpert audience of investors. Moreover, to reinforce specific interpretations, verbal metaphors can work in combination with metaphoric gestures, such as the “constant rolling movement with both hands clasped in front of [the speaker’s] body and tilted inward toward each other, and with both arms then rotated outwards to indicate the progress that the company has made since its inception” (Clarke et al. 2019: 344). In the same study, investors were more likely to fund the ideas pitched with metaphoric language and gestures that rendered both entrepreneurs’ passion and their proposed ideas’ usefulness more transparent. Yet the effect of metaphoric language and metaphoric gestures may also depend on the characteristics of the idea (see also Müller, Chapter 4 in this volume). Although research on metaphors in idea championing is in its infancy, a recent paper has found that the ability to attract investment depends not only on the metaphors with which creative

340    CLAUDIO BISCARO AND ELENA BRUNI ideas are pitched—​whether they are described as “ongoing journeys” or “results-​in-​ progress”—​but also on the technological characteristics of such ideas (Manning and Bejarano 2017).

Metaphor in Idea Implementation As the phase of idea implementation is constituted of two subphases with different goals and dynamics, we shall distinguish them to understand what role metaphor might play in each. In the production subphase, creators need to reach a shared vision to ensure that all parts of a creative idea are consistent and can be integrated into a tangible product. In the impact subphase, the idea—​now a product—​needs to be accepted, recognized, and adopted by an external audience. What is needed, therefore, is to ensure that the idea is familiar to and legitimate in the eyes of the target audience. Research is ambivalent as to the contribution of metaphor in creating a shared vision (e.g., Lingo and O’Mahony 2010; Majchrzak et al. 2012). A metaphor may lead to a shared vision when it draws on the background of individuals involved in the production process or when there is time to explain it to one another. Musicians, for example, use metaphors to make sure everyone in the band understands what sounds and rhythms are needed in a song (Lingo and O’Mahony 2010). By referring to specific riffs and licks of other bands, or good or bad songs, musicians understand how to play their specific instrument. Similarly, at Pixar, metaphors sometimes help find solutions to problems emerging while animating movies. During the production of Toy Story 3, the scene of the toys’ mutiny against the mean teddy bear Lotso did not seem credible as it was originally produced. The mutiny was triggered by the protagonist Woody’s speeches. Yet, it seemed forced. A fix emerged when producers thought of “Lotso as Stalin” and the “other toys as the dictator’s army” that could self-​organize to overthrow the dictator (Catmull and Wallace 2014). While the metaphor might not have drawn on all animators’ backgrounds, they surely spent the necessary time together to unpack it. However, metaphors do not always help create a shared vision when individuals involved in production have different worldviews and difficulties of reaching common ground persist (Majchrzak et al. 2012). In this case, they might need to abandon the metaphor in favor of language that affords precision and clarity. On manufacturing production floors, individuals reach a shared vision by pointing out problems and illustrating them as explicitly and literally as possible, even bringing colleagues to the site of the problem to show why specific parts do not work, or cannot be integrated (Carlile 2002; Bechky 2003). In the impact subphase, metaphors can be used to showcase the characteristics and value of a new product, process, or service, increase its familiarity, and evoke possible uses. These activities are underpinned by two cognitive mechanisms: transference and framing (Mullainathan et al. 2008). Transference refers to the transfer of meaning from source to target. For example, the slogan “We put silk in the bottle,” used to advertise a

METAPHORS IN THE CREATIVE JOURNEY    341 brand of shampoo, draws on the metaphor of silky hair that the product’s audience may value. With framing, the source is intentionally selected to guide the interpretation of the target. For instance, a boxing metaphor can describe a trade policy. Interestingly, irrelevant information and particularly inaccurate metaphors may still enable speakers to attain their goals: using silk in the shampoo does not produce any effect on hair, nor is trade a zero-​sum game like boxing. Nonetheless, these metaphors help boost sales and the reception of a given policy. Distant sources can also be leveraged “to communicate new definitions and values” of products (Raffaelli 2019: 593–​4): “We don’t sell watches. We sell dreams” and a “beating heart” describe watches and their technology as a desirable fantasy and a living being. These metaphors offer conceptual bridges to distant domains, which are cherished and familiar, and served to relaunch a product technology—​in this case, quartz watches—​that had lost its appeal. Metaphors may even help design product shapes. Incorporating features of an already widespread product, such as its shape (Gentner 1983), increases the familiarity of a new idea (i.e., the target), evoking its potential uses. This may help even if the borrowed shapes are not ideal for the technology of the new product. The study of the diffusion of electric lighting in the USA demonstrates that Edison carefully designed the electric lightbulb to resemble the gas lamps that people already had in their homes (Hargadon and Douglas 2001). In doing so, Edison avoided confusing external audiences about the possible uses of the new creative product.

Conclusions This chapter has outlined and demonstrated the wide spectrum of creativity-​related activities that metaphors can assist, and in doing so it has tried to dispel the notion that metaphor just ignites a creative spark, as is often portrayed. In a sort of ebb and flow, metaphors shape the creative journey. The effect is predominant at the onset, as metaphor fosters cognitive flexibility and is an entry point for co-​ creation. If the metaphor turns into an abstract model, establishing a benchmark against which to refine an idea, it also helps the elaboration of creative ideas. When creators need support and resources, metaphors may make pitches more convincing—​but not always, as their impact depends on the nature of the trope and gatekeepers’ expectations. The ambivalence of the usefulness of metaphor remains when ideas turn into products. However, at the very end of the creative journey, when the product enters the market, metaphor can be harnessed to make the product more familiar to external audiences, facilitating its diffusion. This chapter has given little space to the problems that may arise when using metaphor. One of them is confusion. Metaphors are tropes that are easy to utter; multiple metaphors can be present at the same time and compete for the attention of creators, gatekeepers, advisors, workers on the production floor, and even consumers. When

342    CLAUDIO BISCARO AND ELENA BRUNI multiple metaphors are present, which metaphor one is to attend to could be a matter of interpretation, and then the creative idea might be pulled in different directions when a shared vision is needed—​exactly what happened in the study of Seidel and O’Mahony (2014), where creators had to ensure that creative ideas were represented by only one metaphor. A second problem is its inconsistent creative effect. One metaphor may yield significant creative variation that seems to depend on the source-​domain expertise of creators (Biscaro and Comacchio 2018). Indeed, individual knowledge of the source allows the identification of more structural similarities between source and target. This means that for individuals who are relatively new to the source, a metaphor could be an interesting idea, but it could run the risk of being abandoned because of the inability to follow up the intuition or appraise its value. In contrast, for experts the same metaphor could be revolutionary. We conclude by drawing practical implications. The vigorous impact of metaphors on creativity suggests that organizations could deliberately harness the power of metaphor to support creativity and innovation. We believe that organizations should find ways to stimulate the emergence of creative associations by exploiting the characteristic of metaphor as an entry point—​particularly for nonexperts—​into someone’s idea. Hence, organizations might foster idea elaboration and idea generation by designing moments of collective interaction where creative ideas, even problematic ones, are presented by outsiders to exploit the power of simple, nontechnical representations and different perspectives. Yet, we also argue for the value of precision, especially when individuals need to find common ground and elaborate ideas. Therefore, seminars and workshops where the pros and cons of metaphors are highlighted could help practitioners recognize when to strike a balance between metaphoric associative thinking and precision. Moreover, because creative insights may often come from association with distant sources, organizations should think of enlarging the set of creators by hiring or involving individuals who know something about the source—​whereas organizations often hire and reward only the individuals who know the target! Another implication is to be mindful of the use of metaphors when support for the idea needs to be garnered. It is important to know who the gatekeepers are and what they expect. Hence, tailoring a convincing speech accordingly (with or without metaphors, or with one or more metaphors) might improve the odds of getting the resources needed to continue the development of the idea. Ultimately, what can we scholars do to sensitize practitioners and organizations to attend more to metaphors? If the value of associative and out-​of-​the-​box thinking—​ both drawing on metaphors—​in generating new ideas is well known, the contributions and drawbacks of metaphor in the other phases of creativity might be less known. As we scholars approach a more comprehensive view of metaphor in the creative journey, what we perhaps need is a book fleshing out metaphors’ advantages and limitations, written with practitioners in mind: with less academic jargon and more examples. A book of that kind could be a bridge to connect the world of practitioners to the—​oftentimes—​ too abstract debate on metaphor. As this chapter has shown, stories to fill such a book already exist.

METAPHORS IN THE CREATIVE JOURNEY    343

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chapter 21

using metaph ors i n t h e management c l as sro om Conceptualizing Complexity, Exploring Mindsets, and Driving Change cynthia wagner weick

Introduction  Metaphors offer a powerful tool for preparing students to be successful in complex and fast-​changing business environments. The goal of this chapter is to help management educators weave metaphors from nonbusiness contexts into teaching and learning. Practical guidance is provided that will help students master the use of metaphors to grasp abstract concepts, gain insight into their own mindsets as well as the mindsets of others, and create original metaphors that drive organizational change. The ancient concept of metaphor has been popularized over the past 50 years by the works of linguist George Lakoff, philosopher George Johnson, and organizational theorist Gareth Morgan. A large and varied body of literature related to the use of metaphors in management has ensued. Prominent management scholars—​Henry Mintzberg, Kathleen Eisenhardt, Rosabeth Moss Kanter, and John Kotter—​have made metaphors central to their thinking. Interest in metaphors has grown to include a widened range of applications in business, new metaphorical contexts, and critiques of using metaphors. This interest has also led to a body of pedagogical literature on various ways that metaphors can be used in undergraduate and graduate management coursework. The most obvious use of metaphor is as a figure of speech or literary device, which leads to evocative communication. For example, Richard Thorpe, founder of UK-​based Gocycle, has likened his journey to start the company to becoming “a Star Wars Jedi . . . a

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    347 master of the art of designing the best urban electric bicycle” (Katz 2020). Drawing from her love of skiing, Frances Allen, CEO of American restaurant chains Checkers and Rallys, advises leaders to “have the willingness to throw yourself off the top of the mountain, otherwise you’ll never progress” (Bunea 2019). Metaphors, however, have an even deeper meaning. “Metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action,” Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 1) write in their book, Metaphors We Live By. They argue that metaphors structure how we perceive and navigate the world, and govern our relationships with others. In management classrooms, metaphors offer a powerful and necessary complement to more traditional materials: textbooks, readings, casework, and computer simulations. As is discussed in the first section of this chapter, metaphors are particularly well suited to helping students comprehend the complex, qualitative, and more abstract dimensions of management. The second section addresses how metaphors can be used as a tool to surface and critically reflect on the mental frames that guide behavior, often unconsciously, in individuals and organizations. The third section demonstrates how metaphors can be used to catalyze students’ invention of entirely new approaches to thinking and communicating about management. The last section presents a learning cycle, which shows how the uses of metaphor in management coursework—​to conceptualize and communicate complexity, to explore mental constructs of individuals and organizations, and to create novel approaches—​can build on one another.

Enhancing Students’ Understanding of Complex Concepts This section provides guidance on how instructors can incorporate metaphors into their lectures and course materials to help students better comprehend complex management concepts. Metaphors from a variety of contexts that have been developed by scholars are presented, as are ways to help students gain an understanding of the source domains of metaphors. The importance of using multiple metaphors in coursework to capture complexity is discussed, as is the need to spur discourse in order to reveal differing interpretations of a metaphor.

Management Metaphors Management educators are often challenged to convey complex and abstract con­ cepts: for example, strategy formation and implementation, organizational development and change, ethical behavior, leadership, and innovation. Business

348   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK environments have become increasingly dynamic, given the need to address sustainability issues and a widened range of stakeholders. This pedagogical challenge is especially evident when teaching less experienced undergraduate students. “Instructors will find that the concreteness of metaphors enlivens class discussion and therefore enhances the students’ ability to grasp the more literal materials found in academic texts” (Weick 2003: 333). Metaphors have long been used in management education. Historically, machine metaphors, which depict organizations as closed systems and highlight the goals of efficiency and profit, have been emphasized in, for example, Taylorism and operations research. Reliance on these mechanistic models has come under scrutiny (Mintzberg 2019). Pirson (2020) argues that a more humanistic paradigm that recognizes conflicting demands of multiple stakeholders will lead to more ethical and sustainable business conduct. Dervitsiotis (2004) has pointed out that business organizations operating in dynamic environmental conditions need to be treated more as complex adaptive systems, which have the capacity to operate in dual management modes, accommodating both stable and turbulent conditions. Eisenhardt (1997) developed her improvisation model to reflect the fast and flexible decision making required in rapidly changing corporate contexts. Weick (2003) details a comprehensive approach to teaching strategic management based on metaphors from a variety of nonbusiness realms, and includes a reading list that has been successfully used in conjunction with more traditional textbook materials in capstone coursework. This article is complemented by her book Out of Context (Weick 2005), which provides a collection of metaphors from sports, the military, Eastern and Western philosophy, evolutionary biology, and fine art. In the years since this book was published, management scholars have added to the reservoir of metaphors related to management; several of these are particularly well suited to classroom use. Below are examples that address a range of management concepts: 1. Bokeno (2009) posits soccer as a metaphor that offers a powerful alternative to a management worldview based on individualism, competition, control, efficiency, and economics. Soccer’s emphasis on genuine participation and collaboration fosters organizational creativity and innovation, which then drives business success. 2. Jacobides (2010) uses theater as a tool to understand strategy development in fast-​ changing environments. Organizations develop a “playscript,” a narrative that identifies characters and their roles, and describes plots, subplots, and story lines. Jacobides provides examples of companies in the pharmaceutical, advertising, and entertainment sectors to illustrate the theater metaphor. 3. Kanter’s (2011) metaphor of a camera lens aids strategic decision-​making processes. Just as a zoom lens allows for the reframing of a scene, effective strategic decision making requires knowing when and how to move between a detailed perspective and the bigger picture.

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    349 4. Fuda and Badham’s (2011) metaphors of fire (ambition), snowball (accountability), mask (authenticity), and movie (self-​reflection) help leaders catalyze individual and organizational transformation. The authors provide detailed prompts for applying these metaphors to elicit deep and broad discussion. 5. Page’s (2012) metaphor of stem cells can be used in fostering organizational adaptability and change. Through their ability to develop into a variety of cells, stem cells have the capacity to repair and regenerate tissues and organs. 6. Rottig (2013) has developed a marriage metaphor to guide the sociocultural integration of international mergers and acquisitions, with phases of dating (cultural due diligence), creating (cultural integration), and mating (cultural legitimacy). 7. Marshall et al. (2015) apply the military concepts of “search and destroy” and “hearts and minds” to human resource management in order to dampen the effects of manipulative employees who undermine organizations. 8. Fischer’s (2018) metaphor of Malay-​based halal markets provides a metaphor from a non-​Western context, and one with cultural associations to Islam. It offers a model of a global organization that operates as a network among the state, entrepreneurs, and markets; and which is embedded within a broader social, cultural, and political environment. Instructors can assign these and other metaphor-​ based articles as readings to supplement traditional textbook coverage of typical topics such as organizational types, strategy formulation and implementation, organizational change, mergers and acquisitions, and human resource management. Discussion can be fostered on how the metaphors reflect the textbook concepts, enhance them, or deviate from them. For example, consider the topic of organizational design, which is addressed in strategic management as well as organizational development courses. Mintzberg’s (1979) classic typology of organizations, which remains influential today, includes five configurations: the entrepreneurial organization, the machine organization, the professional organization, the divisional organization, and the innovative organization. After learning about this or another, similar typology, students can then be assigned Keidel’s (1984) article, “Baseball, Football, and Basketball: Models for Business,” and discuss which sports are best aligned with the organizational configurations and why. To stretch their thinking further, the instructor might ask students to use Keidel’s article to discern what sorts of leaders would be best suited to the organizational models. Building on the sports metaphor, the instructor can then introduce Bokeno’s (2009) article on soccer, and discuss how this model is useful in illustrating how a small start-​up organization can retain its innovativeness as it grows. Students can be prompted to consider which type of organizational type they would prefer to work in or to lead. Given that athletics is pervasive in many cultures, students are often able to think of other sports that can serve as models for business: ice hockey, golf, cricket, synchronized swimming, among others. Like other metaphorical contexts, athletics brings the traditional, more abstract topic of organizational design to life by making it more familiar and concrete.

350   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK Visual metaphors have been developed for use in the classroom. Aoki and Simi dos Santos (2020) rely on films to enhance understanding of leadership and organizations. Kassinis and Panayiotou (2017) have developed the visual metaphor of a helix, which they argue depicts phases of organizational change and stability more effectively than words. Mitterhofer and Jordan provide insight into the use of visual metaphors in organizations in Chapter 16 in this volume. Experiential metaphors have also been used for teaching purposes. Useem (2001) conveys lessons on leadership through taking students on mountain-​climbing expeditions. Audebrand’s (2010) “crafting workshops” provide students with hands-​on exercises in strategic management.

Understanding Source Domains If metaphors are to provide clarity to management concepts, instructors and students need to have a basic understanding of their source domains, the nonbusiness disciplines from which they are derived. Von Ghyczy (2003: 89) cautions that, while becoming an expert in a source domain is not necessary, the source domain “can perform its function only if the audience makes an effort to overcome its unfamiliarity with the subject.” Some metaphor-​based articles, including those listed above, provide background on the source domain. Additional ways to augment understanding include bringing in guest speakers to the classroom who have expertise on a source domain: for example, a symphony conductor, an athletics coach, or a stem cell researcher. Students can also be assigned original materials related to a metaphor—​Machiavelli’s The Prince, Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, Lao Tzu’s Tao te Ching, excerpts from Shakespeare—​or be asked to do research on their own.

Using Multiple Metaphors No single metaphor can be expected to express complex phenomena fully; neither will a single metaphor be able to reach everyone in a classroom. The solution is to use multiple metaphors in courses. “Different metaphors,” writes Morgan (1980: 612) “can constitute and capture the nature of organizational life in different ways, each generating powerful, distinctive, but essentially partial kinds of insight.” In their study of the impact of metaphor on student learning, Audebrand and Burton (2012) conclude that “the intentional use of a variety of metaphors provides a more comprehensive picture of the complex and paradoxical situations encountered in strategic management education and practice.” Akin and Palmer concur: Use of a limited array of metaphors can trap managers by narrowing the options they perceive as open to them in responding to new (and old) situations. Indeed, whole organizations can become locked culturally into a narrow use of metaphors and a correspondingly narrow view of the organizational world. (Akin and Palmer 2000: 71)

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    351 When choosing metaphors to use in management courses, instructors should also consider whether they are culture-​bound. Rottig (2013) acknowledges that the marriage metaphor he uses to describe mergers and acquisitions may not translate well across different cultures, such as those favoring arranged marriages. Keidel’s (1984) metaphors—​football, baseball, and basketball—​draw from American sports. Football in many other countries refers to what Americans call soccer. In addition, these sports are male dominated. As an antidote, instructors might use Keidel’s comparative frameworks to analyze women’s softball or any number of sports that are popular in different countries. For example, Bokeno’s (2009) soccer metaphor transcends both culture and gender, as soccer is played in over 200 countries by an estimated 250 million people, including both men and women. Instructors may want to intentionally bring in metaphors from non-​ Western cultures. Fischer’s (2018) metaphor of Malay-​based halal markets not only has cultural associations to Islam, it also offers a model for network organizations that are embedded in a global social, cultural, and political environment.

The Importance of Discourse Metaphors are subject to different interpretations by an audience, and their use to clarify concepts may therefore backfire. To illustrate the danger of misinterpretation, Reissner et al. (2011) provide the example of Kotter and Rathgeber’s 2006 book, Our Iceberg is Melting, which regards managing resistance to change in organizations. On the surface it is an allegorical tale of how a group of penguins successfully learn to survive by changing their lifestyle. This interpretation, however, assumes readers uncritically accept the roles and behaviors of the various characters. If they do not, the story is far less convincing. The solution is to use the metaphor as the basis for further discussion. This allows different interpretations to be unearthed such that readers can eventually come to a common understanding, which fosters more cohesive action. Writes von Ghyczy (2003: 91): “The greatest value of a good cognitive metaphor—​as it makes no pretense of offering any definitive answers—​lies in the richness and rigor of the debate it engenders.” If the goal is enhancing comprehension of a concept, instructors also need to put thought into which metaphors will be most familiar to students. Even so, it should not be assumed that all students will interpret metaphors in the manner intended. This is true for even common metaphors. An example is the use of “family” as a metaphor for business organizations. The instructor’s goal may be to convey close relationships in which people can depend on one another in good and bad circumstances. However, to some, family might connote patriarchal leadership and dysfunctional relationships. An effective way to demonstrate to students how even common metaphors can be misinterpreted is to spark a discussion in which they associate the first words that come to mind when they think of “family.”

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Exploring and Reflecting on the Conceptual Frames of Individuals and Organizations The second use of metaphors in management courses is to identify and analyze mental constructs in individuals and organizations. This section begins with a discussion of why metaphors need to be explored and analyzed. A method is described for evaluating how metaphors shape an instructor’s approach in the classroom, consciously or not. Processes are described for use by students as they explore their own mindsets, and analyze metaphors employed in organizations. Scrutiny surrounding the use of military metaphors in business is then addressed.

The Deep and Dark Corners of Metaphors The use of metaphors in casual conversation can be perfunctory. But metaphors can also operate very deeply in the mind, as “powerful paradigms that have associated values, beliefs, language, and action” (Weaver 2015: 2). To use metaphors intentionally in teaching and learning, these values and beliefs need to be surfaced. Moreover, as metaphors spotlight phenomena, they also reveal some things, but hide others in what Meyer and Gent (2003) refer to as “dark corners.” It is important to analyze what is not emphasized in a metaphor, along with what is. Consider, for example, use of a beehive as an organizational metaphor. As Birsel (2017) points out: A beehive can be the best of metaphors—​disciplined, hard-​working and producing a sweet product that everyone wants. But it can also describe an organization where everyone works under a queen bee and where there is little room for initiative-​taking and creativity. A place filled with drones.

In her study of a top management team in the defense industry, Longnecker (2005: 134) found that “[t]‌he team appeared to use the war metaphor as a means of emphasizing combat, competition, conflict, and threat to life. At the same time, the war metaphor obscured notions of the environment that could be seen as collegial, collaborative, nurturing, peaceful, or fun.”

Exploring Metaphors that Shape Instruction Instructors enter the classroom with linguistic habits and mental constructs that have been developed over many years. Lectures and course materials are laden with metaphors, which are used consciously or not. Audebrand and Burton (2012) warn

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    353 that educators need to recognize the possible impact metaphors used to frame business situations may have on their students. Instructors should make their own use of metaphors intentional by recognizing their own cognitive lenses and considering how these influence course content and delivery. As described below, this can be accomplished through:

1. 2. 3. 4.

identifying the metaphors used in course materials and communication; surfacing the beliefs and values that underlie them; analyzing what they emphasize and what they hide; and considering additional or alternative materials in light of course objectives.

Identifying the Metaphors Used in Courses Instructors should review their course materials—​texts and other readings, cases, and simulations—​for metaphors. Are managers viewed as coaches or captains? Do leaders orchestrate? Are organizations described as machines or networks? Are employees called troops or crew members? Is the market a battleground or a blue ocean? It may come as a surprise to find the number of metaphors that are used, knowingly or not. Identifying the metaphors that instructors use themselves when communicating material requires introspection. It can be challenging to discern one’s own lenses. As a starting point, sets of metaphors can serve as reflective tools: for example, the eight metaphors presented by Morgan (1997) in his book Images of Organizations; Keidel’s (1984) three sports metaphors; or Wagner’s (1995) continuum of Machiavellian and Taoist leadership. Which metaphors best describe the instructor’s approach to teaching? A colleague might be asked to listen for metaphor usage in informal conversation or by sitting in on a class. Alternately, students can be asked to listen for metaphors that instructors employ in lectures and discussions.

Surfacing the Beliefs and Values that Underlie Metaphors Once metaphors have been identified in course materials and delivery, the beliefs and values associated with them need to be surfaced. Do the metaphors imply that a single leader should be responsible for envisioning an organization’s future? Is decision making hierarchical or participative? Is a competitive culture preferred over a cooperative one? Does profit maximization eclipse workplace satisfaction? How important is trust or gender equity? Do the metaphors convey a global or nationalistic outlook? Are they predicated mainly on Western beliefs and values?

Analyzing What Metaphors Emphasize and What They Hide Considering what the metaphors in use emphasize and de-​emphasize can help instruc­ tors identify inconsistencies in their teaching approach. For example, if an instructor wants to convey the importance of integrating a broad range of stakeholders in decision making, it is counterproductive to base the bulk of a course on mechanistic organizational metaphors, in which profit and efficiency dominate to the exclusion of other

354   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK goals. Do the metaphors in use overemphasize competition and minimize the importance of customers? Do they reflect prevailing trends in the environment of business? Metaphors that depict strategy processes only as linear and algorithmic processes are unlikely to help students understand the demands of strategic management in turbulent environments.

Considering Additional or Alternative Materials The last step is to make any changes needed in course materials and the manners in which these materials are conveyed. Are the beliefs, values, and emphases of metaphors in use consistent with the course objectives established by the instructor? Will they be effective in preparing students as managers? Any gaps or inconsistencies that are detected can guide the redesign of course content and, if needed, revamp the instructor’s use of metaphor in communicating that content.

Exploring Metaphors that Shape Students’ Outlooks Like instructors, students do not come to the classroom as blank slates. They should be encouraged to undergo introspection and to reflect on the ways they see the world and express themselves. As an assignment, students can be presented with sets of metaphors and be asked to identify their preferences, consider the beliefs and values that underlie them, and ponder what the metaphors emphasize and hide. What do these preferences imply for the students’ approaches to managing others and being managed, and for the sort of organizations they would prefer to be in? Are their preferred metaphors aligned with environmental trends? Undertaking this process in dialogue with a classmate can provide additional insight.

Analyzing Metaphors Used in Organizations It is important to learn to surface not only metaphors used by individuals, but also those that are prevalent in organizations. In Images of Organizations, Morgan (1997) demonstrates how powerfully metaphors shape organizational values, beliefs, and action. How do metaphors-​in-​use influence the priorities set by organizations, and the roles and relationships of top leaders, managers, and other employees? Are metaphors implicitly and explicitly used and understood consistently within an organization? Jonczyk Sédès’ (2019) research has shown that conflicting metaphorical imagery among employees can jeopardize the success of strategy implementation. Assessing organizational fit is also enabled by employing metaphors. Using American football, baseball, and basketball, Keidel (1984) has shown how important it is for a manager’s approach to be consistent with the type of organization they are in, and what happens when it is not. For example, it is unwise for a leader who thinks like a football coach—​where decision making is centralized in a hierarchical organization—​to be at the helm of a

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    355 baseball-​type organization in which employees are empowered to make decisions more autonomously. Students can analyze the use of metaphor in companies profiled in trade journal articles and case studies. Greenhalgh (2007) describes a way to augment traditional analytical approaches of case methodology with a metaphorical approach that enhances problem-​solving skills and leadership potential. She has students use Morgan’s eight metaphors in an undergraduate management course to reframe the problems posed in cases in a manner that surfaces multiple and diverse perspectives. Taber (2007) incorporates Morgan’s set of metaphors as a tool for case analysis in his master’s-​level systems theory-​based course. Student groups interpret a common case through the lens of one of Morgan’s metaphors and present their results. The class then decides which metaphor or metaphors generate the best solutions. Students who are currently in the workplace can listen for the metaphors used in their own organizations and then analyze them. What values and beliefs do they reveal? What do they emphasize and de-​emphasize? How well do they reflect the organization’s mission and objectives? Is there internal consistency among the metaphors that are used? Are they appropriate to the organization’s environment now and in the future? What recommendations might the students have for changing the metaphors that are prevalent in their organizations? Students who are not in the workplace can apply a similar thought process to extracurricular organizations in which they are involved: social and professional fraternities, and athletic teams, for example.

Are Military Metaphors Obsolete? The use of military metaphors in business organizations has attracted scrutiny. Are they outmoded or overused? Cespedes (2014) has argued that, through their emphasis on battle and competition, war metaphors divert attention from the customers who are central to business success. Audebrand (2010) warns that traditional war metaphors, which are predicated on adversarial relations among organizations and a singular strategic goal of victory, are counterproductive to promoting issues related to sustainability. Before discarding military metaphors in the classroom, however, it is important to keep in mind that a number of CEOs have served in the Armed Forces (Lockie and Akhtar 2019), and likely draw from that experience consciously or not in their leadership roles. Wiener’s 2020 memoir of her experience in Silicon Valley demonstrates that the use of military metaphors remains embedded in the high-​technology industry. Students may themselves have military experience. While students should be encouraged to think normatively and critically, they should also consider what they may experience in their workplaces. Moreover, metaphors that are thought to be outmoded may spur discussion on why they endure. “Cultural metaphors,” of which war metaphor is one example, write Lakoff and Johnson (1980: 160), are often “imposed upon us by people in power—​political leaders, religious leaders, business leaders, advertisers, the media, etc.” Finally, while certain “dark corners” of military metaphors may be inappropriate for

356   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK business, other aspects may provide insight to organizations that place value on strong discipline, logistics, and efficiency.

Catalyzing New Metaphors and Driving Change “New metaphors,” writes Morgan (1980: 612), “may be used to create new ways of viewing organizations which overcome the weaknesses and blind spots of traditional metaphors, offering supplementary or even contradictory approaches to organizational analysis.” How can management instructors spur creative thinking in students using metaphors? One way is to provide them with an unusual context through which they think about business. Audebrand (2010), for instance, proposes prompting students to imagine how the business world would operate if it were similar to Pandora’s original inhabitants in James Cameron’s movie, Avatar. To help business students envision organizational cultures that are alternatives to closed mechanical systems, Starr-​Glass (2004) has challenged them to build on organic metaphors like a river or a tree. Assignments that require students to create their own metaphors are even more thought provoking. Taber (2007) has had MBA students write essays on original metaphors that best described the organizations in which they worked. Students chose metaphors such as a dysfunctional family, hungry bear, ant hill, budding flower, subway, and alien spaceship. In an undergraduate strategic management course, students invented original metaphors for strategy processes (Weick 2003). Their new metaphors included the music of Stravinsky and Mozart, Mexican dance choreography, and margarita making. McKenzie and van Winkelen (2010) have developed a pedagogical tool in which students are challenged to create original visual representations of complex knowledge management systems. Creating metaphors requires stepping beyond the traditional rational-​analytical approaches used in management courses. Students who are uncomfortable with metaphorical thinking should be encouraged to draw from their realms of interest outside of business school: for instance, participating in theatre, dance or musical productions, sports, or martial arts. Henry Mintzberg’s (1987) article, “Crafting Strategy,” was based in large part on observing his wife’s pottery making.

Metaphors and First Principles Thinking Creative metaphors are needed in management classrooms now more than ever. As future managers, students have to be prepared to conceptualize and communicate their roles in organizations in which social and environmental sustainability, climate change, a broad array of stakeholders, and gender and racial equality are central to

USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    357 decision making. What new ways are needed to conceptualize management when artificial intelligence, virtual reality, cryptocurrencies, and space travel become routine? The challenge to management educators is to encourage students to envision where we are now and craft novel ways to conceive and communicate where we need to be in the future. The massive changes on the horizon will demand visionary and powerful metaphors. How can management instructors encourage leaps in thinking? The most creative metaphors are ones that deviate from the concepts under consideration; these are generative metaphors, “used for the purpose of making the familiar unfamiliar” (Örtenblad 2017: 57). It may be best to encourage students to craft truly novel metaphors using first-​ principle thinking: building metaphors up from desired beliefs and values, and in consideration of what environments the future may bring. What fundamental beliefs and values should underlie future business organizations? What external trends are likely to surround businesses in the future? What new metaphors will best capture these principles and provoke “a new understanding of our experience . . . to what we know and believe?” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 139).

Driving Change: The Learning Cycle of Metaphors in Management Coursework To summarize, in the past several decades, management educators have learned more and more about why and how to use metaphors in the classroom conceptually, critically, and creatively. A rich repertoire of approaches and metaphors has been developed and tested. Integrating the use of metaphorical thinking into management courses is itself a creative process. Educators can select which topics will be most enhanced by metaphors, and which tools and resources will best help them reach their course objectives. They can be on the lookout for new connections between metaphors and the more literal and abstract concepts presented in traditional course materials; and for new nonprint media sources for presenting metaphors. For students to deeply understand how metaphorical thinking can drive organizational change, all three uses of metaphors in management courses can work together in the cycle shown in Figure 21.1. Instructors first incorporate metaphors into management courses to help convey complex concepts; this exposes students to the idea of using metaphors. With this exposure and comfort level, students are in a better position to recognize and analyze their own mental constructs using metaphors, and the metaphors that prevail in organizations. This knowledge then establishes the foundation for creating novel metaphors better suited to the future in which students will work. As managers, they will be better prepared to close the gap between what is in place now and the new vision: “redefining reality for organizational actors and enabling them to see familiar

358   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK

Conceptualizing and Communicating Complexity Students invent new metaphors to drive management and/or organizational change in the future

Students gain familiarity with management metaphors

Exploring Mental Constructs of Individuals and Organizations

Creating Novel Metaphors

Students recognize their own mindsets and metaphors that currently prevail in organizations

­figure 21.1  The learning cycle of metaphors in management coursework

situations or actions in a new light” (Heracleous 2002: 258–​9). The beauty of the ancient concept of metaphor is that the future is limited only by our imaginations.

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USING METAPHORS IN THE MANAGEMENT CLASSROOM    359 Cespedes, Frank V. 2014. “Stop Using Battle Metaphors in Your Company Strategy.” Harvard Business Review, December 19. https://​hbr.org/​2014/​12/​stop-​using-​bat​tle-​metaph​ors-​in-​ your-​comp​any-​strat​egy. Dervitsiotis, Kostas N. 2004. “Navigating in Turbulent Environmental Conditions for Sustainable Business Excellence.” Total Quality Management 15 (5–​6): 807–​27. Eisenhardt, Kathleen M. 1997. “Strategic Decisions and All that Jazz.” Business Strategy Review 8 (3): 1–​3. Fischer, Johan. 2018. “Forging New Malay Networks: Imagining Global Halal Markets.” Focaal: Journal of Global and Historical Anthropology 2018 (80): 91–​104. Fuda, Peter, and Richard Badham. 2011. “Fire, Snowball, Mask, Movie: How Leaders Spark and Sustain Change.” Harvard Business Review 89 (11): 145–​8, 167. Greenhalgh, Anne M. 2007. “Case Method Teaching as Science and Art: A Metaphoric Approach and Curricular Application.” Journal of Management Education 31 (2): 181–​94. Heracleous, Loizos. 2002. “The Contribution of a Discursive View to Understanding and Managing Organizational Change.” Strategic Change 11 (5): 253–​61. Jacobides, Michael G. 2010. “Strategy Tools for a Shifting Landscape.” Harvard Business Review 88 (1): 77–​84. Jonczyk Sédès, Claudia. 2019. “Mind Your Metaphors: Early Warning Signals When Rolling Out Strategy.” Journal of Business Strategy 40 (3): 10–​17. Kanter, Rosabeth Moss. 2011. “Zoom In, Zoom Out.” Harvard Business Review 89 (3): 112–​16. Kassinis, George, and Alexia Panayiotou. 2017. “The Helix of Change: A Visual Metaphor.” European Management Review 14 (2): 143–​63. Katz, Charlie. 2020. “Gocycle Founder Richard Thorpe: How We Plan to Rebuild in the Post COVID Economy.” Authority Magazine, June 29. https://​med​ium.com/​author​ity-​magaz​ine/​ gocy​cle-​foun​der-​rich​ard-​tho​rpe-​how-​we-​plan-​to-​rebu​ild-​in-​the-​post-​covid-​econ​omy-​ bcfb4​b9bb​cac. Keidel, Robert W. 1984. “Baseball, Football and Basketball: Models for Business.” Organizational Dynamics 12 (3): 5–​18. Kotter, John, and Holger Rathgeber. 2006. Our Iceberg Is Melting: Changing and Succeeding Under Any Conditions. New York: Penguin Random House. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 1980. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press. Lockie, Alex, and Allana Akhtar. 2019. “15 Current and Former Fortune 500 CEOs Who Got Their Start in the Military.” Business Insider, May 27. Longnecker, Jo L. 2005. “Use and Implications of War Metaphors in a Top Team.” Organization Management Journal 2 (3): 123–​43. Marshall, Alasdair J., Melanie J. Ashleigh, Denise Baden, Baden Ojiako, and Marco G. D. Guidi. 2015. “Corporate Psychopathy: Can ‘Search and Destroy’ and ‘Hearts and Minds’ Military Metaphors Inspire HRM Solutions?” Journal of Business Ethics 128 (3): 495–​504. McKenzie, Jane, and Christine van Winkelen. 2010. “Beyond Words: Visual Presentation as a Generative Process for Understanding KM.” Proceedings of the 2nd European Conference on Intellectual Capital. ISCTE Lisbon University Institute and Polytechnic Institute of Leiria, Portugal, March 29–30, 430–​9. Meyer, Gordon, and Michael Gent. 2003. “Metaphors of Management Education: Casting New Light and Looking in Dark Corners.” Journal of Management Education 27 (6): 631–​36. Mintzberg, Henry. 1979. The Structuring of Organizations. Englewood Cliffs, NJ: Prentice Hall. Mintzberg, Henry. 1987. “Crafting Strategy.” Harvard Business Review 65 (4): 66–​75.

360   CYNTHIA WAGNER WEICK Mintzberg, Henry. 2019. Bedtime Stories for Managers. San Francisco: Berrett-​Koehler. Morgan, Gareth. 1980. “Paradigms, Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory.” Administrative Science Quarterly 25 (4): 605–​22. Morgan, Gareth. 1997. Images of Organization. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Örtenblad, Anders. 2017. “Approaches to Using Metaphors in Organizational Analysis: Morgan’s Metaphors and Beyond.” In Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, edited by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam, 54–​86. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Page, Steven W. 2012. “Stem Cells as Metaphor Implications for Organizations and Organization Development.” OD Practitioner 44 (2): 29–​36. Pirson, Michael. 2020. “A Humanistic Narrative for Responsible Management Learning: An Ontological Perspective.” Journal of Business Ethics 162 (4): 775–​93. Reissner, Stefanie C., Victoria Pagan, and Craig Smith. 2011. “Our Iceberg Is Melting: Story, Metaphor and the Management of Organisational Change.” Culture and Organization 17 (5): 417–​33. Rottig, Daniel. 2013. “A Marriage Metaphor Model for Sociocultural Integration in International Mergers and Acquisitions.” Thunderbird International Business Review 55 (4): 439–​51. Starr-​Glass, David. 2004. “Exploring Organizational Culture: Teaching Notes on Metaphor, Totem, and Archetypal Images.” Journal of Management Education 28 (3): 356–​7 1. Taber, Tom D. 2007. “Using Metaphors to Teach Organization Theory.” Journal of Management Education 31 (4): 541–​54. Useem, Michael. 2001. “The Leadership Lessons of Mount Everest.” Harvard Business Review 79 (9): 51–​8. von Ghyczy, Tihamér. 2003. “The Fruitful Flaws of Strategy Metaphors.” Harvard Business Review 81 (9): 86–​94, 133. Wagner, Cynthia K. 1995. “Would You Want Machiavelli as Your CEO? The Implications of Autocratic vs Empowering Leadership Styles to Innovation.” Journal of Creativity and Innovation Management 4 (2): 120–​7. Weaver, Richard. 2015. “Metaphors Impact Daily Decisions by Managers and Leaders.” Global Journal of Business Research 9 (4): 1–​16. Weick, Cynthia W. 2003. “Out of Context: Using Metaphor to Encourage Creative Thinking in Strategic Management Courses.” Journal of Management Education 27 (3): 323–​43. Weick, Cynthia W. 2005. Out of Context: A Creative Approach to Strategic Management. Mason, OH: Southwestern/​Thomson Publishing. Wiener, Anna. 2020. Uncanny Valley: A Memoir. New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux.

chapter 22

metaphors i n ac t i on The Seductive Quality of Metaphors and Ways to Counterbalance It sonja sackmann

Introduction Over recent decades, metaphor has received increasing attention in the field of organization studies. Researchers have applied all kinds of different metaphors to organizations and organizational processes. The best-​known metaphors are the machine, culture, organism, brain, and transformation (Morgan 1986/​1997/​2006); less frequently used are metaphors of an amoeba (Flik 1990), Camelot (Schumacher 1997), gardening (Sackmann 1989), surfing (Martin et al. 1985), and traveling (Morgan 2001). The purpose of using metaphors may be theory building (Cornelissen 2006; Haslam et al. 2017), gaining a better understanding of organizations and organizational life (e.g., Morgan 1986/​1997/​2006), or researching organizations (Cornelissen et al. 2008). Hence, the metaphorical lens plays a significant role in organization studies, as Cornelissen discusses in detail in Chapter 2 of this volume. A metaphor may give new insights into organizations and organizational life, and thus lead to a better understanding of organizations and their functioning both for scholars and for organizational members (Morgan 1980, 1986/​1997/​2006; Tsoukas 1993; Grant and Oswick 1996; Schoeneborn et al. 2016). Furthermore, metaphors help organizational members to make sense not only of current situations and events, but also of future situations that are associated with uncertainty. Examples of such cases are (future-​oriented) strategy development and related decision making (Sapienza 1985) as well as situations of organizational change and transformation (Marshak 1993, 2002; Oswald and Schoeneborn 2011). A myriad of theoretical, empirical, and practitioner-​oriented publications point to the importance of communication and its critical role in organizational contexts in general, and for leaders in particular, including its appropriate use in situations of change

362   SONJA SACKMANN (e.g., Elving 2005; Frahm and Brown 2007; Kotter 2012). If organizational members can relate to the metaphor of choice, it may reduce their anxiety regarding the uncertainty of the future situation. In addition, it may energize them to implement necessary steps for moving forward toward the anticipated future. However, given their specific focus, metaphors employed may also seduce organizational members into taking particular actions while neglecting others, thus leading to suboptimal outcomes. The following sections briefly outline the nature of metaphors and their value for organizational members before exploring the inherently seductive quality of metaphors in more detail, and ways to counteract their potential negative implications.

The Nature And Value of Metaphors in Organizational Settings A metaphor is a word or phrase used to describe a person, practice, or object; its literal meaning is applied to a different context to suggest a resemblance, such as describing organizations as well-​oiled machines. Comparing organizations (target) with well-​ oiled machines (subject) provides additional information about the target’s structure, processes, and functioning. Hence, metaphors can suggest a functional analogy between the target and the subject. They may emphasize a particular facet of the target and render an abstract idea or situation more concrete. Based on their prior experience with the subject, organizational members associate specific meanings with the metaphor they are exposed to. They attribute this particular meaning to the target in its different context. Metaphors can stand for a thousand words: they create mental pictures in the recipients by drawing on their prior experience with the subject. This experience may include knowledge, actions and their consequences, emotions, scents, and the general atmosphere they have learned to associate with that subject. Thus, metaphors transmit a large amount of information holistically and provide recipients with a coherent understanding of the target (Ortony 1975). Due to the link with concrete experience, metaphors may render new or unfamiliar ideas and situations more tangible for organizational members. In addition, the clear image that a metaphor provides for organizational members due to their own experience with the subject and domain of the metaphor helps reduce uncertainty and insecurity that they may associate with the target. For example, when Carl Reichardt was CEO of Wells Fargo, he wanted every bank teller to understand the bank’s strategy at the time, which was, in essence, to provide a limited product range with the same reliable service quality in every branch. To explain this strategy to the bank tellers, he used the metaphor McDonald’s. He explained to them that “we are the McDonald’s in banking.”1 Most Americans have a clear image of what to expect when they go to a McDonald’s. 1 

Personal interview of Carl Reichard with the author of this chapter.

METAPHORS IN ACTION    363 Every McDonald’s restaurant in the USA has the same range of products prepared and served in the same way. The burgers, buns, and French fries look the same and taste the same, and they are packaged in the same way. Hence, the McDonald’s metaphor helped bank tellers understand the intangible concept of the bank’s strategy, and it helped them to perform their interactions with customers more confidently. This example also illustrates that organizational members need to be familiar with the metaphor’s literal meaning to develop its positive effects by producing a clear, holistic mental picture. If organizational members are unfamiliar with the literal meaning of the metaphor, it will not elicit a mental image. Or it may produce one that is different from the one intended by the metaphor’s originator. For example, if new bank tellers had never been to a McDonald’s restaurant, they would not be able to make the intended set of attributions. This may be the case when the metaphor’s originator chooses an idiom as metaphor and some organizational members have a different cultural background at either the functional, professional, organizational, or national level, and thus cannot relate to the metaphor. However, the positive effects of metaphors in providing more clarity and certainty in a nebulous situation come at a cost. Metaphors invite us to see the similarities between the subject and the target while ignoring the differences (Morgan 1986/​1997/​ 2006: 5). This concentrated focus leads to a rather narrow and reduced view of the target. Furthermore, metaphors are biased in that they emphasize certain aspects over others, similar to when using a stereotype (Hinton 2017). Like a spotlight, metaphors focus on specific qualities of the target, attracting recipients’ attention to these while other qualities stay in the background unnoticed. In the example of the machine metaphor, the human side of organizations and unplanned and emerging organizational dynamics are entirely ignored. Given the deterministic nature of machines versus the probabilistic nature of organizations, the machine metaphor may lead to rather inappropriate actions. In the case of the above-​mentioned McDonald’s metaphor, recipients may associate all kinds of different things with a McDonald’s restaurant that are not necessarily related to its limited product range and the level of service quality. Hence, metaphors may be misleading by ignoring paradigmatic, contextual, functional, or structural differences between the subject and the target, as well as differences in recipients’ experience with the literal meaning of the metaphor. In addition, metaphors have an often-​unintended seductive quality that may, however, also intentionally be used by the metaphor’s originator. The following section explores this seductive quality further.

The Seductive Nature of Metaphors According to the Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary & Thesaurus (2023), “seduction” refers to the attractive quality of something. Metaphors are inherently attractive since they elicit a holistic and tangible mental image in recipients. Depending on the originator’s choice of metaphor and the recipients’ existing experience base, a metaphor

364   SONJA SACKMANN evokes a vivid image including its cognitive, emotional, behavioral, and contextual components as well as potential actions and related outcomes. Once elicited, the holistic mental image is transferred to the target. It also suggests a particular course of action without, however, determining the actual behavior. Altogether, a metaphor produces a holistic mental image in the recipients if they have prior experience with the subject. Therefore, the choice of metaphor is crucial for the kind of image it can trigger. This choice is the starting point of subtly seducing recipients into selec tively focusing on a specific aspect of the target, with related actions and consequences, while neglecting other parts of the target. Cognitive psychology and its theories of perception and information processing (e.g., Solso et al. 2005) help explain this subtle seduction process. The chosen metaphor triggers an image in the subject domain of respondents’ experience. Depending on the extent of prior experience with the subject, its domain may vary in the amount of developed knowledge, the kind of emotions and potential actions it evokes, and hence its richness and complexity. While the degree of richness and complexity of the domain influences the elicited mental image in terms of its specificity and clarity, the chosen subject/​metaphor influences the focus. Once voiced by the originator, the metaphor evokes the related mental image associated with specific meanings and emotions in recipients. This image and its associated emotions and behavioral aspects are immediately projected onto the target in its different context—​usually without further questioning of potential differences in context and their related implications. Despite its holistic nature, the elicited mental image is a reduced and selective perspective due to the focus triggered by the metaphor to which recipients were exposed. Even though the mental picture is the recipients’ property, they are exposed to the originator’s metaphor, thus seducing them to focus selectively on particular aspects of the target. Other characteristics and qualities of the target are entirely ignored. Figure 22.1 depicts the process beginning with the originator choosing a specific metaphor to elicit the respective recipients’ experience and related knowledge, emotions, and actions. This elicited experience produces a clear mental image that the recipients transfer to the target. The seductive element is the deliberate exposure of the recipients to a metaphor chosen by the originator. In that moment of exposure, the recipients do not have a choice Originator

Recipients’

chooses

Metaphor

(Topic)

elicits

prior experience with the literal meaning of the metaphor in its original context: - Knoweldge - Emotions - Actions - Outcome & consequences

produces

Mental Image

associated with knowledge, emotions & potential actions

Seduction process

­figure 22.1  The seduction process in using metaphors

is transferred to

Target is perceived in a clear yet limited and distorted way

?

?

Choice of Recipients’ Behavior

METAPHORS IN ACTION    365 over either the metaphor or the mental image that emerges automatically based on their prior experience with the subject. Recipients may have a limited choice of which parts of their mental image they subsequently transfer to the target. Those parts of the mental image they transfer to the target render it tangible to them, albeit in a limited and thus distorted way. At this point, the subtle seduction process continues if recipients decide to take those actions suggested by the metaphor that seem to be more attractive than others. Even though the specific use of a metaphor and its elicited mental image with its attributed meanings suggest certain behaviors as being more attractive than others in dealing with the target, the recipients may consciously choose at this point if they want to follow the course of the metaphor’s suggested behavior or not. If they implement the suggested behavior without much consideration, they are still acting within the metaphor’s seduction process. However, if they explore the consequences of potential actions and then make a conscious choice regarding the action steps that follow, they break out of the metaphor’s seductive quality.

Illustrations of the Seduction Process This subtle seduction process of metaphors is now illustrated with two examples of natively generated metaphors from organizational life documented in the literature. The first is a top management decision-​making process in a highly complex and uncertain situation, the Cuban missile crisis in October 1962 (Kennedy 1969/​1999). The USA and Soviet Union were engaged in the Cold War. As a response to US ballistic missiles in Italy and Turkey, the Soviet Union moved nuclear missiles to Cuba that were able to reach US territory even though the Soviet government officially denied it. When a US reconnaissance flight brought back pictures of missiles stationed on Cuba, President Kennedy had to decide on the American response. He gathered a group of experts, including generals and diplomats, to discuss the situation. Given the Cold War context, the USA could not and would not accept nuclear missiles on Cuba. Hence, the goal of the expert group’s discussions was to find a way to remove the missiles without entering a third world war. In the early meetings of these highly ranked people, three options quickly emerged: a surgical airstrike, a larger airstrike, and an invasion. The surgical airstrike was favored as the best option for several days. Every person in the room had a clear conception of surgery and a surgical procedure. The surgeon removes an ulcer precisely and carefully with a scalpel while sparing the healthy tissue. The surgery metaphor elicited a mental image of focused precision—​carefully removing the missiles documented on the photographs. This mental image of accuracy seduced the high-​ ranked diplomats, generals, and politicians, including the US President, into believing that such a surgical airstrike could remove the missiles without any casualties. Given its precision, the associated actions and outcomes of the metaphor were highly attractive in the given circumstances and therefore it was considered the best option for removing the nuclear weapons (target). After several days of further discussions and exploring the

366   SONJA SACKMANN surgical airstrike option in more detail, including its potential consequences, the discussion revealed that the so-​called surgical airstrike was not as precise as the surgery metaphor suggested. Besides removing the missiles, it would kill not only Soviet soldiers stationed close to the missiles but also many civilians. The other example comes from the corporate world. Despite having an engineering background, the CEO and chairman of the board of a publicly listed company introduced gardening metaphors for implementing their newly developed strategy and the way the organization treated its people. These gardening metaphors were subsequently adopted by several of the company’s vice-​presidents. Regarding their human resource practices, they talked about planting seeds, watering, and nurturing. Since they tried to “gather around friends,” their selection processes were influenced by recruiting qualified people whom they also liked. Once hired, the company gave them the opportunity to develop by planting seeds in managers with development needs. When they recognized a specific development need in a manager, they would address it in a dialogue with the manager and/​or provide an opportunity for the manager to practice the individual behavior. Subsequently, they watered and nurtured their planted seeds by checking up a few weeks or months later and further exploring the development issue with the manager, mainly indirectly, using a coaching and mentoring approach. As one of the vice-​presidents explained: It’s a lot like Johnny Appleseed at work. You go in, plant a few seeds, come back another time, water those seeds, and see how they develop. Let’s talk about this. What do you think about this? How do you think this would work out? He’s tried. Some of it worked out, and some didn’t. He’s coming on nicely, he’s developing. Like all managers do, they have certain things to work on. So he’s still ways to go, but he’s getting there. (Sackmann 1989: 481)

The gardening metaphors introduced by the CEO seduced the vice-​presidents to practice a positive and humanistic orientation in treating and developing their people. They focused on people’s strengths rather than weaknesses and tried to build on their strengths. According to the CEO, the downside of the gardening metaphor-​enticed humanistic orientation was that these personal development processes took quite some time. Hence, the Vice-​presidents recognized relatively late if a manager would not or could not live up to their standards of behavior—​be it work-​related or personality-​wise. As the CEO explained, they should have parted with some people much earlier than they finally did due to their development-​oriented gardening approach. The two examples illustrate that the inherently seductive quality of metaphors has both positive and critical attributes. It nudges recipients’ perspectives in a particular direction that they may not have actively chosen by themselves in the given situation. Once the originator exposes the recipients to the metaphor, their attention and thought processes are seduced without them noticing. If they can relate to the evoked mental image, they have a clear picture in mind that may enable them to stay calm and keep a clear head in an uncertain, messy, and complex situation, as illustrated in the

METAPHORS IN ACTION    367 first example. Despite this seduction into placing their attention on a specific focus, recipients have a choice to move out of the seduction process and regain control by consciously deciding on the next step. As a consequence of the elicited mental image, they may or may not follow through with the action as suggested by the metaphor. In the case of the gardening metaphor, the recipients did. The consequences in this situation were bearable both for the stakeholders and for the organization. In the case of the surgery metaphor, fortunately, they did not follow the metaphor’s suggested course of action despite the time pressure and the pressure of some group members who favored military intervention. Hence, depending on the choice of metaphor and the context in which it is used, the seductive quality may vary.

Conditions under which the Seductive Quality of Metaphors Is Higher Several factors contribute to the level of seductive quality of metaphors. These pertain to the nature and characteristics of the chosen metaphor and the three stakeholder groups in the process described in Figure 22.1: the target, the metaphor’s originator, and the recipients of the metaphor. In case a group is involved, the group’s characteristics and dynamics also influence the metaphor’s seductive nature. The seductive quality is likely to be high if the recipients are familiar with the literal meaning of the chosen metaphor and if it is attractive to them. Attractiveness implies that the metaphor has a positive connotation for the recipients and seems to provide a potential solution for the target, as illustrated in the Cuban missile crisis. The level of seductive quality is high if the target is highly unstructured, messy, complex, and uncertain in the case of an event. In such a context, recipients readily adopt an attractive metaphor since it reduces the inherent uncertainty and complexity. In addition, if the metaphor’s originator is well known, has a high status as perceived by the recipients, and possesses a high level of power, recipients are likely to be willing to accept the chosen metaphor to frame the target. The power of the metaphor’s originators may have different sources (Raven 1992): it may be based on their position (legitimate power); the originator may have a strong personal influence on the recipients (referent power); they may be recognized experts in the field (expert power) and be well informed (information power) about the target, such as the air force general in the case of the Cuban missile crisis; or they may be able to exert pressure on the recipients using coercive power. Furthermore, the seductive quality of a metaphor is likely to be high if recipients are familiar with the literal meaning of the metaphor and if they have experience in the metaphor’s original domain. This experience helps trigger the mental image spontaneously once the metaphor is voiced. The metaphor’s seductive quality is also high if the recipients are personally insecure and have an external locus of control (Lefcourt 1992).

368   SONJA SACKMANN Their external locus of control makes them susceptible to external influences, especially if the originator has high status and power, and if the target has an uncertain quality. If the recipients belong to a group, as was the case in both examples given above—​an expert group in the example of the Cuban missile crisis and a top executive group in the corporate example—​the group’s quality and dynamics also matter. The metaphor’s level of seductive quality is likely to be high if the group consists of similar members who share, for example, the same professional or functional background. The metaphor’s seductive quality is also likely to be high if the group is highly cohesive and isolated from external sources of information. If such a homogeneous and cohesive group has a directive leader, who either is the originator or promotes the chosen metaphor, its seductive quality is likely to be high. The combination of these different contextual factors tends to increase the metaphor’s seductive quality. In contrast, the seductive quality of a metaphor is likely to be low if the metaphor is unattractive to recipients and has negative connotations for them; if it is unclear or weak, in that recipients have difficulty in seeing the analogy between the subject and the target; and/​or if the recipients are not familiar with the chosen metaphor. For example, this may be the case if the recipients have a different cultural background from the originator, who has chosen an idiom of their domain whose meaning is unknown to the recipients. In addition, the metaphor’s seductive quality is likely to be low if recipients are familiar with the target and it is clear to them what it implies. Hence, they may already have a different image in mind than that suggested by the voiced metaphor. Finally, if the metaphor’s originator is unknown to the recipients and has low status and no power, the metaphor’s seductive quality is also likely to be below. In contrast, if the recipients have high status, high power, and no experience in the chosen metaphor’s domain, they are likely to form their own opinion. Hence, they are less susceptible to the metaphor’s evoked mental image. The metaphor’s influence is further reduced if recipients are self-​assured and have an internal locus of control that makes them less susceptible to external influences. In the case where recipients form a group, the seductive quality of the metaphor is likely to be low if the group consists of members with a diverse background and if the group has a low to medium level of cohesion. If the group is open to information from the outside and its members actively bring or search for information from all kinds of outside sources, they are likely to question a metaphor’s focused influence. In addition, they can explore additional options. The metaphor’s seductive quality is also likely to be low if the group members consider each other at an equal level, listen to each other, accept each other’s opinions, and share leadership responsibilities. Table 22.1 summarizes these conditions of a metaphor’s high versus low level of seductive quality, which lend themselves to testing in future research. As the above two examples show, the consequences of using a metaphor may vary depending on the subsequent actions that recipients choose in handling the target. The various levels of seductive quality that different metaphors may have suggest that conditions exist that can reduce its seductive quality. Counterbalancing a metaphor’s seductive quality may be especially important if the target has critical implications. For

METAPHORS IN ACTION    369 Table 22.1  The seductive quality of metaphors as a function of contextual factors Characteristics of

Level of seductive quality of metaphor High

Low

Metaphor

• Attractive, has positive connotation • Compelling • Known to recipient

• Unattractive, has negative connotation • Weak, unclear • Not known to recipient

Target

• Highly uncertain (situation/​event) • Messy, complex • New to recipient

• Clear • Familiar to recipient

Originator

• High status • Well known • High level of power (re. legitimate, referent, expert, information, and coercive power)

• Low status • Unknown to recipient • Low power

Recipients

• Experience in metaphor’s domain • Insecure • External locus of control

• No experience in metaphor’s domain • Self-​assured • Internal locus of control

Recipients’ group

• Homogeneous membership • High cohesiveness • Isolated from other information sources • Directive leadership, no critical discussions

• • • •

Diverse membership Low to medium cohesion Bring in outside information Shared leadership, open discussions

example, this was the case in the Cuban missile crisis, and it may be the case when using the metaphor herd immunity to conquer the COVID-​19 pandemic.

How to Avoid the Potentially Negative Consequences of the Seductive Quality of Metaphors As Table 22.1 indicates, several factors contribute to the seductive nature of a metaphor. If we take the recipients’ perspective, they have no influence over the metaphor to which the originator exposes them. However, they have several other options in reducing a metaphor’s seductive quality. These are now discussed using the process steps in Figure 22.1. First, when confronted with the metaphor, recipients can reflect on what kind of experience they have with the metaphor’s domain and critically question their related experience in terms of knowledge, emotions, actions, outcomes, and consequences. Such a reflection influences the mental image that usually automatically emerges when

370   SONJA SACKMANN recipients are exposed to a metaphor. In the next step, recipients can critically examine the metaphor-​produced mental image and the extent of its fit with the target’s different context. Such a conscious examination involves critical questions about the target’s quality—​both those that the metaphor focuses on and those qualities that the metaphor neglects. Such a detailed examination will help recipients to take a more differentiated view regarding potential actions. Furthermore, it is essential that recipients also explore the consequences and side-​effects of the various behavioral choices they consider. In this process, they can eliminate those potential actions with adverse outcomes. If the metaphor is raised in a group that has to find solutions for a target, recipients need to consider the group’s characteristics and dynamics. In this situation, the diverse composition of members is critical. For example, in the case of the Cuban missile crisis, President Kennedy gathered people with different expertise and functional backgrounds—​generals from the air force, army, and navy, politicians belonging to different parties, and diplomats. In addition, he gathered people he trusted, such as his brother, and people who were critical and would also stand up for their opinion in front of the President. Hence, the group had a low degree of cohesion. What united them was the need to find a viable solution for the target. Furthermore, it is essential to question what kind of additional information may be helpful or necessary that the group currently does not have, and to bring that information into the group from the outside. During the discussions, it is essential that the formal leaders do not impose their view on the group, but instead hold back and listen to all group members. Furthermore, the leaders should actively invite additional perspectives to those of the dominant metaphor being discussed, including criticism and an exploration of the potential consequences of actions. It may also be helpful to work in subgroups on alternative solutions to the target, so that different kinds of metaphors may emerge that are then critically explored in terms of their associated actions and potential consequences.

Concluding Comments Metaphors are omnipresent in organizational life and organizational communication. Metaphors are especially helpful in communicating future situations, such as an anticipated change, and explaining a future state that may be nebulous to many organizational members (Marshak 1993, 2002) and may thus produce anxiety. Nevertheless, metaphors are also seductive, since they influence organizational members’ focus of perception and actions, and subtly nudge them in a specific direction. Thus, on the one hand, a metaphor may be helpful for organizational members, since it reduces the inherent uncertainty and complexity of a future state, such as in a change situation. On the other hand, the reduced focus may lead to choices of actions that are not appropriate for the new situation while eliminating viable behavioral choices. If recipients know about the seductive nature of metaphors, they can consciously reflect on the

METAPHORS IN ACTION    371 metaphor’s focus and the appropriateness of the mental image produced. They can critically examine if and to what extent the metaphor to which they are exposed can and should be transferred to the target with its different context. Such critical reflection and examination also allows for exploring those qualities of the target that are not in the focus of the metaphor’s produced attention. Future research may investigate the various conditions and effects of the seductive quality of different metaphors in organizational settings as outlined above.

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372   SONJA SACKMANN Morgan, Gareth. 1980. “Paradigms, Metaphors and Puzzle Solving in Organizational Theory.” Administrative Science Quarterly 25 (4): 605–​22. Morgan, Gareth. 1986/​1997/​2006. Images of Organization. London: SAGE. Morgan, Jayne M. 2001. “Are We ‘Out of the Box’ Yet? A Case Study and Critique of Managerial Metaphors of Change.” Communication Studies 52 (1): 85–​102. Ortony, Andrew. 1975. “Why Metaphors Are Necessary and Not Just Nice.” Education Theory 25 (1): 45–​53. Oswald, Simon, and Dennis Schoeneborn. 2011. “Von anpassungsfähigen Amöben bis tanzenden Elefanten: Wirkungsmöglichkeiten von Metaphern in der Wandelkommunikation.” OrganisationsEntwicklung: Zeitschrift für Unternehmensen­twicklung und Change Management 20 (1): 57–​63. Raven, Bertram H. 1992. “A Power Interaction Model on Interpersonal Influence: French and Raven Thirty Years Later.” Journal of Social Behavior and Personality 7 (2): 217–​44. Sackmann, Sonja A. 1989. “The Role of Metaphors in Organization Transformation.” Human Relations 42 (6): 463–​85. Sapienza, Alice M. 1985. “Believing Is Seeing: How Culture Influences the Decisions Top Managers Make.” In Gaining Control of the Corporate Culture, edited by Ralph H. Kilmann, Mary J. Saxton, Roy Serpa, and Associates, 66–​83. San Francisco: Jossey-​Bass. Schoeneborn, Dennis, Consuelo Vásquez, and Joep Cornelissen. 2016. “Imagining Organization through Metaphor and Metonymy: Unpacking the Process-​Entity Paradox.” Human Relations 69 (4): 915–​44. doi: 10.1177/​0018726715612899. Schumacher, Terry. 1997. “West Coast Camelot: The Rise and Fall of an Organizational Culture.” In Cultural Complexity in Organizations: Inherent Contrasts and Contradictions, edited by Sonja A. Sackmann, 107–​32. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Solso, Robert L., M. Kimberly MacLin, and Otto H. MacLin. 2005. Cognitive Psychology, 7th ed. Auckland: Pearson Education. Tsoukas, Haridimos. 1993. “Analogical Reasoning and Knowledge Generation in Organizational Theory.” Organization Studies 14 (3): 323–​46.

pa rt v

P E R SP E C T I V E ON M E TA P HOR

chapter 23

tr ansl ating org a ni z i ng and organiz at i ona l metaph ors From the Universal to the Particular hugo gaggiotti, heather marie austin, peter case, jonathan gosling, and mikael holmgren caicedo

Introduction: Metaphor, Movement, and Translation In the Rhetorica ad Herennium, attributed to Cicero, metaphor is defined thus: “Translatio est cum verbum in quandam re transferetur ex alia re, quod propter similitudinem recte videbitur posse transferri” (Cicero 1954: 342, emphasis added) (English translation: “Metaphor occurs when a word applying to one thing is transferred to another, because the virtue in seeming similar justifies this transference”) (Cicero 1954: 343, emphasis added). Cicero’s definition prompted two immediate reflections for us. First, the words he uses for metaphor and for translation have the same root, the past participle of the verb transfero, translatum (to bear across, carry, bring over, transfer). The term signifies the act of carrying over from one place or condition to another. Viewed in this light, metaphors are already translations, translative words. Second, his emphasis on how metaphorical similarity “seems” to justify transference reminds us of Michael Taussig’s equating of the power of “replica” with the power of transference and the mutual transfiguration of copy and original (Taussig 1993). Metaphors qua translations, movements, and travels are not only inexorable features of the social and the spatial; by displacing our vocabulary, we are capable of imagining

376    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL. and reimagining our world. Michel de Certeau, for example, draws attention to the literal relationship between translation, metaphorical imagination, and movement by pointing out that in modern Athens, the vehicles of mass transportation are called metaphorai. “To go to work or come home,” says de Certeau, “one takes a ‘metaphor’—​a bus or a train” (2001: 88). The language one speaks thus not only affects one’s conceptual system and behavior (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003), but also affords the possibility of experiencing the social; a point also made by Gilles Deleuze when he asserts that “modes of thinking create modes of living” (Deleuze 2001: 66). In this chapter, we explore the relationship between universals and particulars with respect to organizational metaphors, addressing the contradiction of the practice of translating metaphors from one language/​culture to another and the consequences of metaphorical imposition and manipulation. We base our argument in the apparent opposition between the universal nature of metaphorical reasoning and the extremely local and culturally diverse production of metaphors. This is also closely related to the controversial and potentially problematic practice of simplistic metaphorical translation and the propensity to crystalize metaphors. A claim to be tested in this chapter is that deploying the metaphor of translation helps to illuminate metaphor itself (pace Alvesson’s [1993] “second order” metaphor). We begin by showing that language is inherently and ubiquitously metaphorical; then compare structural, linguistic, and anthropological perspectives before applying this distinction to examples of translated metaphors.

The Metaphorical Nature of Linguistic Representation Lakoff and Johnson (1980/​2003: 244) argue that “the locus of metaphor is in concepts not words” and that the nature of metaphor lies in the nature of cognition. They explain that humans reason about one conceptual domain by systematically using inference patterns from another conceptual domain, resulting in a conceptual metaphor that consists of a set of systematic correspondences called mappings, between a “source” and a “target” domain (Kövecses 2010a). These mappings are shaped and constrained by our experiences—​experiences in which the two conceptual domains are correlated (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003). Furthermore, it is generally suggested that the source domain is better understood and defined by sensory input or content, while the target domain is the response or evaluation of the sensory input (Lima 2006). Thus, “the essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003: 5), and they are generated via the correlation between two distinct domains of experience (Lima 2006). But what does this look like cognitively? The ideas that make up our thoughts are physically “computed” by brain structures, and “the modelling of neural computation is done over networks with nodes,

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    377 connections, degrees of synaptic strength, and time lapses at synapses” (Lakoff 2008: 18). Essentially, when two neuronal groups fire at the same time, “activation spreads outward along the network links connecting them, which we experience as a chain of thought. . . . In situations where the source and target domains are both active simultaneously, the two areas of the brain for [these] domains will both be active . . . [and] neural mapping circuits linking the two domains will be learned” and strengthened as firing together reoccurs over time. It is these circuits that compose the metaphor. Lima (2006) describes primary metaphor as being grounded via a correlation in embodied experience. So, for example, the primary metaphor more is up is grounded via the correlation between quantity and verticality—​if you pour water in a glass, the level goes up (Lakoff 2008: 18–​26). Similarly, the primary metaphor desire is hunger emerges from recurrent experiences of physical hunger and the simultaneous desire for food. These cognitive operations are illustrated in Figure 23.1, adapted from Lima (2006). It seems almost expected, then, that when different cultural frames combine with primary metaphor, different metaphor systems arise (Lakoff 2008), leading to variation and, of course, potential misunderstandings. Take, for example, the metaphor time is money. In English, time is spent, saved, and invested, and thus reflects Western culture; yet not all languages talk about time like this (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003). In Kala Lagaw Ya (a Pama-​Nyungan language), there is an analogy between “windward/​leeward,” “front/​ back,” “up/​down,” and “before/​after,” and “backwards/​forwards in time.” There is the idea that one is floating in a canoe with one’s back in the direction of the motion, having, as it were, the past before one’s eyes and the future still behind one’s back. Thus, metaphor is not merely an embellishment of language, but a “fundamental scheme by which people conceptualize the world and their own activities” (Gibbs 2008: 1).

Cognitive Operation Source Domain

Target Domain

Domain of Experience

Domain of Experience RESPONSE/EVALUATION OF SENSORY INPUT

SENSORY INPUT e.g., direct sensory experience: UP HUNGER

experience derived from recurring experiences of verticality and hunger: MORE DESIRE

­figure 23.1  The cognitive operation of a primary metaphor (adapted from Lima 2006)

378    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL.

Ubiquity of Metaphor According to Lakoff and Johnson (1999) metaphors are based on embodied human experience. This speaks for the universality of primary metaphors because they are connections that emerge from our bodily experience of the world rather than choices: the warmth of an embrace is unconsciously and automatically connected to love and affection as opposed to the coldness of rejection and being alone. In fact, just living an everyday life gives you the experience and suitable brain activations to give rise to a huge system of the same primary metaphorical mappings that are learned around the world without any awareness. (Lakoff 2008: 26)

These “shared human experiences” are particularly evident with regard to emotions, reasoning, and even spatial orientation. Perhaps the most common of human experiences is more straightforward: the body, the environment it inhabits, and how the two interact (Johnson 1987). Though not universal in an absolute sense, there are a few metaphor candidates for near-​universal status: knowing is seeing (Sweetser, as mentioned in Kövecses 2010a: 198), desire is hunger (Grady 1997), more is up (Lakoff 2008), and an angry person is a pressurized container (Kövecses 2000). However, Kövecses (2010b) highlights the inevitable fact that “the universal bodily basis on which universal metaphors could be built may not be utilized in the same way or to the same extent in different languages” (Kövecses 2010b: 753). He proposes three main systems that play an important part in determining a metaphor’s degree of universality or variation: (1) bodily experience (embodiment), (2) social-​cultural experience (context), and (3) cognitive preferences and styles (Kövecses 2005). From this premise it follows that metaphors are fundamental to our experience and understanding of culture (Kövecses 2005). Yet, as there are varied cultures in the world and a myriad of different metaphors, we misunderstand because we do not possess the necessary cultural equipment and conditioning to comprehend them. Yu (2008) eloquently explains this by pointing out that [w]‌hile the body is a potentially universal source for emerging metaphors, culture functions as a filter that selects aspects of sensorimotor experience and connects them with subjective experiences and judgments for metaphorical mappings. That is, metaphors are grounded in bodily experience but shaped by cultural understanding. (Yu 2008: 247)

In this sense it may ultimately prove futile to try to establish the facticity of universal metaphors (i.e., metaphors whose meaning and use can be found in every human language). Nonetheless, we would claim that metaphor itself is structurally universal and is an invariable feature of linguistic communicative conduct. This universality has been explored in considerable depth by a range of structuralists approaching the issue from

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    379 different disciplinary perspectives, including, inter alia: linguistics (de Saussure 1916/​ 1986; Chomsky 1957), anthropology (Lévi-​Strauss 1963, 1967), analytic psychology (Jung 1969), literary theory (Burke 1969) and cognitive linguistics (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​ 2003; Kövecses 2000, 2005, 2010b; Gibbs 2008; Morin 2015). While space prevents us from exploring each of these disciplinary arguments in depth, we shall draw selectively on them to explore differing approaches to understanding the origins, meanings, and uses of metaphor.

Understanding Metaphor: Disciplinary Perspectives We consider various disciplinary perspectives to metaphor. Structural perspectives tend to emphasize the universal use of metaphorizing; linguistic perspectives are concerned with the technical functioning of metaphor (in different languages); while anthropological perspectives point out the cultural relativism of their uses. We do not offer a clear for/​against position as our main contention is that metaphorizing is universal in its capacity and particular in its operations.

Structural Perspectives Attempting to discover universal metaphor has so far led only to (near-​)universal candidates; it might therefore be more promising to concentrate on the ubiquity of metaphor not as a substantive but as a verb. Metaphorizing, if we call it that, is the ability to bring out the “thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this” (Burke 1969: 503) by transferring an alien name and applying it to something: technically the tenor, which is the literal subject, and the vehicle, which is the figurative connection, bring their own contexts, not all parts of which become active in the exchange that creates the metaphor. Metaphorizing is thus a translatio in Cicero’s terms that performs “a transaction between contexts” (Richards 1967: 95) in order to produce interaction between them. Effectively, as Burke writes, such an operation has not only a figurative but also a literal usage inasmuch as it is “a device for seeing something in terms of something else” (1969: 503), an action of “seeing as” (Burke 1984), and the invention of perspective, which as we have seen is a product of our being in the world. It operates through selection and offers new perspectives and therefore new information about objects, processes, or events. In effect, “as one learns to ‘literalize’ a metaphorical perspective, one develops an ‘orientation’ toward the world” (Schiappa 1993: 405), which is to say a “general view of reality” (Burke 1984: 3–​14), a “bundle of judgements as to how things were, how they are, and how they may be” (Burke 1984: 81), or a “system of meanings” (Burke 1984: 118).

380    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL. This means also, as Aristotle (1951) tells us, that making metaphors—​ that is, metaphorizing—​brings about learning and understanding insofar as it is through metaphors that we share our world, literally by way of our words. The universal movement that metaphorizing implies helps us to learn new things from each other. However, as we do not always understand others’ metaphorizing, this forces us to shift our perspective in perhaps even more innovative ways, including through the use of translation: we all use metaphor, but we mistake each other’s meaning nonetheless.

Linguistic Perspectives While the Chomskyan linguistics of the 1950s focused on the structure of language, with meaning being seen as “interpretive” and thus only a secondary aspect of language study, another area of linguistics with a vastly different approach called cognitive linguistics began to develop as a field in the 1970s (International Cognitive Linguistics Association n.d.). Cognitive linguistics focuses on language and the mind, asserting that meaning is such a fundamental part of language that it should be the main focus of linguistic study, particularly in the mappings between form and meaning, considering that the main function of linguistic structures is to express meaning (International Cognitive Linguistics Association n.d.). Much research has been done over the years that attempts to give more insight into cognition and metaphor, leading cognitive linguists and scientists to believe that the same cognitive operations humans use to make sense of language (i.e., categorizing, framing knowledge, and metaphorical understanding) are used to make sense of experience (Morin 2015). Perhaps more remarkably, some languages, even those far removed from each other, share identical conceptual metaphors, even down to the linguistic expression that is used to express them. Kövecses (2010b) presents three potential reasons for this: (1) by some miracle all languages developed the same conceptual metaphor, (2) languages possibly borrow metaphors from each other, or arguably more likely, (3) the possibility that there is some sort of shared, universal underpinning that made way for the same metaphors to develop among diverse and far-​removed languages. However, he also points out that the way one person in one culture uses their cognitive operations to make sense of something, as well as which cognitive operations they use, is not universal by any means. Thus, it may not be the linguistic metaphor that has universal potential, but the conceptual one, and even still it may not be exactly the same in its focus. This can especially be seen with the concept of the embodied experience of anger in Chinese, which focuses on anger as pressure, and in English, which focuses on anger as heat and pressure (King 1989; Yu 1995). Hence, the term near-​universal is often used to describe such metaphor. Further examples regarding complex organizational metaphor are evident in Case et al. (2017) when discussing Gareth Morgan’s international bestseller, Images of Organization (1986), which is widely used in Management and Organization Theory courses. Malaysian MBA students interpreted the metaphor “organization as machine” differently from Morgan’s intended Western meaning—​in

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    381 the Malay language, this metaphor would be interpreted as the organization being “something like a robot” because, unlike in Anglophone contexts, the human and the nonhuman are not easily distinguished in the concept that Malays have of a “mechanistic view” (Case et al. 2017: 237). Consequently, instructors using Morgan’s book in international settings must be careful in highlighting certain metaphorical interpretations, as the semantic force of a particular metaphor can vary so much across differing cultural and linguistic contexts.

Anthropological Perspectives Anthropologically, metaphorizing is not universal, but always ethnically constructed and practiced in a wide variety of forms that communicate an equally diverse range of understandings. It could imply even translations between social practices like working and existential conceptions of the individual, the family, or entire communities. The work of the anthropologist Olivia Harris (2010) on the meaning of work among the Aymara serves to illustrate our points. Indeed, Aymara people prefer to refer to work not with one word and multiple metaphors but with a constellation of words, and sometimes different words for the same work depending on the social context (see Table 23.1). Reflecting on how culturally and historically constructed the meaning of work can be among the Aymara, Harris (2000) underlines that to “work” implies the affirmation of human personhood, the nature of domestic relations and of the community to which Table 23.1  The Aymara vocabulary of work (adapted from Bertonio 1612/​1956; Harris 2010) Ayratha

to work in two farms the same day

yapu alekhattatha, hallakhchatha

to work in the farm without raising your head

cchamatatatha, tuli-​tatatha, meqquetatha, phutitathata

to work hard

thalatha, arasa liuisitha

to work until exhaustion

Kichisitha

to work diligently as a good worker

paraquenacatha, halanacatha

to work hard without feeling tired

Thayllitha

to work a lot walking or grinding quinoa

Urujaatha

to work all day

Añancutha

to work as two people

iranacaña, locanacaña

to labor

yanastha

to work in the company of others to make a house, or a farm, or similar things

Yanasiri

the one who willingly goes to do the collective work

añancuri, kutu, kichisiri, hani pali

a very big/​hard worker

382    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL. the Aymara belong. Evidence of this is how Aymara construct the division of labor between husband and wife and represent the home economy: it is the man who handles the plough and the woman who provides food, but this division of labor is at the same time an act of metaphorical seduction. Harris notes that when Aymara praise human energy when ploughing and feeding, they use the word wapu for both male and female work, a semantic borrowing from the Castilian guapo, meaning “attractive.” As such, it seems that a sexual connotation is expressed in Aymara in reference to the spirit of work: those who are not wapu will be branded as lazy, be they women or men, and finding a mate will be challenging. Wapu women are also those who give birth. Taussig’s (1993) treatment of the totemic figures of the Cuna as vehicles of translation also resonates with the Aymara’s linguistic practices. When describing the curing figurines of Cuna culture in Panama, he refers to the power of multifaceted replication. The Cuna developed a practice of modelling figurines which replicated an individual who was sick in the belief that such ritual mimesis would have curative effects. While the primary purpose may have been to cure, Taussig points out that the figurine replicas came to serve a much wider purpose in understanding and making sense of self and other; in particular, the colonist in relation to the Cuna. The mimetic figurines not only resemble the qualities of their referents, but also function to transform social relations. As Taussig (1993) remarks: Note the magical, the soulful power that derives from replication . . . the image affecting what it is an image of, wherein the representation shares in or takes power from the represented . . . (Taussig 1993: 2)

The way the Cuna treat illness with the figurines has interesting resonances with the different ways of metaphorizing we usually understand, by translating meanings from one place to another. According to Taussig, the Cuna base their cures on the creation of a set of multiple displacements of social meanings surrounding the illness. The “other-​as-​ figurine” becomes an agent that everyone, including the afflicted individual represented, associates with the illness, thereby contributing collectively to the cure. Metaphorizing became multi-​situated and understood by the Cuna as a collective and individual simultaneous act of translation. Thus in spite of the universality of metaphorizing, linguistic and cultural particular­ ities confound attempts to generalize their interpretations.

Translating the Translated The foregoing perspectives have indicated the difficulty in arriving at universal interpretations or meanings or metaphors. This section explores the challenges of translating them. It is likely that the quality of translation much depends on the translator’s level of expertise. Jensen (2017), for instance, posits that accurately

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    383 translating metaphorical expressions requires competence developed through experience, and this competence would include cross-​ cultural knowledge, an awareness of the pragmatic, semantic and textual function of the metaphor, as well as an understanding of the duality of metaphors as both mental concepts and linguistic expressions. (Jensen 2017: 204)

Furthermore, Giora (2008: 156) contends that whether or not metaphoric translations are actually interpreted as intended likely has little to do with words/​phrases/​sentences being literal or nonliteral at all. Instead, she proposes the concept of a “salient-​nonsalient continuum,” suggesting that meanings are accessed according to their level of salience rather than their literal/​nonliteral distinction. An example of a novel pun from an English text in Haaretz (Ettinger 2004) is given in reference to the issues the Israeli occupation has caused for Palestinian families: Till barriers do them part. “This pun has a salient meaning in its association with a common phrase appearing in marriage vows: Till death do us part” (Giora 2008: 143). Yet, this pun likely becomes less salient when translated into another language considering the fact that these marriage vows, albeit common in English-​speaking countries, are not universal. For example, one of the authors, a native English-​speaking American, did not exchange marriage vows when marrying her Turkish husband in Turkey, instead responding to the standard Turkish alternative: “Without any pressure or influence and with your free will, do you accept him/​her as your husband/​wife?” Turks therefore may not catch Ettinger’s (2004) pun if it is translated into Turkish because its salience relies on both a cultural usage of English and a play on words relating to the Israeli and Palestinian conflict. Cultural practices and even location affect language knowledge and language use, including metaphor, and thus they are not static. Further still, translations may be successful in capturing the main idea of a metaphor, but perhaps not its entire essence. When analyzing native Russian and native Croatian speakers’ understanding of three Russian translations of a Croatian poem (each translated by translators with varying levels of Russian and Croatian proficiency), Božić (2018) determined that although the notion of love and friendship is transferred—​the complete magical enchantment of the poem—​wasn’t (the same message but in a different degree). What is the reason? Is it because of language differences, cultural background or translational skills? The answer is yet to be found. (Božić 2018: 96)

This can be further demonstrated when comparing the following three translations of a passage from c­ hapter 64 of the Tao Te Ching: A journey of a thousand li commenced with a single step. (Legge 1891: 108) The journey of a thousand miles starts from beneath your feet. (Mitchell 1999: 72) A thousand li journey begins when you are sufficiently connected to the Earth. (Sheets and Tovey 2002: 64)

384    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL. Each is informed by a distinct cosmology. The 1891 English translation is by a distin­ guished Western orientalist who had literally journeyed by land and sea to China; it is redolent with a colonial worldview in which the Earth and those who walk upon it are in an object–​subject relationship. The 1999 version (Mitchell 1999) (like many others in the 20th century) evokes self-​centered recollection and individual responsibility, fundamental to neoliberal confidence. By 2002 (Sheets and Tovey 2002) neither the Earth nor the sovereign individual exists alone: possibilities emerge only in interdependence with nature. The quality of meaning in the text is dependent upon a translator interpreting the metaphor “correctly”—​that is, to evoke resonance within the reader. Yet, the translator could choose or accidentally invoke a meaning that the source text writer did not intend, and if this happens, the translated work as a whole may take on a different meaning or have a different effect than those of the source text (Jensen 2017). Translation is indeed a great responsibility when considering both the contextual and linguistic effort involved in staying true to the magic of the original text and its author’s more and less conscious intentions when writing it. When applying this to a singular metaphor—​say, an organizational metaphor used within the business field—​the implications of “incorrect” translations can lead to even larger discrepancies in meaning at the point where the expected business register of each language and the sociocultural background of the translator meet. The variation in metaphors across cultures is perhaps best characterized by the Italian adage “traduttore, traditore” (English translation: “translator, traitor”). The so-​called pun lies simply in the fact that traduttore and traditore are very similar words in spelling and sound. Through the sacrifice of some aspect in the original text, a translator is indeed a traitor, committing treason to the author, or to the reader (of the translated text). Hence its meaning, “[the] translator is [a]‌traitor”!

Illustrations Specific images themselves have differing cultural meanings and thus affect how we make sense of metaphors that may include them. Direct translation of metaphors, especially personal ones, is problematic when sources have multiple connotations that are deeply rooted in their cultural context. The following three illustrations in three different contexts illustrate some of our points.

“Two Heads Are Better Than One” versus “What Does One Hand Have? Two Hands Have Sound” Two heads are better than one, right? Many in Western organizations would agree with this common English idiomatic expression, especially regarding tasks involving

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    385 teamwork or collaboration. One of the authors used this expression with her upper-​ intermediate English class at a university in Turkey. After some careful thought, they were able to come up with the Turkish version: “Bir elin nesi var? İki elin sesi var [What does one hand have? Two hands have sound]”—​implying that one hand has nothing, of course. Here the meaning of the English expression was transferable to the extent that the students were able to find the Turkish equivalent and thus found it personally salient (Giora 2008), though the meanings are not exactly the same. Still, the shared concept of quantity between the two expressions—​that is, more than one-​ness to achieve something—​was salient enough for the students to replace the English version with the local Turkish one despite the underlying discrepancy in the translation.

“Greenwash/​Bluewash” versus “Communal Vessel” In a well-​known Japanese electronics company, the concept of gong qi (communal vessel, 公器) is deployed as a metaphor for “corporation.” The multilayered meanings of gong qi emerge from an analysis of its ideograms (Dai et al. 2020), with references into classical philosophies and associations to contemporary application in China. Gong qi—​the kind of vessel in which offerings to ancestors might be made—​imagines a corporation as an inclusive and virtuous social entity, and addresses the elusive, implicit, and forever-​ evolving nature of organizational life that is itself communal, of no fixed meaning, and therefore rarely noticed. Applying this to ethics, Dai et al. (2020) suggest that rather than considering virtue as a list of definable individual qualities, the metaphor of gong qi reveals how virtue can be experienced as indeterminate, yet immanently present, like the substance of emptiness. This, then allows us to see the virtue of immanence, the beauty of implicitness, and hence, the efficacy of gong qi. (Dai et al. 2020: 277)

In this example, while the metaphor is contextually and linguistically dependent, at least one of its discursive functions is familiar—​to assert a unitary view of the organization.

“Organizations as Machines” and “Machines as Orchestras” Discussing the use of metaphors in Mandarin in reference to the car industry, a participant of a research project (Gaggiotti 2012) explained to one of the authors the following double metaphorizing loop: When thinking on organizations I always refer to the 组织像机器 [Zǔzhī xiàng jīqì] expression: an organization is like a machine.

386    HUGO GAGGIOTTI, HEATHER MARIE AUSTIN, ET AL. Asked about the meaning of “like,” the participant replied: “Like” means similar to . . . because there is a sequence in every process, from inputs to outputs.

The discussion with the participant moved toward reflecting on things that do not flow linearly and serve different purposes, even if they are similar. The participant responded: It is not about things that could be similar or different or have different names, it is because of the processes. Some processes are being done concurrently while others need to wait for the completion of the previous one . . . how can I explain it to you. . . . It is better to think on it differently, 它是一个乐团 [Tā shì yīgè yuètuán]. . . . It is an orchestra . . . of resources and human involvement.

In this example, we experience the power of metaphorical translatio, not limited to particular cultural contexts, but transcending the movement of meanings between words to the meaning of metaphors themselves: metaphors of metaphors. We also have an initial feeling of impotence when translating (“how can I explain it to you”) the frustration of trying to understand something that is out of our paradigms by simply translating words and metaphors into our own language.

Discussion and Conclusion Metaphor is both universal and particular and, as such, introduces a double alterity. It is an alterity that is also contextual: (1) a translatio which is universal and (2) a particular translatio in every context. In both cases the literal is left behind. On the one hand, Kövecses (2000) suggests that by analyzing figurative language in cultures other than our own, we can find out whether the way we think about our experiences is shared by speakers of other languages, and if so, to what extent. Because metaphor can help us make “sense of our own lives as well as relate to others” (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003: 232–​3), failing to examine this type of language would be a missed opportunity to uncover potentially shared beliefs, values, and other culturally constructed concepts. Lakoff (1993), on the other hand, points out that while embodied phenomenological experience appears to motivate metaphors, it does not predict them due to cultural influences and variation. Indeed, Lima (2006) posits that, perhaps through further analyses in several languages, we might eventually be able to determine the extent to which the basic experiences inherent to every human being are actually conceptualized in similar ways: that is, whether or not primary metaphor might indeed be predictable, regardless of influential cultural factors. Therefore, we see the act of metaphorizing as a universal, as a way of reasoning, and metaphors as

TRANSLATING ORGANIZING METAPHORS    387 particular, as a reflection of the way we collectively and individually think and live. Thus, by analyzing figurative language, we can either discover common metaphors or learn about each other through our differences. The problem we face with metaphor is that translation is the treason (translation) of the treason that metaphors already imply. As we translate particular metaphors, we try, in a sense, to universalize them, and in that quest to discover or understand, translation is both the problem and the solution. We must thus be cautious, particularly when generating, engaging with, and translating (organizational) metaphors, as metaphors are essentially incomplete considering they “represent a part, but not the whole, of the phenomena they describe” (Weade and Ernst 1990: 133). Morgan himself pointed out that “metaphor invites us to see the similarities but ignore the differences” (2006: 5). Assigning multiple words or phrases of one language to refer to things in another brings additional complexity to the practice of translating metaphors. In particular cultural contexts, as with the example of the Aymara, this simply might not work. Sometimes we need to be compelled to name things differently, learn other vocabularies, or use metaphors to explain other metaphors. Something quite simple for an Aymara to explain—​what work is—​using a rich and plentiful lexicon and constellation of expressions, could be difficult for a non-​ Aymara to translate to their own lexicon and symbology. We know organizational metaphors are often utilized to explain organizational behavior, define important aspects of an organization, and facilitate organizational change, among other purposes; however, there is an undeniable likelihood that individuals experimenting within the framework of a given organizational metaphor, such as the popular organizational metaphors of organism, machine, or brain, to name a few collated by Morgan (1986), may have differing interpretations rooted in other linguistic traditions, particularly those from non-​Anglophone backgrounds. An approach to embracing interpretative diversity is offered by Case et al. (2017), who encourage us to “learn with the other” by preparing ourselves to “journey into differing social and cultural epistemologies that the other brings to the communication” with an “alertness to different ways of metaphorizing” (Case et al. 2017: 240). Adopting an open attitude toward our own and others’ metaphorizing can help mitigate the frustrations of mutual misunderstanding, transforming them instead into experiences of mutual learning about and appreciation of the inexhaustible richness of language and semantics.

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chapter 24

m etaphors a nd val ence—​d o t h ey hav e it ? d o they ne e d i t ? jonathan pinto and hans christian garmann johnsen

Introduction Metaphor is one of the four main rhetorical tools identified by the ancient Greeks (Ramsay 2004; Pinto 2016; Ritchie, Chapter 25 in this volume) and has been extensively applied in the management and organization studies literature (Oswick et al. 2004; Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume). This literature has also analyzed the term metaphor with regard to several characteristics, such as whether metaphors are (a) root or intermediate or surface-​level (Oswick and Grant 1996; Pinto 2016; Bruni and Biscaro, Chapter 18 in this volume); (b) strong or weak (Black 1993; Pinto 2016); (c) first-​level or second-​level (Alvesson 1993; Pinto 2016); (d) dead or alive (Pinto 2016; Müller, Chapter 4 in this volume); (e) decontextualized or contextualized (Cornelissen et al. 2008; Pinto 2016); (f) descriptive or generative (Örtenblad 2017); (g) inductive/​elicited or deductive/​ projected (Pinto 2016); and (h) of those being studied or of the analyst (Örtenblad 2017). However, one distinction that has largely escaped the attention of scholars thus far (see Örtenblad et al. 2016; Pinto 2016, for exceptions), and which is the focus of this chapter, is whether metaphors are positive or negative: that is, do they have valence? And, as a corollary, do they need valence? That is, would analyzing metaphors with regard

392    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN to valence be helpful in management and organization studies (see also Bendl and Schmidt, Chapter 7 in this volume)? In psychology, valence (also called hedonic tone) is the affective quality referring to the intrinsic attractiveness/​“good”-​ness (positive valence) or averseness/​“bad”-​ness (negative valence) of an event, object, or situation (Frijda 1986). It has been used in the study of various psychological phenomena including emotions (Russell 1980), attitude formation (Fazio et al. 2004), and the impact of events (Brendl and Higgins 1996). With regard to the first, valence has been used to characterize and categorize specific emotions as depicted in the circumplex model of affect (Russell 1980). With regard to the formation of attitude toward novel objects, research found that there was better learning for negatively valenced (as compared to positively valenced) objects (Fazio et al. 2004). And finally, with regard to events, not only can the valence (i.e., positivity or negativity) of an event determine affect and motivation, but also, conversely, the affect or motivation can at times determine the valence of an event (Brendl and Higgins 1996). This focus on valence is also central to the positive psychology (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000), positive organizational scholarship (Cameron et al. 2003), and positive organizational behavior (Bakker and Schaufeli 2008) movements. Positive psychology “is the study of the conditions and processes that contribute to the flourishing or optimal functioning of people, groups, and institutions” (Gable and Haidt 2005: 103). It was developed as a reaction to the dominant focus on pathology in psychology that has resulted in a model of the human being lacking the positive features that make life worth living (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000). But “positive psychology does not imply that the rest of psychology is negative . . . in fact, the large majority of the gross academic product of psychology is neutral, focusing on neither well-​being nor distress” (Gable and Haidt 2005: 104). Nevertheless, the positive psychology movement triggered positive organizational scholarship (POS), which rigorously seeks to understand what represents the best of the human condition based on scholarly research and theory (Cameron et al. 2003). And POS in turn spawned positive organizational behavior (POB), which “emphasizes the need for more focused theory building, research, and effective application of positive traits, states, and behaviors of employees in organizations” (Bakker and Schaufeli 2008: 147). They further argue “that in order to make a substantive contribution to organizational science, POB [would] need to show the added value of the positive over and above the negative” (Bakker and Schaufeli 2008: 147). Thus, all three “positive” movements (i.e., psychology, organizational scholarship, and organizational behavior) could be construed as attempts to impose a valence on an entire discipline or subdiscipline. And if an entire discipline or subdiscipline can have a valence, why can a metaphor not have one? This is the first of the two overarching questions of our chapter (as also cued in the title). The second overarching question is, do metaphors need valence? But before we address these two questions it is important to clarify the definition of valence and what constitutes positive, negative, and neutral (or zero) valence.

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Valence—​Positive, Negative, and Neutral The term “valence” entered the psychology literature in English in 1935 via the translation of the German texts of Kurt Lewin (Wildgen 2001; Dege 2019). The original German word, Valenz, implies “binding” and is used in the hard sciences as a measure of the capacity of an element to combine with other atoms when it forms chemical compounds or molecules. In the hard sciences, valence can be expressed as a number. In the social sciences, such as psychology, it is less a quantity and more a quality (i.e., good or bad) of the intrinsic nature of something (e.g., emotion, object, event). Thus, in the hard sciences valence is “scalar” (i.e., a quantity that has magnitude but no particular direction) whereas in the social sciences it is a “vector” (i.e., a quantity that has magnitude and acts in a particular direction). Thus, in psychology and related fields, valence can be positive or negative, and theoretically should not be zero. But in this chapter, considering the subject-​matter (i.e., metaphor), we also include a neutral (or zero) valence. This is because a particular metaphor, first, may be truly neither positive nor negative, and second, could have multiple meanings or interpretations (see also Czarniawska, Chapter 10 in this volume), some of which may be positively valenced and others which may be negatively valenced, resulting in no clear overall direction (hence neutral). Although what is positive and what is negative is quite clear in mathematics and the hard sciences, this may not be as clear in the social sciences. The closest analog to the hard sciences notion of valence is Russell’s (1980) affect or emotions circumplex. This circumplex or circle is anchored by two axes: (1) the horizontal axis, which represents valence (positive, negative) of emotion; and (2) the vertical axis, which represents degree of arousal (low, high). And the intersection of the two axes, which is the center of the circumplex, is the “neutral” point. The valence axis is very similar to a number-​line with neutral (or zero) in the center, with negative being represented by the arrowhead going left, and positive being represented by the arrowhead going right. In this case, positive implies pleasantness and includes both: high-​arousal emotions like excited, delighted, and happy; and low-​arousal emotions like content, relaxed, and calm. In contrast, negative implies unpleasantness and includes both: high-​arousal emotions like tense, angry, and frustrated; and low-​arousal emotions like tired, bored, and depressed. Positive, in the positive psychology sense, according to Seligman and Csikszen­ tmihalyi (2000: 5), is about “valued subjective experiences” such as “well-​being, contentment, and satisfaction (in the past); hope and optimism (for the future); and flow and happiness (in the present).” At the individual level, it includes positive traits like “the capacity for love and vocation, courage, interpersonal skill, aesthetic sensibility, perseverance, forgiveness, originality, future mindedness, spirituality, high talent, and wisdom” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000: 5). And at the group level, positive psychology is about “the civic virtues and the institutions that move individuals

394    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN toward better citizenship; responsibility, nurturance, altruism, civility, moderation, tolerance, and work ethic” (Seligman and Csikszentmihalyi 2000: 5). In contrast, the corresponding negatives would be subjective experiences (e.g., lack of wellbeing, discontentment, dissatisfaction, despair, pessimism, stagnation, and unhappiness), negative individual traits like the capacity for hate, cowardice, vindictiveness, and the dark triad of personality (Paulhus and Williams 2002), to name a few, and group-​and organization-​level processes that lead individuals toward selfish behaviors and away from citizenship behaviors. Positive, in a POS context, “refers to the elevating processes and outcomes in organizations” (Cameron and Caza 2004: 731). And positive, in POB (Luthans 2002: 695), implies a proactive approach that emphasizes “strengths, rather than continuing in the downward spiral of negativity trying to fix weaknesses.” In contrast, negative in these contexts would refer to downward-​spiraling processes and outcomes, and a reactive approach to weaknesses and problems.

Do Metaphors Have Valence? This is the easier of the two overarching questions to answer. The answer is clearly no (see also Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume). Unlike emotions (Russell 1980), metaphors do not have a fixed intrinsic valence. This is similar to the position taken by some psychology scholars (e.g., Brendl and Higgins 1996) with regard to the valence of events. According to Brendl and Higgins (1996: 95), “valence is not inherent to an event” and “the valence of most events is quite variable across situations, across individuals, and over time.” Metaphors take one thing (i.e., the source domain) and equate or overlap it with another thing (i.e., the target domain), with regard to a common particular aspect, to the exclusion of other aspects (Morgan 1986; Örtenblad 2017; Pinto 2016). Thus, though a metaphor works by being read as the author intended, that is not the only possible interpretation (cf. variable versus “seeing as,” Örtenblad 2017). As Morgan (2016: 1037) points out, “the meaning of a metaphor always has an emergent and situation-​specific dimension that is open to multiple interpretations by the parties involved.” Thus, metaphors, by definition, are fundamentally imprecise, and therefore cannot have a clear intrinsic valence. Further, each of the possible interpretations of the metaphor would have a valence, and all these valences may not be same (see also Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume): that is, some could be positive, some negative, and some neutral (i.e., a zero valence). Also, metaphors are essentially a linguistic or rhetorical device (Johnsen, Chapter 5 in this volume; Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume), and as the German philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein argued, language gets meaning in its use, not as predefined. He coined the term language game (Munz 2004) to refer to the fact that words and sentences have a meaning only as a result of the “rule” of the “game” being played. Thus, language has its limits, as evident in the following example (Wittgenstein 2009). Let us say you

METAPHORS AND VALENCE    395 went to a concert last evening and would like to tell your friend what you experienced. It is unlikely that you can reproduce in words the experience of listening to the concert. And in cases like this a metaphor could allow you to communicate more than what mere words could. But even that would still leave a lot of the experience unspoken. In the philosophy literature, this relationship between language and reality has been studied in four schools of thought: (a) analytical, (b) pragmatic, (c) structuralist, and (d) poststructuralist. Briefly, we can argue that the analytical school acknowledges that words have their limit but the aim is still for the words to be as exact or true as possible (Searle 2004). And truth can be either theoretical (i.e., self-​evident) or empirical, and metaphors do not fall into either category. Yet, metaphors, like language itself, can say something truthful about the world (see examples and analysis of metaphors of competition in business, Byers and Owusu, Chapter 11 in this volume; see also examples and analysis of metaphors of empirical organizational research, Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume) because, as Wittgenstein (1922) argues, the structure of language corresponds to the structure of the world. In a parallel vein, Carnap (1995) argued that a scientific sentence should be correctly formulated and, inter alia, meet criteria of logic. Against this, the pragmatic school focuses on language and symbol, including seeing language as symbolic in relation to its use (Searle 2004; Mitterhofer and Jordan, Chapter 16 in this volume; Rossi, Chapter 12 in this volume). This school changed the focus from the meaning of words and inherent logic in propositions to linguistic practice. Metaphors are part of this practice and get their meaning in use (see also the analysis of color metaphors in organization studies, Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​Danisman, Chapter 14 in this volume). Further, Austin (1965, 1975) posits that speech (later referred to as speech acts, Searle 1969) is performative wherein utterance is directed toward the speaker’s intentions. Thus, there are two forms of speech acts: illocutionary (intention lies in what is said) and perlocutionary (intention lies in the consequences of what is said). In this regard, Linstead’s (Chapter 13 in this volume) analysis of darkness and light as metaphors for processes is interesting. In contrast, the structuralist school shifts the focus from individual intentions to the collective impact of language, and argues that linguistic structures form the way we perceive the world, and language (including metaphors) is reality shaping (e.g., Midgley 2003; Lakoff and Johnson 2008). This has resulted in a stream of work directed at tracing the biases and unwarranted assumptions in language. Finally, the poststructuralist position is that the relationship between language and reality is broken. All that we think of as belonging to language (e.g., words, sentences, signs, speech, meaning, references), and therefore metaphor as well, are made possible and must ultimately be understood in terms of the structure of writing—​“writing thus comprehends language” (Glendinning 2011: 44). We compare the differences between these four philosophical schools with regard to language and metaphor, and the default or neutral position, in Table 24.1. As can be seen from Table 24.1, metaphors are understood and treated differently in each school of philosophy. And the valence of the metaphor could also depend on the

396    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN Table 24.1  Philosophical positions on language and metaphor Position Default/​neutral Language, Language is a mind, and natural device reality between mind and reality.

Analytical

Pragmatic

Language Language gets is mind-​ its meaning in independent. use. It can describe reality but has limits.

Structuralist

Poststructuralist

Language has a Language lives formative role in independent of our perception of mind and reality. reality.

What is a Metaphor Metaphors metaphor? conveys pictures describe in the mind. things.

Metaphors are like pictures of the world and get their meaning in use.

Metaphors Metaphors are enhance our purely symbols, as perception of the is language. world.

What do Metaphors are Metaphors metaphors only an imprecise describe do? use of language. things we are not able to say normally.

Metaphors Metaphors are are integrated world forming. into language and get their meaning in use.

Metaphors do not necessarily refer to anything in reality.

linguistic approach employed by the author. For instance, a metaphor like “the organization is like a flower” may be positively valenced in an analytical sense (it is just a description) or in a pragmatic sense (the author used it to highlight the natural and beautiful aspects of organizations). But it could be negatively valenced in a structuralist sense (it might result in organizational leaders adopting a superficial approach by focusing on style rather than substance and form rather than function). And it could have a neutral valence in a poststructural sense (the flower and the organization are both abstractions and do not refer to anything in reality).

Do Metaphors Need Valence? If metaphors do not have a clear, fixed valence, but rather have several implicit valences, is there value in authors explicitly signaling the valence that they intend? And if authors do not do so, would it be useful (from both academic and practice perspectives) to analyze metaphors with regard to valence? We explore the first question by analyzing a recent organizational metaphor—​that is, the organization as Icehotel (Pinto 2016)—​ whose intended (positive) valence is explicit. We explore the second question by analyzing eight classic metaphors (Morgan 1986) whose intended valences are unspecified and ambiguous.

METAPHORS AND VALENCE    397

When Metaphor Valence Is Explicit: “Organization as Icehotel” Pinto (2016: 891) introduced “the Icehotel, the world’s first and largest hotel to be constructed entirely of ice and snow, as a unique and generative” metaphor for organizations. According to Pinto (2016: 908), the Icehotel is “inarguably positive . . . enables positive experiences, such as hope, creativity, courage, confidence, and perseverance . . . embodies the triumph of the human spirit against all odds” (see also the discussion of metaphors in the creative journey, Biscaro and Bruni, Chapter 20 in this volume). Further, Pinto (2016) also explicitly ties the Icehotel metaphor to the work done in the POS (Cameron et al. 2003) and POB (Luthans 2002; Bakker and Schaufeli 2008) streams. In subsequent work, Pinto (2017a) described the Icehotel as an intentionally sustainable organization which reinforces the positive valence of the original metaphor. Despite this explicit signaling of positive valence, the metaphor can be interpreted to have a negative valence, drawing on the source article (Pinto 2016) itself, as well as based on argumentation (see also discussion of deep and dark corners of metaphors, Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume). First, Pinto (2016: 908) himself acknowledges the mixedness of the valence when he writes that the Icehotel “exemplifies the unity of the positive and the negative” and manifests a “negative as a positive” paradox. Pinto (2016) also points out the danger of some of the Icehotel’s positive aspects, such as its purity of purpose and uncompromising approach, which, if adopted by entrepreneurs, may result in an increase in business failures. Second, it could be argued that the Icehotel neither exemplifies “eco-​coreness” nor manifests “the unsustainably sustainable paradox,” as Pinto (2016) claims. It is located in a remote area (200 kilometers north of the Arctic Circle), and the flights taken to and from it by the 50,000+​guests who visit it every year would create a massive carbon footprint. However, according to Pinto (2016), the “organization as Icehotel” metaphor is broader than just an amalgam of positive and negative valences. First, the Icehotel is more than a metaphor—​it can be deployed as each of the four master tropes (Manning 1979; Oswick et al. 2004; Cornelissen 2008): that is, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (Pinto 2016; Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume). The last mentioned (i.e., irony) includes four paradoxes, each of which, by definition, contains a contradiction and therefore could not have either a positive or a negative valence; it would typically have both. Second, it is not just a metaphor, it is a SUPER metaphor, which provides novel insights on five aspects (which make up the acronym): that is, surprise, unifinality, purity, eco-​coreness, and rebirth. Each of these could have multiple interpretations and therefore multiple valences. For instance, “surprise” is usually considered to be positive, but it could also be negative: for example, a “nasty surprise.” Hence it is a multilayered metaphor with multiple, possibly contradictory, meanings and interpretations, and therefore valences, at each layer.

398    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN Third, the Icehotel can be read through each of the mutually exclusive paradigm models (e.g., Burrell and Morgan 1979; Deetz 1996; Hassard and Cox 2013; Reed, Chapter 26 in this volume). Pinto (2017b) conducts a multiparadigm inquiry (Hassard 1991; Lewis and Kelemen 2002), to show that the Icehotel can be viewed and read through each of Burrell and Morgan’s (1979) four sociological paradigms (i.e., functionalist, interpretive, radical structuralist, radical humanist), Deetz’s (1996) four discourses (i.e., normative, interpretive, critical, dialogic), and Hassard and Cox’s (2013) three paradigms for a post-​paradigm world (i.e., structuralist, antistructuralist, poststructuralist). Therefore it is little wonder that the “organization as Icehotel” metaphor exposition (Pinto 2016) cuts across all of the philosophical positions delineated earlier. It exemplifies the default position because it conjures up the image of a hotel made of ice and uses that as an organizational metaphor. It exemplifies the analytical position because it describes something—​“Wow!” (i.e., surprise)—​that we cannot otherwise. The strongest resonance is probably with the pragmatic school, because the phrase “organization as Icehotel” would be mystifying to most readers, not least because of their unfamiliarity with the source domain (i.e., the Icehotel). In keeping with the structuralist position, the Icehotel enhances our understanding of the world in general, and temporary organizations in particular—​perhaps one day, temporary pop-​up organizations may be referred to as “Icehotel organizations.” Finally, the Icehotel could also be viewed simply as a symbol for temporary, transient organizations, thereby resonating with the poststructuralist position. Thus, the “organization as Icehotel” metaphor could be read from all linguistic schools of thought.

When Metaphor Valence Is Unspecified/​ Ambiguous: Images of Organization Morgan’s (1986) metaphors have been very generative (Örtenblad 2017) and achi­ eved their purpose: that is, to encourage new ways of seeing, and thinking about, organizations (Grant and Oswick 1996; Putnam et al. 2017; Dell et al., Chapter 6 in this volume). Indeed, each of these eight root metaphors accentuates some organizational features while simultaneously distorting others, and embodies several concepts and images that could split off and develop into different categories and sub-​metaphors (Putnam et al. 2017). Hence it is not surprising that Morgan (1986) did not explicitly spell out the valence of each of these eight metaphors. And this provides an opportunity for us to analyze these seminal organizational metaphors using the valence lens. Given the multifaceted nature of each of these metaphors, we offer this exposition as a “best efforts” (rather than definitive) attempt to illustrate the usefulness (or otherwise) of analyzing the valence of metaphors (see also Audrin and Davoine, Chapter 9 in this volume, for a different analysis of three of Morgan’s metaphors). In Figure 24.1, we depict these eight metaphors on a positive–​ negative axis with a neutral zone on either side of “0” as indicated by the two dotted lines.

Negative

Neutral

Brains

Cultures

Flux & transformation

Organisms

Machines

Political systems

Psychic prisons

Instruments of domination

METAPHORS AND VALENCE    399

Positive

­figure 24.1  Plotting the valences of Morgan’s Images of Organization

We first do a brief linguistic analysis of these metaphors in their valence-​clusters. As depicted in Figure 24.1, the negatively valenced metaphors are organizations as instruments of domination and as psychic prisons. We believe the intention here is not to give a correct view of the world; rather it is perlocutionary—​that is, to provoke reaction. The neutral-​valence metaphors are organizations as machines, as organisms, as political systems, and as flux and transformation. Unlike the former, these metaphors are not perlocutionary: that is, they point to specific organizational aspects, and are therefore analytical expressions. Finally, the positively valenced metaphors are organizations as brains, and as cultures. These metaphors belong to both the pragmatic perspective (i.e., present a positive humanistic picture of the organization) and the poststructuralist perspective (i.e., reality forming by transcending the normal understanding of organizations). We now discuss the valence of each metaphor in more detail.

Organizations as Instruments of Domination We consider this to be the most clearly, albeit implicitly, valenced of the eight metaphors. And it has a clear negative valence. This metaphor is elucidated in the chapter (Morgan 1986) entitled “The Ugly Face,” which along with its opening line “Our organizations are killing us!” leaves little doubt about its negative valence. This metaphor focuses on the dark side of rationality and is arguably the most negatively valenced of the eight metaphors. This is evident from the section titles (Morgan 1986) which include the following: (1) organization as domination; (2) how organizations use and exploit their employees; (3) organization, class, and control; (4) work hazards, occupational disease, and industrial accidents; (5) workaholism and social and mental stress; (5) organizational politics and the radicalized organization; and (6) multinationals: a record of exploitation? Almost every section title contains a negatively valenced word (e.g., stress, exploitation, hazards, disease) and collectively they clearly signal the metaphor’s negative valence.

Organizations as Psychic Prisons The chapter on the psychic prison metaphor begins as follows: “Human beings have a knack for getting trapped in webs of their own creation” (Morgan 1986: 207). This opening sentence reinforces the metaphor’s negative valence. Some of the other key

400    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN components of the exposition of this metaphor that suggest a negative valence include: (1) a Freudian theory analysis of defense mechanisms that individuals use with regard to their repressed impulses; (2) the dominant influence of the male; (3) the consciousness of death; (4) the impact of childhood defenses against anxiety (including the use of “security blankets”); and (5) Jungian theory with regard to shadow and archetype. However, despite this fairly unremitting list of negative constructs, it is not a pitch-​black metaphor. Morgan (1986) also emphasizes the unity in opposites (negative and positive) and the unconscious being both a creative and destructive force, which lessens its negative valence.

Organizations as Political Systems We have plotted this metaphor at the border between the neutral zone and the negative zone. This balance is manifested in the opening vignette of this chapter: “I live in a democratic society. Why should I have to obey the orders of my boss eight hours a day? He acts like a bloody dictator . . .” “Democratic society” is a neutral term, but “bloody dictator” is negative. And the chapter (Morgan 1986) is titled “Interests, Conflict, and Power,” of which the first is neutral, the second is (typically) negative, and the third, although neutral in theory, typically has negative connotations, as manifested in phrases like “power hungry,” “abuse or misuse of power,” and “exploitation of power,” to name just a few. The chapter also discusses organizational politics and politicking, which are generally considered to be negative. Hence, it has been plotted on the negative side of the axis, at the negative–​neutral border.

Organizations as Machines This metaphor is in the neutral zone, but on the negative side of zero, because although “machine” is a neutral term, it is not life giving (i.e., not positive). This is evident from the opening story, which tells of someone advising a farmer about how to improve productivity by employing a machine (i.e., a draw-​well), and the farmer’s response includes the following: “He who does the work like machine, grows a heart like a machine” (Morgan 1986: 12). The focus of this metaphor is productivity. And though productivity is a positive, loss of humanity is strongly negative, and therefore, overall, it is neutral–​negative.

Organizations as Organisms This metaphor focuses on the relationship between an organization and its environment (analogous to an organism and its supporting ecosystem). It is a valence-​neutral metaphor (hence it is in the neutral zone), but since it has life at its root (as opposed to a machine, which is lifeless), it has been plotted on the positive side (see also Arman and Wikström, Chapter 8 in this volume). Furthermore, the underlying theme of life and growth is evident throughout the chapter (Morgan 1986), from the title “Nature Intervenes” and section titles such as “The Variety of Species,” “Natural Selection: The Population-​Ecology View of Organizations,” and “Organizational Ecology: The Creation of Shared Futures,” thereby reinforcing its neutral–​positive valence.

METAPHORS AND VALENCE    401

Organizations as Flux and Transformation “Change is a constant” is the basis for this metaphor, as evidenced both by the chapter’s (Morgan 1986) title (“Unfolding Logics of Change”) and by its opening sentence, which quotes Heraclitus (“you cannot step twice into the same river”). Change is a valence-​ neutral term and much of the chapter deals with similarly neutral-​valenced terms like complexity, causality, and feedback loops, hence it has been plotted in the neutral zone. However, there is also a life/​ecosystem theme underlying Morgan’s (1986) exposition, and transformation is typically considered a positive term (cf. transformational leadership, Bass and Avolio 1993; Bass 1998); hence it has been plotted close to the neutral–​ positive border.

Organizations as Cultures Although “culture” itself is a valence-​neutral term, Morgan (1986) imbues it, reasonably clearly, with a positive valence. He begins the chapter by implying that culture played a major role in the transformation of Japan from the ashes of World War II to “an industrial empire second to none” (Morgan 1986: 115). Continuing with his exposition, Morgan (1986) references the roots of the culture metaphor to both cultivating land and “being cultured” (i.e., refined), both of which reinforce the positive valence. However, Morgan (1986) also points out the dangers (and sometimes, ridiculousness) of cultural practices and rituals; hence though positively valenced, this metaphor has been plotted near neutral–​positive border.

Organizations as Brains This is almost inarguably the most positively valenced metaphor in the set. The chapter (Morgan 1986) opens by making the case that a considerable amount of the brain can be removed without significantly impairing the individual. Morgan (1986: 72) asks, “what if we think about organizations as living brains?” (emphasis added) and “is it possible to design ‘learning organizations’ that have the capacity to be as flexible, resilient, and inventive as the function of the brain?” All these terms are strongly positively valenced and collectively signal the overall positive valence of this metaphor.

Conclusion We conclude that metaphors do not have intrinsic valence, nor is it necessary that they do. However, the valence lens could be a useful analytical device to apply to metaphors in management and organizational studies. We have assessed the valence of Morgan’s (1986) eight organizational metaphors, and plotted them on a positive–​ negative (including neutral) axis, which sheds new and (we hope) interesting light on these well-​ established metaphors. However, this linear depiction could be enhanced in future research with a vertical intersecting axis (representing another dimension) to obtain an

402    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN even more nuanced and richer analysis of (organizational) metaphors, and consequently of organizations themselves. Our exposition could also encourage management and organizational scholars to think about and make explicit the valence of the metaphors that they employ. This would not only make their thesis clearer, but also generate a more pointed discourse and debate around the metaphor and the validity (or otherwise) of its author-​intended valence.

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METAPHORS AND VALENCE    403 Gable, Shelly L., and Jonathan Haidt. 2005. “What (and Why) Is Positive Psychology?” Review of General Psychology 9 (2): 103–​10. Glendinning, Simon. 2011. Derrida: A Very Short Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Grant, David, and Cliff Oswick. 1996. “Introduction: Getting the Measure of Metaphors.” In Metaphor and Organizations, edited by David Grant and Cliff Oswick, 1–​20. London: SAGE. Hassard, John. 1991. “Multiple Paradigms and Organizational Analysis: A Case Study.” Organization Studies 12 (2): 275–​99. Hassard, John, and Julie Wolfram Cox. 2013. “Can Sociological Paradigms Still Inform Organizational Analysis? A Paradigm Model for Post-​paradigm Times.” Organization Studies 34 (11): 1701–​28. Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. 2008. Metaphors We Live By. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Lewis, Marianne W., and Mihaela L. Kelemen. 2002. “Multiparadigm Inquiry: Exploring Organizational Pluralism and Paradox.” Human Relations 55 (2): 251–​75. Luthans, Fred. 2002. “The Need for and Meaning of Positive Organizational Behavior.” Journal of Organizational Behavior 23 (6): 695–​706. Manning, Peter K. 1979. “Metaphors of the Field: Varieties of Organizational Discourse.” Administrative Science Quarterly 24 (4): 660–​7 1. Midgley, Mary. 2003. The Myths We Live By. New York: Routledge. Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. Beverly Hills, CA: SAGE. Morgan, Gareth. 2016. “Commentary: Beyond Morgan’s Eight Metaphors.” Human Relations 69 (4): 1029–​42. Munz, Peter. 2004. “My Adventure with Popper and Wittgenstein.” In Karl Popper: Critical Appraisals, edited by Philip Canton and Graham Macdonald, 124–​37. New York: Routledge. Örtenblad, Anders. 2017. “Approaches to Using Metaphors in Organizational Analysis: Morgan’s Metaphors and Beyond.” In Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, edited by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam, 54–​86. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Örtenblad, Anders, Linda L. Putnam, and Kiran Trehan. 2016. “Beyond Morgan’s Eight Metaphors: Adding to and Developing Organization Theory.” Human Relations 69 (4): 875–​89. Oswick, Cliff, and David Grant. 1996. “The Organization of Metaphors and the Metaphors of Organization: Where Are We and Where Do We Go from Here?” In Metaphor and Organizations, edited by David Grant and Cliff Oswick, 213–​26. London: SAGE. Oswick, Cliff, Linda L. Putnam, and Tom Keenoy. 2004. “Tropes, Discourse and Organizing.” In The SAGE Handbook of Organizational Discourse, edited by David Grant, Cliff Oswick, Linda L. Putnam, and Tom Keenoy, 105–​27. London: SAGE. Pinto, Jonathan. 2016. “‘Wow! That’s So Cool!’ The Icehotel as Organizational Trope.” Human Relations 69 (4): 891–​914. Pinto, Jonathan. 2017a. “A Multifocal Framework for Developing Intentionally Sustainable Organizations.” Current Opinion in Environmental Sustainability 28: 17–​23. Pinto, Jonathan. 2017b. “The Icehotel: A ‘Good Organization’ that Integrates Paradigms by Enshrining Paradoxes.” Paper presented at the Annual Symposium of the European Group for Organization Studies (EGOS), Copenhagen, Denmark, July 6–​8, organized by Copenhagen Business School. Paulhus, Delroy L., and Kevin M. Williams. 2002. “The Dark Triad of Personality: Narcissism, Machiavellianism, and Psychopathy.” Journal of Research in Personality 36 (6): 556–​63.

404    JONATHAN PINTO and HANS CHRISTIAN GARMANN JOHNSEN Putnam, Linda L., Anders Örtenblad, and Kiran Trehan. 2017. “Introduction: From Theory to Application of Metaphor in Organizational Analysis.” In Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, edited by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam, 2–​14. Thousand Oaks, CA: SAGE. Ramsay, John. 2004. “Trope Control: The Costs and Benefits of Metaphor Unreliability in the Description of Empirical Phenomena.” British Journal of Management 15 (2): 143–​55. Russell, James A. 1980. “A Circumplex Model of Affect.” Journal of Personality and Social Psychology 39 (6): 1161–​78. Searle, John. 1969. Speech Acts: An Essay in the Philosophy of Language. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Searle, John. 2004. The Philosophy of Language. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Seligman, Martin E. P., and Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi. 2000. “Positive Psychology: An Introduction.” American Psychologist 25 (1): 5–​14. Wildgen, Wolfgang. 2001. “Kurt Lewin and the Rise of ‘Cognitive Sciences’ in Germany: Cassirer, Bühler, Reichenbach.” In The Dawn of Cognitive Science, edited by Liliana Albertazzi, 299–​332. Dordrecht, Holland: Kluwer Academic. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 1922. Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus. First published in Wilhelm Ostwald’s Annalen der Naturphilosophie, 1921. Original English translation by Frank P. Ramsey and Charles Kay Ogden. London: Kegan Paul. Wittgenstein, Ludwig. 2009. Philosophical Investigations. Chichester, UK: Wiley-​Blackwell.

chapter 25

jobs and th e mac Conceptual Metaphors as Cognitive and Rhetorical Resource l. david ritchie

Using an Apple product could be as sublime as walking in one of the Zen gardens . . . (Isaacson 2011: 564)   

Introduction Until recently, research and theorizing about metaphors focused on decorative functions of literary metaphors in which an interesting vehicle is substituted for or compared to a literal word or phrase to achieve aesthetically pleasing results. Examples typically take the form of x is y, such as Aristotle’s example, “old age is a withered stalk.”1 This approach is consistent with the code model of language, in which communication is theorized as a process of “encoding” meanings into words and “sending” them to a “receiver,” who “decodes” them into the exact same meanings. The code model has been discredited both at the level of the brain (Dor 2014; Everett 2017; Damasio 2018) and at the level of communication (Sperber and Wilson 1986/​1995; Reddy 1993; Krippendorff 2017), but it still has advocates, if only because people are used to it (Krzeszowski 2020). Moreover, most of the attempts to go beyond substitution or comparison accounts in

1 

I mark words used metaphorically in italics within quotation marks. I mark conceptual metaphors in small capital letters and thematic metaphors in italicized small capital letters.

406   L. DAVID RITCHIE explaining the effects of metaphors are fundamentally circular (Ritchie 2003), in that they end up explaining one metaphor (e.g., “my lawyer is a shark” or “my boss is a bulldozer”) by invoking another metaphor (“my lawyer is predatory like a shark” or “my boss pushes people around like a bulldozer”). Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980, 1999) shifted the focus to the common, ordinarily unnoticed metaphors that pervade language use, arguing that metaphors observed in language express underlying conceptual metaphors, in which an abstract concept such as life is experienced as another, usually less abstract, concept such as a journey. Subsequent research has shown that words are associated with perceptual simulations, brief partial activation of neural systems that would be engaged if one actually perceived the named object or performed the named action (Barsalou 2008; Bergen 2012). When words are used metaphorically, the neural systems associated with the metaphor vehicle are at least weakly activated (Gibbs 2006, 2008; Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume), but novel or highly interesting metaphors activate much stronger simulations than familiar, less interesting metaphors (Littlemore 2019). Conceptual Metaphor Theory (CMT) focuses on metaphors as universal mappings, based on commonly experienced correlations between abstract concepts and less abstract experiences, with little or no consideration of the context (Cameron 2007; Cameron et al. 2010). Conceptual metaphors like life is a journey, more is up, and emotion is temperature are analyzed as having an unvarying, hence code-​like relationship to meanings. Attempts to elaborate the insights of CMT into a systematic science (e.g., Lakoff and Kövecses 1987; Kövecses 1990) reinforce the code-​like interpretation of conceptual metaphors, and often lead to interpretations that go well beyond the original texts (e.g., see Esmaeili et al. 2015.). Ritchie (2013, 2017) observes that most conceptual metaphor vehicles are commonly deployed to express a range of topic concepts and proposes that many metaphors are based on generic metaphors that do not necessarily reflect a code-​like mapping between topic and vehicle. For example, journey can represent various aspects of a career, a marriage, or writing an academic paper.2 The implication is that conceptual metaphor vehicles are available as resources to express general aspects of experience in thought and communication, but are not necessarily associated with any one topic. Damasio (2018) argues that the neural system maintains a “forward representation” of the state of the body in its social and physical environment, which includes perceptual simulations and language. People reflect on and try to understand and communicate about the nuances of our experience and feelings in relation to the environment (Baumeister and Masicampo 2010). Language, including metaphor, is crucial to both introspective examination of our experiences and feelings, and communicating about

2  Accordingly,

for the remainder of this chapter I will refer only to the generic metaphor vehicle unless a specific topic to vehicle mapping is pertinent.

JOBS AND THE MAC    407 them (Enfield 2017). However, because emotions and other experiences are complex and often difficult to express, people often use different words and syntax to express the same experience on different occasions (Chafe 2012). Conceptual metaphors, like other language, are available as resources, but even when they result from “a basic, originary [sic] interpretive (seeing as) process” (Koch and Deetz 1981: 13), they are subject to the individual interpretations and understandings of speakers’ unique language histories as well as to the immediate context of production as demonstrated by Chafe. For example, when Gay Bryant (1984) was reflecting on her career, trying to understand and explain to others why her series of rapid promotions stopped when she reached the upper levels of middle management, she probably searched for metaphors and other phrases to represent exactly what she experienced. Promotions are c­ ommonly expressed as “rising” in management or “climbing the corporate ladder” (up; movement). Then her “progress stopped” as if she had encountered an “obstruction” that kept her from “moving up” any higher in the corporation, like bumping up against a “ceiling.” She was fully aware of the senior management positions: she could “see” them (knowing is seeing) but she couldn’t “get to them” because of the “obstruction.” Since she could “see through it” but could not “pass through it,” the “barrier” to “upward motion” must be “transparent”—​hence, a “glass ceiling” (Bryant 1984). As Bryant reflected on her experiences, her memories activated memories of her emotions; as different metaphors occurred to her, she would have compared the simulations they activated to her remembered emotions, and selected the expressions that best fit her own feelings (Ritchie 2017). Hillary Clinton elaborated Bryant’s metaphor, blended with several other metaphors, in her 2008 concession speech (for a detailed discussion, see Ritchie 2017). Lynne Cameron (2007) argues that metaphors are often developed and elaborated ad hoc around a common theme (hence, systematic metaphors), and must be understood in their immediate discourse context. Conventional metaphors, including those that represent underlying conceptual metaphors, as well as more literary metaphors encountered in novels, news coverage, and other cultural texts, are available to speakers as they search for language to express their thoughts and feelings. Metaphors that have already appeared in the same conversation, or even in previous conversations among the same participants, are likely to be particularly salient. Accordingly, metaphor-​led discourse analysis (Cameron 2007) focuses on patterns of metaphor use, reuse, and transformation in an attempt to understand the experiences people are trying to express and the cognitive and social-​interactive processes through which they communicate these experiences. These considerations suggest a more nuanced approach to metaphorical language in natural discourse. People routinely draw on the cultural resources of conceptual and thematic metaphors, combining, blending, and transforming them in creative and often quite playful ways. They also create new metaphors, drawing on cultural resources and personal experiences. Novel metaphors like “glass ceiling” enter the cultural repertoire

408   L. DAVID RITCHIE of metaphors available for use in many contexts. Rather than fixed and code-​like, metaphors are fluid, malleable, and readily modified to serve new communicative needs in future social contexts (Cameron 2007; Ritchie 2011). Moreover, the same metaphor may be understood in quite different ways, even by two members of the same speech community (Ritchie 2017). Methodologically, these considerations have two important implications. First, metaphor analysis should always be grounded in the discourse context in which the metaphors occur, including patterns of use, reuse, and transformation, and account for the cultural and personal rhetorical resources available to individual participants as they interact in real time. Second, especially for metaphors produced in conversations or introspective texts, interpretation should remain close to the text to capture the experiences and feelings as the source expresses them. This chapter illustrates an approach to metaphor analysis in organization studies based on close attention to the actual language of the source. The chapter applies this approach to illuminate Steve Jobs’s discourse about his design and management philosophy. After a brief discussion of method, I discuss a series of metaphors organized around three thematic metaphors, physics and space, art and light, and pirates. I conclude with a brief summary of what this approach to metaphor analysis reveals about Jobs and his organizational approach.

Method The Data The examples are all drawn from Isaacson’s (2011) biography of Steve Jobs. In this chapter, I focus on metaphors that express the engineering and management aspects of Jobs’s work. Because this is a third-​person biography, scenes and quotations were selected and some of the metaphors were coined by Isaacson. However, since Isaacson quotes extensively from both Jobs and his associates, this presents the opportunity to examine both the metaphors used by his sources and his (more deliberate and presumably more literary) metaphors.

Identification and Selection I read through the entire text, identifying and marking metaphors as I read (Pragglejaz Group 2007; Dorst and Kaal 2012). I then reviewed the entire list of metaphors to identify metaphorical themes and, where possible, the cultural sources from which metaphors were drawn. For this chapter, I identified the themes that seem particularly relevant to Jobs’s managerial style and design philosophy, then selected for more detailed analysis particular examples for which Isaacson had provided a reasonably detailed discourse context.

JOBS AND THE MAC    409

Interpretation and Analysis For the quoted metaphors, I read through Isaacson’s account of each conversation for clues to what the speaker may have been experiencing and feeling, and how the conversation fit into the story. For Isaacson’s metaphors, I read through the relevant passage, examining how the metaphor related to Isaacson’s representation of his subjects’ experience. Throughout the process, I attempted to stay close to each source’s intellectual and emotional experiences as expressed by that person, drawing on Isaacson’s comments where they seemed helpful. I examined each metaphor as an artifact of the source’s thought processes as well as a resource used by the source to represent these thought processes to an audience.

Analysis Unsurprisingly, many of the metaphors that are common to discourse about business appear in Isaacson—​in particular, journey, war, and machine. These metaphors are unremarkable and conventional, and they will not receive further attention here. Several other metaphor themes express Jobs’s personality, his management style, and Isaacson’s depiction more clearly. I will focus on three thematic metaphors that seem particularly central to Isaacon’s account of Jobs’s management and design philosophy: physics and space; art and light; and pirates.

physics and space: “Distort Reality” and “Change the Universe” Several of Jobs’s associates used a metaphor based on the long-​running science-​fiction TV series Star Trek (especially popular among computer hobbyists and high-​tech workers). For example, Isaacson quotes Jobs’s friend Daniel Kottke, who describes how Friedland, another friend Jobs met at Reed College, introduced Steve to “the reality distortion field” and described Steve’s ability to “bend situations to his very strong will”3 (Isaacson 2011: 38). In the “Menagerie” episodes of Star Trek, aliens use their mental powers to create a new physical world. Applied to Jobs, the phrase implies a thematic metaphor4 that might be stated as reality is a pliable object. As used by Kottke and

3 Throughout, metaphor vehicles are marked in italics. All italics have been added to indicate metaphors unless explicitly marked as in the original. 4  Following Cameron et al. (2010) I will differentiate thematic metaphors, which do not necessarily imply a universal or even consistent underlying conceptual mapping, from conceptual metaphors.

410   L. DAVID RITCHIE others, the metaphor refers both to the social reality of relationships and to the physical realities implied by work schedules. physical objects is a common conceptual metaphor, so both of these metaphors, “reality distortion field” and “bend situations,” also seem to fit conceptual metaphor theory. However, these expressions, drawn from the subculture of science fiction, are more cultural than cognitive, and they are part of a larger theme that appears in several other contexts. For example, while attempting to recruit John Sculley (who was at the time president of the Pepsi-​Cola division of Pepsico), Jobs presented Sculley with a choice, to spend his life “selling sugared water” or “changing the world” (Isaacson 2011: 154). “The world” is technically a metonym referring to the “world” of data processing and electronic communication that is part of the literal world, but in context, especially the contrast with the belittling reference to “selling sugared water,” it appears Jobs meant the challenge more broadly and more metaphorically. While recruiting Bill Atkinson, Jobs claimed to be “inventing the future” (time is a machine), and offered Atkinson the chance to “make a dent in the universe.” Jobs reinforced these object metaphors by contrasting “surfing at the front edge of a wave” with “dog-​paddling at the tail-​end of that wave” (Isaacson 2011: 94). Here he created a metaphor contrasting the graceful athleticism of a surfer with the awkwardness of a novice swimmer, a metaphor likely to activate vivid visual and (for experienced surfers) muscular simulations to express the contrast between working for Apple and what other computer companies were doing. Later, during a retreat with members of the Mac division, he promised them that their work would “send a giant ripple through the universe” (Isaacson 2011: 143), blending a body of water metaphor (already conventional in discussions of Relativity Theory) with the space metaphor. One of Jobs’s employees referred to Jobs’s energy and his tendency to switch from dismissing an idea to lavish praise as a “high-​voltage alternating current” (Isaacson 2011: 120). The Mac team described how they learned to deal with the emotional swings in terms of an audio concept called a “low pass filter” (electronic transmission) that would smooth out the “extreme spikes of impulsive opinions” and “provide a less jittery moving average.” It is likely that members of the team, all of whom had been both observers and targets of Jobs’s mercurial emotional outbursts, had discussed them many times. Concepts from electrical and audial engineering were certainly salient to every member of the team. When one of them arrived at a metaphor that fit, the others would have quickly joined in and developed the metaphor and its implications. Silicon Valley is a classic example of a “small town,” a community of practice with a dense network of overlapping personal and business relationships. It is likely that many of the metaphors, including “reality distortion field,” were developed, elaborated, and disseminated, meme-​fashion (Dennett 2017), through conversations among all the people who knew Jobs. (Some particularly apt metaphors coined for Jobs were probably subsequently applied to others in that high-​pressure, obsessive industry—​and vice versa.) Some of the metaphors may have been coined during the interviews with Isaacson, but most of them were probably well polished and partially lexicalized by the time he heard them.

JOBS AND THE MAC    411

A “Binary System” Presumably Isaacson selected quotes with metaphors that expressed his own understanding of Jobs, and he reused several of them, notably “reality distortion field” and conventional astronomical metaphors like “launch” and “orbit.” When he set out to characterize Jobs’s relationship with Bill Gates, Isaacson developed a metaphorical story based on another astronomical metaphor. With the subtitle for Chapter 16, “when orbits intersect” he introduced a thematic metaphor celestial objects, presenting Jobs and Gates as planets or moons, raising the possibility of a “collision,” probably “destructive.” But in the opening paragraph he qualified the metaphor, describing Jobs and Gates as a “binary system,” two stars orbiting around a common center of gravity, in effect, both distant from and attracted to each other. He characterized them as “orbiting superstars,” and compared their relationship to earlier eras that were “shaped by the relationships and rivalries” between Einstein and Bohr (computer development is physics), and between Jefferson and Hamilton (computer development is governance). The first paragraph ends by describing Jobs and Gates as a “binary star system . . . composed of two high-​energy college dropouts” (Isaacson 2011: 171). With hundreds of hours of interviews over several years, Isaacson was faced with an enormous amount of information about a very complex person; to make a coherent book he had to distill it down into a limited number of interconnected themes.5 To do this he drew on metaphorical resources available in the culture as well as those presented by the people he had interviewed. “Star” is a commonplace metaphor for a successful and influential person.6 “Binary” presents Jobs and Gates as co-​equal, with undeveloped implications about the symbiotic relationship between software and hardware.7 “Defining” implies that their relationship determined the nature of the personal computer age, reinforcing “an era is shaped by” in the second sentence. “High-​energy,” in the context of “star system,” suggests the physics thematic metaphor that appears throughout the book. “Dropout” is a conventional metaphor with implications of both rebellion and failure—​interrelated themes that mark Jobs’s entire career. Here it ironically reinforces Jobs’s claim that college had little to contribute to his accomplishments. The two “superstars” pursued contrasting visions. Gates designed the product to be open to integration with other products and left the user with a high degree of autonomy. Jobs pursued a perfectionist and control-​oriented strategy, integrating every aspect of hardware and software in order to inhibit integration with outside products and preserve the integrity of the initial concept. The relationship veered between cooperation and competition, but it contributed to the success of both. The “binary system” metaphor expressed only part of this complex relationship, so Isaacson developed another 5  I am, of course, distilling it down even further, to say something coherent not just about Jobs but also about metaphor analysis. 6  knowing is seeing; fame is light; also, perhaps, emotion is warmth, importance is size, and (in)accessibility is distance. 7  Compared to their distance from “Earth-​bound” observers, binary stars are relatively “close” to each other.

412   L. DAVID RITCHIE metaphorical story comparing the relationship as “a scorpion dance, with both sides circling warily” to avoid “a sting by either” (Isaacson 2011: 178). At first reading this story activates a visual simulation of two male scorpions in a territorial struggle, threatening each other with their poisonous sting. It also potentially activates a more complex story about scorpion mating. The male injects a small dose of poison to calm the female, they clasp claws and “dance” around each other until copulation is completed. Then, if he does not escape rapidly, the male may be killed and eaten by the female. Although these further implicatures may not have been intended, for individuals who have the requisite biological knowledge they potentially express the cooperation, exploitation, and competition between the two men and their companies.

art and light: “At the Intersection of Arts and Technology” Jobs’s father was a craftsman, a mechanic and carpenter with a strong sense of quality in everything he did, which he impressed on Jobs. The family lived in an Eichler home, famous for simple affordability and clean, elegant design; throughout his career Jobs held that up as an inspiration and a model. His sense of design was reinforced when he decided to attend Reed College, an elite liberal arts college in Portland, Oregon, in 1972. He loved the intellectual environment but found the required courses stultifying and irrelevant, so he dropped out, but continued (like a “pirate”) to hang around campus, auditing courses he found interesting. One was a class in calligraphy, where he honed his taste for simplicity, balance, and elegance. Drawing on two conventional conceptual metaphors, location in space and marriage, Isaacson describes it as “Jobs consciously positioning himself at the intersection of arts and technology,” which would always be “married to great design” (Isaacson 2011: 41). His childhood home provided a metaphor for good design. When he saw the bitmap-​ based graphical interface developed by Xerox, he described his experience as “like a veil being lifted from my eyes,” a brief metaphorical story expressing how he suddenly “saw” how his team could accomplish his objective of computers “with the cheerful but affordable design of an Eichler home” and as easy to use as “a sleek kitchen appliance” (Isaacson 2011: 97). His father’s craftsmanship and dedication to quality surfaced in a metaphorical story he used to explain the importance of having the sense of beauty and good design throughout the product, even inside where it would never be seen by customers. “A great carpenter isn’t going to use lousy wood for the back of a cabinet . . . the aesthetic, the quality, has to be carried all the way through” (Isaacson 2011: 133–​4). As a way of instilling this sense of artistry, he had everyone on the design team sign their names, and had the signatures inscribed on the inside of every Mac. Atkinson commented that, “with moments like this, he got us seeing our work as art.” Jobs was inspired by the work of Italian designers and the Bauhaus movement. In contrast with the dark, sleek, and futuristic look favored by Sony, Jobs wanted

JOBS AND THE MAC    413 Apple products to be “clean and simple,” “bright and pure and honest about being high-​tech” (Isaacson 2011: 126), “sleek but not slick . . . playful . . . with a sense of play” (Isaacson 2011: 127). Here, Jobs’s playful use of alliteration reinforces the metaphorical implications—​an example of the creative transformation of metaphorical phrases that inspired Cameron (2007). Jobs’s design commitments (clean and cheerful) were also expressed in visual metaphors. He insisted that the factory where the Mac was manufactured be kept spotlessly clean, and had the machinery painted in bright, cheerful colors, even though it added to the expense and interfered with the functioning of some of the machinery. Isaacson explains Jobs’s visual design metaphors with a series of contrasting metaphors: the original Mac was “a dazzling but woefully slow and underpowered computer,” a contrast that emphasizes the tradeoffs the Mac team was forced to make, and the tradeoffs Jobs expected consumers to make. On the other hand, its user interface, like “a sunny playroom,” contrasted with “a somber dark screen with sickly green pulsating letters and surly command lines” (Isaacson 2011: 186).8 “Dazzling” and “sunny” (light) contrasts with “sickly,” and “playroom” contrasts with “surly.” These metaphors impute a human personality to the Mac: not merely a tool for work, it is also a healthy, cheerful, playful friend and companion. Early in the process of developing the Apple brand and design, Jobs struggled with his co-​inventor Steve Wozniak over accessibility. The personal computer movement began with “hackers” who prized their ability to blend parts from many different machines and customize everything to fit their own vision. Wozniak honored this spirit and wanted the Apple to be accessible to hackers and compatible with whatever hardware or software suited their needs. Jobs had a vision of a product in which all the elements, hardware and software, even the external appearance, fit together perfectly and harmoniously. Leaving it open to other software would sacrifice integrity and functionality of the product. Summarizing Jobs’s approach, ZDNet’s editor Dan Farber described Jobs as an “elitist artist,” protecting his creations from unworthy programs, and expressed it in a blend of metaphorical stories about “someone off the street adding some brush strokes to a Picasso painting or changing the lyrics to a Dylan song” (Isaacson 2011: 137).

pirates: “Let’s Be Pirates!” Summarizing ideas gleaned from many Silicon Valley sources, Isaacson characterized Apple’s visit to Xerox PARC, from which Jobs and his team got the idea of a bitmap-​ based user interface as “a raid,” a “heist.” Jobs approved of this characterization, quoting Picasso: “good artists copy, great artists steal” (Isaacson 2011: 98). Reed College, at the time Jobs was there (1972), was a center of the intellectual counterculture; in addition to 8  It is likely that few people born after 1980 will truly experience this metaphor; for those whose first PC experiences were with old Commodore or Radio Shack computers, the perceptual simulation will be vivid.

414   L. DAVID RITCHIE the spare aesthetic of calligraphy, Jobs was exposed to LSD and Zen Buddhism. Cutting classes, then dropping out to avoid tuition payments but continuing to audit the courses that interested him for free was characteristic of a rebellious spirit of “piracy” that was later evident even in such petty actions as refusing to put a license plate on his automobile and parking in spaces designated for handicapped drivers. Musing on the difference between the 1970s generation and the 1980s, Jobs commented that “the idealistic wind of the sixties is still at our backs” (Isaacson 2011: 107). When IBM introduced its personal computer, Jobs and his team were unimpressed with its clunky design and lack of innovation. Jobs characterized the coming competition with IBM as a “spiritual” struggle and IBM as an impediment to progress, “a force for evil” (Isaacson 2011: 136). He saw himself “as an enlightened rebel pitted against evil empires, a Jedi warrior or Buddhist samurai fighting the forces of darkness.” He predicted that an IBM victory would lead to “a computer Dark Ages,” claiming that IBM will “always stop innovation” (Isaacson 2011: 136). Jobs was evidently less dismayed about the prospect of losing the competition for market dominance to IBM than about the prospect that IBM’s clunky-​but-​serviceable machines would impede the development of truly sophisticated computers in more or less the same way that introduction of the QWERTY keyboard prevented and continues to prevent subsequent introduction of more efficient and ergonometric designs. But the “spiritual” and “evil’ metaphors go beyond efficiency or even design elegance, characterizing design as a moral, even religious struggle. This is reinforced by the sci-​fi metaphor of “Jedi warriors” and the quasi-​religious metaphor of “Buddhist samurai.” It is also a telling indication of the culture that he coupled these, the sci-​fi and the religious, blending them into a single heroic characterization of the “enlightened rebel.” The team developing the Mac was separated from the corporate offices and the team that was working on the Lisa, a more powerful computer aimed at the corporate market. Jobs, who was heading up the Mac team and not part of the Lisa team, encouraged a sense of competition, to motivate the Mac team and at the same time to compensate for having been ousted from the Lisa team. However, the competition “became unhealthy.” Isaacson explains with contrasting metaphors that he may have heard from some of the people he interviewed: “Jobs repeatedly portrayed his group as the cool kids on the block (play), in contrast to the plodding HP engineer types (labor +​ journey) working on the Lisa” (Isaacson 2011: 136). At a team retreat shortly after the Lisa was released, Jobs declared that “It’s better to be a pirate than to join the navy,” encouraging the team to “behave like swashbucklers” and “commandeer work from others” (Isaacson 2011: 144). One of the Mac programmers transformed this to a visual metaphor, creating a pirate flag with the Apple logo for an eye patch and flew it on a scaffolding pole left by a construction worker. “Pirate” is an ambivalent metaphor vehicle, with one foot in naval history and one foot in popular culture, that had already been adapted as a metaphor for theft of intellectual property. Literally, pirates were (and still are, in several regions) sea-​going robbers, who often murder the crews of ships they take over. Historically, many were also sea-​ going raiders who captured and looted poorly defended towns; rape and murder usually

JOBS AND THE MAC    415 accompanied the pillage, and the town was often burned to the ground. However, during the wars against Spain, the English government licensed pirates to prey on Spanish merchant vessels carrying gold and silver from South America back to Spain. In popular culture, pirates are often portrayed in a more flattering light, as merry, swashbuckling adventurers who live by their own code, independent of any external authority.9 By contrast, the navy is a rigidly hierarchical bureaucracy, rule-​governed and answerable to a state bureaucracy. The “pirates” metaphor contrasts “adventuresome free spirits” who “move fast” and “take what they want” with unimaginative workers whose lives are defined by rules and circumscribed by hierarchical authority. Jobs’s blend of “Jedi warriors” and “Buddhist samurai,” pop culture religiosity with genuine spiritual practice, along with the ambivalent and potentially contradictory “pirates,” is thematic of Jobs’s entire intellectual career. It fits the “brilliantly successful dropout” identity and legitimates Jobs’s single-​minded pursuit of his own vision. It also expresses what he struggled to make the Apple corporation become, through the people he hired and the stress tests he put them through while interviewing them, and through his high-​pressure leadership style. As several of his employees admitted to Isaacson, Jobs’s “reality distortion field,” which led him to demand what seemed impossible, often forced and inspired them to actually achieve the “impossible” by developing new products or completely redesigning a crucial feature within a fraction of the time they thought it would take.10 Many of the members of Jobs’s team would probably agree with Debi Coleman, who recalled the emotional stress of working with Jobs, then concluded that she was the “luckiest person in the world to have worked with him” (Isaacson 2011: 124).

Discussion People use metaphors for many reasons, including to “dress up” a text with “striking” language, as per Aristotle; people also use conventional metaphors unthinkingly, without deliberation (Steen 2017). But when they are trying to understand and explain complex experiences and feelings, people use language, including metaphors, deliberately. Ruminating about a complex experience, especially a stressful experience, will usually activate the associated feelings, or simulations based on memories of the feelings. It will also activate simulation-​memories of perceptions and muscular actions, of social interactions and responses. Human experience is too complex and too subtle to be expressed precisely by language, so we are forced to deliberate about the language we use, try out different ways of expressing a thought or a feeling. We select words and phrases that activate perceptual simulations and feelings that best fit the remembered

9 

10 

Stevenson’s (1879/​2016) Long John Silver is a prototype of this sort of ambivalent portrayal. See Sackmann (Chapter 22 in this volume) for a discussion of the “seductive” power of metaphors.

416   L. DAVID RITCHIE perceptions and feelings, and when necessary we use familiar words and metaphors in new ways, to express new ideas. When we do so, we increase the ambiguity of language, increase its expressive power at the sacrifice of expressive precision. According to Koch and Deetz, “metaphors are not just shared subjective inter­ pretations of the ‘real’ organization, but are surface records of a basic, originary [sic] interpretive (seeing as) process which continually structures the organization’s reality . . . not subject to change at the will of particular members” (Koch and Deetz 1981: 13). Deetz (1986) claims that conceptual metaphors represent and help create social realities within organizations, and structure the joint experiences of abstract qualities important to the organization: analysis of metaphor structures in organi­ zations’ texts can reveal relationships of power and interest that either promote or impede morale and productivity. I agree with these claims only to the extent that metaphors and the interpretive processes that originate, select, and shape them are intrinsic to the interactions that constitute and reconstitute the social reality of an organization or other community of practice. However, this social reality can only exist in the world as it is represented in the minds of individual members, each of whom will inevitably have a unique history of social interactions and, consequently, an experience of the social reality that is also, however subtly, unique. As Chafe (2012) has shown, the same individual may draw on different metaphors to express the same experience on different occasions, depending on the aspects of the experience that are salient in the moment. The process of structuring and constituting social reality is coextensive with the continuous individual and parallel conversations among members of a community of practice. Several of the metaphors identified in the foregoing (e.g., “reality distortion field”) appear to be the product of extensive interaction among Apple employees and others in Jobs’s social milieu, but others (“A great carpenter,” “clean,” and “a computer Dark Ages”) apparently arose in the moment, as Jobs strove for language to express his experience and his forward-​projection of the ideal situation. Analyzing the patterns of metaphor use, reuse, and transformation (Cameron 2007) is a useful and powerful tool for understanding both the experiences people express in a conversation or text, and their process of formulating the language to express these experiences. The research in which Cameron initially formulated the theory of dynamic discourse analysis involved an extremely intimate series of conversations between the orphan of a bombing victim and the IRA operative who planted the bomb. Organizational communication research focuses on much more public (but not necessarily less emotionally intense) communication. As exemplified by the text used in the present study, metaphors may often emerge from and be shaped by extended deliberation, gossip, and debate, a process Hutchins (1994) has characterized as “extended cognition.” Although this discursive process of metaphor invention, use, and transformation is more public and more collaborative than private reflection, the underlying principles are much the same. Whether in an emotionally fraught conversation between two erstwhile enemies or in an extended series of interviews about a controversial public figure, people consider the available rhetorical resources, selecting the metaphors (and other language) that

JOBS AND THE MAC    417 activate meanings (emotions, perceptual simulations, and connections to other words and phrases) that best fit the experiences they are trying to express.

Summary Steve Jobs was a visionary entrepreneur whose design and management philosophy had a strong impact on the course of three culturally significant industries: personal computing, telecommunication, and animation art. Metaphor-​led discourse analysis shows how he expressed his experience and his philosophy through three thematic metaphors, physics and space, art and light, and pirates. The analysis illustrates the importance of grounding metaphor analysis in the particular context, and remaining close to the texts themselves. It also shows how conceptual and thematic metaphors can be understood as resources for thinking about, understanding, and expressing the particularities of lived experience. There has been a marked tendency among researchers, including researchers in organizational communication, to treat each conceptual metaphor as a fixed relationship between underlying concepts, often disregarding the communicative context or taking the organization itself as the context (e.g., Koch and Deetz 1981; Deetz 1986). However, utterances are produced by individuals in a particular setting and conversation, selecting language, including metaphors, that express (often imperfectly) their experiences and ideas. The organization and its dynamic social reality may foreground certain metaphors, which can be usefully revealed by examining clusters of metaphors over a large sample (Deetz 1986), but even a commonplace metaphor (e.g., machine, sports, or war) will not necessarily express the same nuances of experience each time it is used. If the research objective includes understanding the organizational culture as a dynamic interactive system, it is important to consider the particular context of each conversation, staying close to the text in order to understand how interlocutors select and modify metaphors to express their individual understandings and experiences.

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JOBS AND THE MAC    419 Pragglejaz Group. 2007. “MIP: A Method for Identifying Metaphorically Used Words in Discourse.” Metaphor and Symbol 22 (1): 1–​39. Reddy, Michael J. 1993. “The Conduit Metaphor: A Case of Frame Conflict in Our Language about Language.” In Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., edited by Andrew Ortony, 164–​201. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ritchie, L. David. 2003 “Categories and Similarities: A Note on Circularity.” Metaphor and Symbol 18 (1): 49–​53. Ritchie, L. David. 2011. “‘Justice is Blind’: A Model for Analyzing Metaphor Transformations and Narratives in Actual Discourse.” Metaphor and the Social World 1 (1): 70–​89. Ritchie, L. David. 2013. Metaphor. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Ritchie, L. David. 2017. Metaphorical Stories in Discourse. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Sperber, Dan, and Deirdre Wilson. 1986/​1995. Relevance: Communication and Cognition. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press. Steen, Gerard J. 2017. “Attention to Metaphor: Where Embodied Cognition and Social Interaction Can Meet, But May Not Often Do So.” In Metaphor: Embodied Cognition and Discourse, edited by Beate Hampe, 279–​96. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press. Stevenson, Robert Louis. 1879/​ 2016. Treasure Island or the Mutiny of the Hispaniola. New York: Signet Classics. Originally published by Cassell & Company, London.

chapter 26

m etaphors a nd organiz ation st u di e s A Critical Realist View michael reed

Introduction This chapter focuses on the ontological status of metaphor and its epistemological and theoretical implications for the study of organizations from a critical realist standpoint. The latter sees metaphors playing an indispensable role in the generation and development of knowledge in all fields of study (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003). However, critical realists are concerned with the “structural embeddedness” of such linguistic and symbolic devices within discursive practices and the socio-​material relations in which the latter are anchored (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 2005). This concern arises from the underlying tendency of metaphorical analysts to forget, or at least elide, the dependency of metaphors on the structures of socio-​material relations in which they emerge and are subsequently deployed. For critical realists, these socio-​ material relations are seen to shape, indelibly, the fabrication and interpretation of metaphorical devices within discursive practices and technologies serving certain political interests and values rather than others (Reed 1998). Initially, the chapter provides a brief resume of critical realism (CR) as it has emerged in organization studies over the last three decades or so. This is followed by an exposition of the ways in which critical realists have approached metaphorical analysis within organization studies as a necessary, but disciplined, attempt to understand and evaluate the intellectual processes through which researchers/​analysts conceptualize “organization” as a particular kind of phenomenon to which specific forms of theorization are appropriate (Blaikie 1993/​2008, 2000; Edwards et al. 2014). Subsequently, the chapter moves on to consider the pivotal role of metaphorical analysis in generating new and innovative forms of theoretical explanation with reference to the emergence of “mutant

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    421 neoliberalism” as a key metaphor for understanding more recent developments in neoliberal organization and governance (Callison and Manfredi 2020). Finally, it concludes with a consideration of the wider implications of the critical realist “take” on metaphorical analysis for the future development of critical organization studies.

Critical Realism and Organization Studies Critical realist thinking—​particularly in relation to its philosophical principles, explanatory axioms, and methodological protocols—​has become increasingly influential within organization studies over the last three decades or so (Reed 2009; Edwards et al. 2014; Tourish 2019). Originally developed as an alternative to the “Hobson’s choice” between authoritarian empiricism/​positivism and iconoclastic constructivism/​ poststructuralism, critical realist concepts, models, and theorizations gradually seeped into the intellectual core of organization studies. They became increasingly influential as researchers turned their attentions toward agendas that transcended paradigmatic boundaries and called for a general analytical framework calibrated to access the underlying mechanisms shaping surface realities. Three, interrelated, features of CR proved to be of increasing interest and value to organizational researchers: first, the emphasis which it gives to social ontology as the foundation of knowledge generation and development in social science; second, the theoretical logics which necessarily emerge from the ontological presuppositions informing our conceptualizations of the nature of the phenomena to which our intellectual efforts are directed; and third, the implications of those logics for the advancement of “explanatory critique” (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Danermark et al. 2002) within organization studies as a socio-​historical science. CR prioritizes social ontology over epistemology because it regards taking an intellectual position on the former as being unavoidable in any systematic attempt to understand and explain the world in which we live. It is only through articulating and defending the ontological presuppositions which inform our epistemological, methodological, and theoretical commitments that we can subject the social analyses that we offer to critical evaluation. Any collective sense of advancement or progress in our analysis and knowledge of the social world is fundamentally dependent on our capacity to elucidate and scrutinize the ontological “domain assumptions” (Gouldner 1971) that shape the concepts, models, and theories through which we make that world amenable to scholarly understanding and critique (Lawson 2015). Given the axiomatic status that CR assigns to social ontology, it is vital to understand the “ontological stance” that critical realists take in relation to the conceptualization of the phenomena which they study, such as “organization,” and its implications for how that study should be undertaken and the knowledge which it generates assessed and validated.

422   MICHAEL REED Critical realist social ontology presupposes an independently existing social reality which cannot be reduced to the social epistemologies and theories through which it is described, understood, and explained (Bhaskar 1989; Blaikie 1993/​2008; Layder 1997; Sayer 2000; Porpora 2015). Such an ontological stance also entails a commitment to a stratified conceptualization of social reality in which three different, but interrelated, levels or domains of material and ideational entities, linked together through complex chains and patterns of interaction, are identified—​that is, “the empirical” domain of sense experience and perceptions, “the actual” consisting of observable events and activities, and “the real” made up of unobservable structures and processes. It is from the interplay between phenomena embedded within each of these levels or domains—​and particularly between the underlying structural mechanisms located at the domain of “the real” and their impact on entities located at “the actual” and “the empirical” levels—​ that novel and innovative social forms emerge which may or may not be reproduced and transformed over time and space (Elder-​Vass 2010). Commitment to a critical realist social ontology also predisposes its adherents to an inclusive social epistemology in which the theorization and modeling of the underlying “generative mechanisms” through which “emergence,” “reproduction,” and “transformation” become possible are central to its explanatory project (Archer 2003; Elder-​Vass 2010; Porpora 2015). In this context, the concept of “social structure” takes on strategic explanatory significance insofar as it is taken to refer to a complex configuration of socio-​material relations which, ontologically and historically, precedes human consciousness and practice in ways that indelibly shape, but do not determine, the efforts human beings make to change such relations in their favor. As Porpora (2015: 104) puts it, “social structure consists of human relations in the midst of actors that connects them to each other and to social things. As actors twist and turn and otherwise act within the structures that bind them, they modify those structures.” Considered in these terms, social structures constitute the key “generative mechanisms” through which the emergence, reproduction, and transformation of social forms such as groups, organizations, communities, and societies occur because they produce an interrelated set of material conditions and social relations in which certain “positional interests and values” necessarily emerge. How the latter are taken forward very much depends on the individual and collective agency of those actors who are embedded within these structures of material relations and their organizational capacities as “corporate agents” to engage in strategies and tactics facilitating outcomes which are favorable to the realization of such shared, but often radically opposed, interests and values (Archer 2000, 2003; Donati and Archer 2015). In this respect, social structures are constraining, facilitating, and motivating for social actors in that they necessarily entail material relations that embody opportunity and reward systems generating and reproducing inequality and exploitation, irrespective of whether they are recognized and communicated by the actors enrolled within them. Thus, a critical realist ontology entails a conceptualization “of social structure as relational, material conditions that stand apart from both behavioural interaction and culture” (Porpora 2015: 104).

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    423 Given this “emergentist” social ontology—​ in which the underlying structural mechanisms dynamically shaping and reshaping actors’ strategies and tactics in changing socio-​historical contexts are assigned explanatory priority—​critical realists theorize “organizations” as “structured social groups with emergent causal powers” in which specialized roles and significant authority relations coordinate and control complex social interaction across temporal and spatial boundaries (Elder-​Vass 2010: 144–​ 68). While they depend profoundly on the normative institutions in which they are “nested,” organizations also possess and mobilize powerful material resources and relations in support of certain social norms and obligations rather than others, which normally favor the vested interests of established elite groups who legitimate their rule through the promulgation of political ideologies and cultural discourses valorizing the necessity and efficacy of the latter. As entities possessing real causal powers which have emergent impacts on social relations materially affecting social outcomes, organizations are the primary social units through which human causal powers interact with social structures to generate the “institutional and distributional positioning [that] conditions agency by defining interests and access to resources” (Parker 2000: 117). If “organization” is theorized in this way, then what role does it play in constructing and justifying the “explanatory critique” that critical realist organization theorists aspire to offer? It suggests that they will be committed to an explanatory logic that conforms to the following rules: first, that the analytical focus for critical realist explanation will be the strategic role which “organization” plays in mediating between “structure” and “agency” as they interact over time and place within complex configurations of socio-​ material relations pre-​dating them and from which they emerge; second, that this analytical focus entails explanatory forms sensitive to the specificities and complexities of historical cases as they unfold over time and place, given that the precise configuration of structural constraint and agential power varies—​sometimes quite considerably—​ from case to case; and third, that these explanatory forms will necessarily embody a critique of the institutional and distributional outcomes generated through recurring cycles of “structure/​agency” interplay and of the strategic role which “organization” has played in reproducing and, potentially, changing the patterns of power relations that the latter embody. For the critical realist organization theorist, “explanation” logically entails “critique,” insofar as it necessarily involves the contested formulation and evaluation of analytically framed narratives accounting for the role which “organization” has played in shaping “outcomes” and the power relations through which they are reproduced, legitimated, and challenged.

Critical Realism and Metaphorical Analysis As Lakoff and Johnson (1980/​2003: 244–​7) remind us:

424   MICHAEL REED Because we reason in terms of metaphor, the metaphors we use determine a great deal about how we live our lives . . . metaphor is a natural phenomenon. Conceptual metaphor is a natural part of human thought and linguistic metaphor is a natural part of human language. Moreover, which metaphors we have and what they mean depend on the nature of our bodies, our interactions in the physical environment, and our social and cultural practices. Every question about the nature of conceptual metaphor and its role in thought and language is an empirical question.

In reminding us of the ontological anchoring of conceptual metaphors and conceptual metaphorical analysis in the socio-​materiality of our lives, Lakoff and Johnson are encouraging us to focus on the fact that “all metaphors are structural (in that they map structures to structures); all are ontological (in that they create target domain entities); and many are orientational (in that they map orientational image-​schemas”; Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003: 264). Considered in these terms, metaphors—​and the manifold ways in which we use them to analyze the power relations and structures in which our organizational lives are necessarily embedded—​are a fundamental component of the conceptual and analytical tool kit which we use to describe, understand, and explain how those structures or mechanisms work to shape the “terms and conditions” under which those lives are lived. They do not inhabit some exclusive ideational or discursive realm of symbolic representations and linguistic fabrications; rather, they exist and function as constituent elements of a material and structural reality that is indelibly shaped by interacting mechanisms and their contingent conjunctures in specific socio-​ historical contexts. The exact role which these metaphors and the wider discursive forms in which they are contained play in shaping organizational outcomes and the patterns of unequally distributed life chances that they generate and legitimate will be entirely dependent on the contingent conditions prevailing within specific temporal and spatial locations. Sometimes discursive mechanisms and the conceptual metaphorical schemas through which they are generated and sustained will play a major explanatory role in accounting for organizational outcomes. On other occasions, their explanatory role will be less significant but, from a CR perspective, discursive mechanisms will always have to be combined with extra-​discursive mechanisms in order to have any chance of constructing and justifying a coherent and sustainable explanation of “how things work” to generate certain organizational outcomes rather than others. Of late, socio-​materiality theory has been identified as a potential way forward for understanding and explaining the complex interplay between extra-​discursive and discursive factors as it shapes the organizational processes through which power relations are generated and sustained (Orlikowski 2007; Orlikowski and Scott 2008). By focusing on the intersections between human bodies, physical objects, spatial relations, material technologies, and organizing practices, socio-​materialism aspires to theorize the mutual ontological interpenetration of “the social” and “the material” as they co-​constitute the relations and practices through which “organization” becomes possible as a viable mode of social structuration. However, critical realist organization theorists have pointed out (Mutch 2013; Mingers 2014) that this kind of approach pays little or no regard to the

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    425 wider social structures in which such socio-​material practices are configured or to their vital role in generating and reproducing the enduring conditions under which collective agency is made possible as a potential source of change and innovation in defined socio-​ historical contexts. However much “entangled” the material and the social may become within the latter, there will be underlying structural mechanisms—​with the causal power to shape and reshape stabilized relations and processes—​at work exhibiting the capacity to generate “emergent” organizational forms potentially disrupting the smooth operation of the status quo. Much the same critique would be advanced against—​the now intellectually dominant theoretical framework in organization studies (Reed and Burrell 2019)—​institutional theory, with its overwhelming explanatory emphasis on culturally determined modes of organizational stabilization and reproduction by means of the decontextualized institutional logics which are presumed to operate behind actors’ backs irrespective of their individual and collective aspirations and intentions (Thornton et al. 2012; Guillén 2015). In both cases, the preference for social ontologies and explanatory logics preserving the ontological primacy and conceptual prioritization of “the ideational or cultural” is, paradoxically enough, legitimated through a series of argumentative maneuvers which dilutes rather than revivifies the status and role of human agency in shaping organizational outcomes. This leaves us with the question of how nondiscursive and discursive mechanisms—​ that is, social structures and cultural practices—​are to be combined in the furtherance of forms of critical realist metaphorical analysis which “track and trace” the emergent dynamics of political ideologies and discourses as they impact on the governance and policy regimes that shape our contemporary organizational lives. CR-​inspired metaphorical analysis proceeds from the assumption that metaphorical construction and deployment entails the “conduct of warfare” within an ideological and political struggle to secure and retain domination over the discursive mechanisms and resources whereby ruling groups legitimate their power and the material advantages it bestows. Building on Lakoff and Johnson’s (1980/​2003: 5, capitalization in original) original analysis that metaphorical “ARGUMENT IS WAR . . . [it] is partially structured, understood, performed, and talked about in terms of WAR,” Fairclough (1992: 195) offers a more fully developed conceptualization in these terms: How a particular domain of experience is metaphorized is one of the stakes in the struggle within and over discourse practices . . . one aspect of discursive change with significant cultural and social implications is change in the metaphorization of reality . . . thus the militarization of discourse is also a militarization of thought and social practice, just as the marketization of discourse [is] also a marketization of thought and discourse.

Consequently, the analytical focus and substantive domain for CR metaphorical analysis is the pivotal role which metaphorization plays within the wider discursively mediated power struggles within and between dominant groups and subordinate

426   MICHAEL REED groups to determine the organizational structures and practices through which our life chances are formed, reproduced, and transformed. By focusing on the “conceptual” and “generative” metaphors (Lakoff and Johnson 1980/​2003; Fairclough 1995, 2005) through which discursive power struggles to control the agenda for political decision making—​and the vested interests which it protects and challenges—​are conducted, CR metaphorical analysis reveals the central role which discursive change plays in helping to reframe the socio-​material relations that govern our organizational existence. By combining “conceptual” and “generative” metaphorical analysis—​that is, the deployment of innovative, counterintuitive metaphors which overturn established discursive understandings so that they become the new, deeper-​level foundational metaphors for emerging governance and policy regimes which radically break with the old regime critical realist organization theorists will be in a better position to explain the underlying dynamics whereby discursive and nondiscursive mechanisms combine to produce new modes of domination. The latter will establish the structural relations and material conditions for innovative organizational forms and practices which are legitimated by a new configuration of ideological and discursive narratives challenging preexisting taken-​ for-​ granted and “normalized” conventions and understandings shaping organizational life under the former.” Of course, these will not entirely disappear and the transition to a new regime may, and often does, take decades or more to “bed in” as it will continue to exhibit all sorts of internal contradictions and tensions left over by its “discursive inheritance” from the once dominant discursive narrative. Nevertheless, a “discursive paradigm shift” will have occurred, however complex its underlying dynamics and protracted its development, such that organizations will find themselves having to confront and adapt to very different socio-​material realities than those prevailing under the preexisting order and the means and modes through which it had been generated and sustained. The following section of this chapter provides a case study of how this CR-​inspired metaphorical analysis works and the kind of results it can produce by focusing on a case study in disruptive discursive innovation and change—​that is, the emergence and impact of “mutant neoliberalism” (Callison and Manfredi 2020).

Critical Realism and Mutant Neoliberalism “Mutant neoliberalism” is a hybrid discursive formation which has emerged as “neoliberalism” has evolved as a political project and regime. It has been mobilized through the sustained interventions of those ruling economic, political, and cultural elites who have benefited most from its inception and promulgation. Overall, it has been directed at reinventing liberalism, delegitimizing collectivism, and depoliticizing market rule, which has been at work within elite circles since the 1930s, but with much greater policy

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    427 and practice impact in Anglo-​American political economies since the 1980s (Callison and Manfredi 2020: 7). As a dynamic political ideology and economic theory, neoliberalism has always contained both a “libertarian” and an “authoritarian” strain which have coexisted in a state of perpetual contestation and tension with each other. It has continually adapted and mutated in the light of changing socio-​historical conditions and lived experiences, so that its internal ideological complexity and organizational diversity have increased (Peck 2010; Dardot and Laval 2013; Mirowski 2013; Davies 2014; Brown 2015; Ban 2016). In turn, the discursive technologies and practices through which neoliberal ideology and theory have been communicated and represented for general consumption within the wider society refract these underlying contradictions and tensions between the “libertarian” and “authoritarian” strains inherent in neoliberalism and neoliberalization (Harvey 2005; Swarts 2013; Cahill 2014; Peck and Theodore 2015; Hurt and Lipschutz 2016). Thus, the combined material and symbolic resources through which discursive technologies and practices are designed and put to use (Chouliaraki and Fairclough 1999; Fairclough 2005)—​such as computer hardware and software, a myriad of textually mediated representations and the social media through which they are transmitted and consumed—​will unavoidably embody and reflect, or indeed deflect, the endemic conflicts that the struggle between the “libertarian” and “authoritarian” strains of neoliberalism generate. For much of its evolutionary development, neoliberalism has been discursively dominated by its “libertarian” strain and the primary conceptual and generative metaphors it has drawn on to legitimate its political vision and economic mission, encapsulating core tropes associated with “individual freedom,” “market fundamentalism,” and “creative destruction.” However, more recently, the turn toward more nationalistic, nativistic, populist, and protectionist discursive tropes within neoliberal political ideology and economic theory have revivified the “authoritarian” strain within neoliberalism so that the collective interests and values of “the people” come to take precedence over individual freedom and liberty. The latter has always provided secondary metaphorical resources for neoliberal apologists and theorists to fall back on when economic and political conditions have turned against them, particularly in contexts (such as a pandemic) where escalating economic and political crises reach a level of intensity and pervasiveness that make individual freedom and liberty seem of relatively minor importance. But they are now assuming an increasingly primary role in the conceptual and generative metaphors through which “neoliberal cheerleaders” go about their business of constructing and deploying the discursive technologies through which they can protect the material interests and social values of the dominant economic and political elites whom they serve (Reed 2018). Yet, in the very act of revivifying these authoritarian-​cum-​populist conceptual and generative metaphors, the “culture warriors” working on behalf of dominant elite groups reignite the fundamental structural tension lying at the ideological core of neoliberalism which undermine its discursive coherence and sustainability as a “lodestar narrative” strategically directing contemporary sociopolitical change and economic innovation.

428   MICHAEL REED They also risk the emergence of “mutant ideological strains” of neoliberalism which threaten to take it in directions fundamentally at odds with any residual or meaningful commitment to the institutional forms and unwritten rules through which liberal democratic politics is legitimated and conducted. The conceptual and generative metaphors at the discursive core of the libertarian strain depend on a set of life science tropes which naturalize, and hence depoliticize, “market forces” as phenomena that determine outcomes irrespective of human volition and intervention—​they are to be regarded as phenomena constituted by transcendental forces ruling our lives, however and whatever means and modes we might pathetically “choose” to resist, or at least mitigate, their determining impact on us. Ontologically, market forces take on the reality and status of demigods which can only be propitiated, rather than controlled, by human beings bowing to their unforgiving logic in ways which satisfy their unsatiable demands and needs (Frank 2001). Thus, the axiomatic status of libertarian slogans such as “market discipline” is discursively driven by a set of generative and root metaphors—​such as “survival of the fittest,” “natural selection,” “creative destruction,” and “evolutionary imperatives”—​redefining human beings as “subjects” who have no choice but to conform to the determining logic which market forces impose on us and to capitulate to the ontological imperatives they necessarily entail. Human freedom and liberty are only made possible by such “subjects” totally and utterly embracing the logic of market forces as they universally, impersonally, and pitilessly impose their rule over us without regard to morality, politics, or culture. In direct contrast, the authoritarian/​populist strain of neoliberalism is discursively constituted through generative and root metaphors selectively drawn from folklore, cultural history, patriarchy, conspiracy theory, and nativist ethnicity extolling the overriding virtues of “the people,” “national sovereignty,” “traditional morality,” and “communal security” (Müller 2016; Brown 2020; Fawcett 2020). By drawing on generative and root metaphors discursively embedded in belief systems ontologically grounded in conceptions of “place,” “community,” “power,” and “control”—​such as “the will of the people,” “the general interest,” or “strangers in their own land”—​the authoritarian/​populist strain of neoliberalism provides potent ideological resources fundamentally rejecting the authority of the cosmopolitan intellectual/​expert elite and their governing rationalities of abstract pseudo-​scientific theory (Hochschild 2016; Springer 2016; Collins et al. 2020; Fawcett 2020; Frank 2020; Sandel 2020). In this way, the authoritarian/​populist strain of neoliberalism generates a powerful internal critique of the socially corrosive and politically emasculating impact of libertarian neoliberalism on the core values and institutions through which security and prosperity of the common people have been traditionally protected and historically venerated. Instead of being ontologically assigned the status of impersonal and implacable natural phenomena, unintendedly facilitating human freedom and individual liberty, “market forces” are now redefined as the “enemy within” which, at the very least, are to be reined in through collective action—​often, but not always, strategically directed by a powerful leader and/​ or leadership group—​undertaken by the state or other governing institutions acting on behalf of “the people.”

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    429 Organizations become arenas in which this ongoing structured and dynamic antagonism between the libertarian and authoritarian strains of neoliberalism are surfaced in ways which may push the latter’s “hybridizing capacity”—​that is, to articulate, absorb, and contain increasing ideological tensions through inclusive organizational narratives which can accommodate opposing discursive mutations—​to its very limits. While the libertarian strain of neoliberalism was dominant, organizational-​level discursive technologies were driven by the imperative to construct “neoliberal subjects” who, at least outwardly, conformed to the extreme “competitive individualism and entrepreneurialism” which the former demanded (Dardot and Laval 2013; Bröckling 2015; Chandler and Reid 2016). However, libertarian dominance at the organizational level was never complete, and recent analysis has suggested that significant enclaves of communal resistance—​particularly among professionals, middle managers, and knowledge workers—​to its discursive embrace continue to provide practical opposition to its ideological imperatives (Courpasson et al. 2021). In however a distorted, even nightmarish, fashion, the authoritarian strain of neoliberalism attempts to exploit and build on these “communitarian enclaves” within contemporary organizations by discursively enrolling them to legitimate exclusionary policies and practices explicitly discriminating between people on the grounds of racial, ethnic, national, and gender differences. It deploys notions of “community,” and the conceptual and generative metaphors—​such as “survival,” “security,” and “protection”—​through which it is discursively articulated, to separate and divide people into different allocative categories that negatively discriminate between them in relation to color, creed, and culture (Fleming and Spicer 2007; Srnicek and Williams 2015; Hanlon 2016). As Burleigh (2021: 8, capitalization in original) puts it, the populist/​authoritarian strain of neoliberalism demands that “the People must be sub-​divided into the authentically real ones, who intuit what is right, and the cosmopolitan uprooted who could be everywhere and nowhere.” The “entrepreneurial subject” gives way to the “loyal subject” through discursive mutations which reject market fundamentalism and competitive individualism in favor of an emergent ideological vision in which exclusive cultural identity and socioeconomic discrimination become the overriding organizational control mechanisms (Brown 2020). Some analysts have interpreted this growing tension and splitting between the libertarian and authoritarian strains of neoliberalism as productively generating various forms of discursive hybridization that have strengthened the latter’s political impact and cultural potency (Springer 2016; Callison and Manfredi 2020). However, others question its coherence and sustainability under the intensifying pressure that emerging ideological fissures and clashes necessarily produce (Davies 2018; Collier and Kay 2020). If the libertarian strain has been the dominant discursive framing for neoliberalism, but its authoritarian alternative is now generating “mutant forms” of the latter which can no longer contain their deep-​seated ideological differences, not to say divisions, then how can it survive as an effective governing discourse and practice in an increasingly complex and uncertain world? There is a distinct possibility that the authoritarian/​ populist strain of neoliberalism will take over as the dominant discursive variant re-​legitimating the latter

430   MICHAEL REED in very different terms to that of its libertarian forebear—​that is, in terms of conceptual metaphors such as the “popular will” rather than “market rule.” Insofar as authoritarian/​ populist neoliberalism entails a discursive shift from market-​based to action-​based political metaphors, then this will prioritize the importance of leadership-​based metaphors in which the legitimacy of behavior exemplifying the implementation of the “people’s will” overrides any lingering concern with democratic constraints and restraints. Indeed, it opens up the distinct possibility of justifying forms of political leadership and organizational domination which proactively undermine democratic values and rules in the furtherance of collective objectives detrimental to the latter. Nevertheless, critical realism would tell us that this is only likely to occur if the complex interplay between nondiscursive and discursive mechanisms generates the underlying material conditions and structural relations within and through which such an ideological realignment can propitiously emerge and take root.

Conclusion This chapter has supported a critical realist metaphorical analysis within organization studies which analytically focuses on the complex interplay between “structure and agency” as it shapes the discursive forms and technologies through which neoliberalism has emerged as the dominant political ideology serving the material interests of ruling political, economic, and cultural elites since the 1980s. By highlighting the importance of the metaphorical innovations through which the once-​dominant, libertarian strain of neoliberalism has mutated into a much more aggressive and divisive authoritarian strain, the chapter has attempted to demonstrate the “explanatory payoff ” which critical realist metaphorical analysis can deliver. It has also identified the discursive ruptures and ideological fissures emanating from this mutation of neoliberalism as it destructively works its way through the once-​dominant conceptual metaphors through which the libertarian strain of the latter was mobilized and legitimated. Of course, it will not have escaped the attention of any readers of this chapter that it has drawn upon discursive representations from the biosciences in which metaphorical language associated with the adaptive evolution of viral diseases became so evocative and resonant during the unfolding of the COVID-​19 pandemic. However, the analysis of the “metaphorical shifts” within neoliberalism undertaken in this chapter has focused on conceptual metaphors rather than “base metaphors” (Mangham 1996)—​that is, relatively complex metaphors shaping political struggle and the cyclical metamorphoses which they undergo in response to changing material conditions and structural contexts. In so doing, it has rejected evolutionary determinism and reaffirmed the centrality of constrained social agency as the critical conduit through which major shifts in political discourses occur as they attempt to absorb and articulate real changes in social structures and their wider significance for sociopolitical action. In accounting for

METAPHORS AND ORGANIZATION STUDIES    431 these major discursive realignments directed at preserving existing hierarchies of power and control or transforming them in ways which reduce their exploitative potential, this chapter has also attempted to demonstrate how “explanation” and “critique” are conjoined within critical realist analysis. Indeed, in its aspiration to understand the emerging discursive and political potency of the mutation of neoliberalism into a more authoritarian variant—​which was always “there” in the populist subtext of neoliberalism, but which remained relatively dormant (Callison and Manfredi 2020) until a decade of “austerity” and a year of pandemic culminated in the emergence of something more dangerous and threatening—​this chapter has attempted to demonstrate the critical realist commitment to “explanatory critique in action.” It also highlights the need to nurture a critical organization studies which focuses on the creative and innovative ways in which political ideologies and discourses change so that they can speak to new material and social realities in an evocative and disruptive manner.

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chapter 27

resea rc h Invitation to Metaphor hugo letiche and ivo de loo



(R +​I +​M) (R +​M +​I) (M +​I +​R) (M +​R +​I) (I +​R +​M) (I +​M +​R)

Research is an invitation to metaphor Research is a metaphorical invitation (to life itself) Metaphor is an invitation to research Metaphors of research invite (variation) Invitations to research are metaphorical Invitations to metaphor produce research

Introduction “Invitation to research” is a metaphor. On the semantic or narrative and ideational level, we are rarely “invited” to conduct research but often have to work to get access to “researchees” or the researched more generally. We also do such work as we are trying to get a degree, promotion, or to keep a job. On the semiotic or “word” level, we are not necessarily re-​searching, or “searching again” when doing so. (All too) often, it has been asserted that research should be a literal translation of circumstances into outcomes, as if phenomena in the world could somehow automatically be transformed into data, formulae, or results. But acknowledgment of “perspectivism” in research or the inevitable use of metaphors, whereby choices in designating, describing, and “languaging” make a difference, enjoins both the researcher and the reader to take their different ways of naming seriously (Jackson and Carter 1991; Letiche 2010). Stated differently: doing research involves a strategic deployment of ideation and descriptive resources. Some but not all theories, some but not all descriptions, are to be employed when research is done. Research is hereby about holding up a metaphorical mirror to some circumstance, phenomenon, or attribute. In fact, groundbreaking research changes identities; something or someone is (re)named—​that is, (dominant) metaphors are changed.

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    435 In this chapter, we examine three very different ways of dealing with the metaphorical nature of research. Paul Ricoeur sees the choice of metaphor as essential to research’s goal of facilitating informed human action; while Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler stress the pitfalls and indeterminacy of metaphor and ideation; and, finally, Henri Lefebvre illustrates with his rhythmanalysis, how rigor and metaphor can meet up in practice. Ricoeur and Derrida are the two most important continental thinkers of metaphor of the 20th century, while Lefebvre demonstrates that a compromise between their positions is possible. The first two sections (after this one) set out how the metaphorical grounds to semiotics (words) and semantics (narratives) are crucial to our very ability to do research. Research, we claim, is all about representation in language (i.e., “languaging”) or finding and/​or creating the “right” metaphor(s) for an object studied. We turn to the views of Paul Ricoeur, the 20th century’s leading theoretician of the necessity of metaphor in research, linking and illustrating his views with Gareth Morgan’s (1986) classical text on organizational metaphor. The third section describes how Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler challenged Ricoeur’s views on the propriety of metaphorization. What if metaphors endlessly keep referring, the one to the other; or what if the choices of metaphor do harm to us? Could Ricoeur’s rather optimistic take on the ethics of metaphorization perhaps be too optimistic? Thereafter, Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis, as a use of metaphor in doing research, is examined as a potential example of good practice. This brings us to the concluding section in which we describe how balance may be sought between the necessity, complexities, and pitfalls of metaphorization in research.

Epistemology: Semiotics versus Semantics The role of metaphor in research touches both upon the ontology (“What is it that is researched?”) and the epistemology (“What means of communicating and knowing are used?”) of doing research. Brown (1976, 1977) asserts that all knowledge is metaphorical, purporting that language itself is metaphorical. We assume that social studies research is interactive, socially embedded, and communicative, with metaphor as a crucial epistemological factor. Naming, framing, and describing are relational, undertaking a “languaged” transaction or interaction between researchers, researched, the researchees and readers. Research results and products are negotiated, shared, debated, and evaluated. Of course, without words, grammar, and communicative constructs there can be no research. Research requires “language”—​words, numbers, theories, concepts, etc. The “language(s)” of social and business research include statistics, specialist notions, interview techniques, narrative skills, etc. But if nothing is observed, and there is no dialogue between the researcher and the researched, or relationship to the

436    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO researched, the researcher will have nothing to say, and there will be no insights to be shared and debated. As Paul Ricouer (1974, 1978, 2004) has insisted, research takes place on the level of sentences or narratives, and not on the level of words and/​or grammar alone. For instance, Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization (1986) provides exemplary narratives, urging readers to think of organization(s) metaphorically. Research, Morgan claims, is an invitation to partake of narrative making; it makes use of “language,” but its key function is to make new narratives (see also Said 1975). Narrative making can be viewed as rigidly prescribed and limited, and semiotically determined (e.g., see Bakhtin 1986). One can assert that there are a very limited number of “plots” to business studies: for instance, how to increase shareholder value or achieve optimal efficiency, or innovation through creative destruction and entrepreneurial leadership. If the number of metaphors is limited and the metaphors have been defined, then research is doomed to endlessly repeat the “language” that it is being reduced to. Thus, an important issue for research is how much are prefigured structures or motifs—​such as exploitation or shareholder value, organism or machine, free market or social market economy, the commons or globalization—​just being repeated over and again. “Research” can merely reduce phenomena to predetermined semiosis or prescribed languaging. We wish to assume, here, a crucial differentiation between “language” and “narrative,” or semiotics and semantics. If, following a Morgan (1986) metaphor, we say that “business organizations are psychic prisons,” we posit on the semiotic or language level a subject, “business organizations,” a descriptor, “psychic prisons,” and an action term, “are.” On the semantic level of meaning, there is a “speaker/​writer” making an assertion, an “audience” (e.g., scholars and students), and the object: “organizations” being classified as incarcerating. On the semiotic level of language, we assume common “language” and that “organization” and “psychic prison” are known concepts. Words may be more or less metaphorical in their origins, but “language” is taken to be a shared and known resource. The rules for the semantic or meaning level are far more open and complex. Are “organizations” somehow uncommendable, criminal, repressive, or undesirable? Acceptance or rejection of the narrative is wide open. We see research as an invitation to participate in narrative making; it makes use of “language,” but its key function is to make new narratives (see also Said 1975). Ricoeur distinguishes between living and dead metaphors (1974, 1978). A dead metaphor is one that preexists the circumstances being investigated and has been semiotically reified. Living metaphors are circumstantial semantic creations of interaction, focused on unfolding events. An example would be: “Critical academics are prey to be eaten before lunch.” The sentence separates into the initiating subject or the “frame,” here “critical academics”; and the addressed or the “focus,” here “prey eaten before lunch.” Of course, the implied cannibalism is not meant to be taken literally. Making “critical” academics into “victims of primitive violence” is the narrative; it is inspired by the recent dismissal by a major UK university of any faculty “guilty” of having done “critical research,” as evidenced by publications in Critical Perspectives on Accounting (Andrew et al. 2021) or Organization (Parker 2021). Metaphorical transposition succeeds as living

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    437 metaphor if it engages the reader in an affective response and is experienced as if the writer is reacting with immediacy and integrity to events. In Ricoeur’s conceptualization of metaphor, it is the rhetorical significance of the sentence that counts, and not the words. In the metaphor “Achilles is a lion,” what is of importance is the rhetorical assertion of Achilles’ strength, majesty, and/​or courage. We are not really expecting Achilles to grow a mane or to roar. The metaphor is a matter of making an oratorical point and not one of actually (re-​)defining the meaning of the word “lion.” By asserting that metaphors play themselves out on the level of the sentence or statement, Ricoeur escapes semiotics or epistemology, where one asks: “Has the word ‘lion’ referenced a real object and, if so, how and why?” Crucial for us here is how much is organizational or business research entrapped in semiotic repetition or merely an exercise in repeated “language”; or is the research really semantically alive or narratively powerful? A caveat is necessary: if we overstate the role of semantic creativity and focus solely on the freshness or circumstantial authenticity of the narrative, research becomes poetry. The specific circumstances and quality of witnessing then dominates, while generalizability and common understanding suffer. The generating of new metaphors can get out of hand; in research one has to retain enough of the “language” or semiotics of social studies theory and methodology to achieve desired common or shared understanding.

Into the Field and Back Out Again When we read that “organizations are machines,” or that “organizations are psychic prisons,” who is speaking? We could assume that Gareth Morgan is addressing us, but we have little or no proof of this. Furthermore, who is Gareth Morgan? Most of us have never met him and know next to nothing about him. In fact, various publishers refused to take Images of Organization, while it became the mainstay of SAGE’s organizational behavior publishing profits.1 Who is responsible for what, where, and when (Örtenblad et al. 2016; Örtenblad 2017)? Positivist research assumes that there is a “reality” out there and that the researcher’s responsibility is to “objectively” represent it (Chua 1986). But the “turn to language,” by identifying the metaphorical nature of narrative, casts all sorts of doubts on the connection between the object of research and the (published) results (Bakhtin 1986; Grant et al. 1998; Deetz 2003). When is a description “true” to its object; and how would we know if this narrative is the best one? The testimony of the researcher may be all that we have; and if so, the trustworthiness of the researcher becomes crucial. If we really have no idea who the researcher is, how do we know if we can trust him or her (Alvesson and Sköldberg 2017)?

1  Oral

communication by one of the authors with Sue Jones (commissioning editor at SAGE at the time) and Gareth Morgan.

438    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO Ricoeur (1992) addresses the dilemma of identity via a distinction between idem and ipseity. Idem identity is characterized by sameness; —​one and the same person, object, or organization as existing through time. This “object” retains the same qualities, appearances, and personality. Idem identity stands still, is motionless, does not change or develop; it just is. Idem is dead. In contrast, ipseity is living identity; it encompasses modifications, variation, and occurrence. Ricoeur (1992) argues that it is ipseity that can say: “Here I am.” I possess existential authenticity in my relationship to the researched and the reader. “Here I am” as engaged, responsible, and an ethical “Other.” In ipseity, there is relationship, change, and dynamism; qualities essential to ethics. In idem, there are no events, no relationships, and thus no ethics. The Gareth Morgan of Images of Organization (Morgan 1986) has no ipseity for us. We are not privileged to whatever he may stand for. He creates metaphors in his book, but according to Ricoeur’s perspective, he has to be criticized for avoiding the authorial responsibility necessary for metaphor creation, as Morgan never critically reveals his process(es) of metaphor creation. Summarizing, we assert that metaphors are a necessity for doing research, as some object of research is to be represented by being narrated, accounted for, and thus “languaged.” Researcher responsibility for the choice of metaphors is crucial; “naming” is never neutral or self-​evident. Via the researcher’s semiotic and semantic choices, the researcher becomes part and parcel of whatever is being researched, which demands clarification and justification. For instance, Karl Weick’s (1979) renowned “sensemaking” is a metaphor producing procedure. The researcher hunts for the key significant representation of a circumstance: that is, the single metaphor that can define the research object. For instance, in the Mann Gulch forest fire story (a wildfire in 1949 that destroyed 3,000 acres of land in the US state of Montana and contributed to the death of 13 firemen who had tried to stop the fire), the key metaphor is “drop your tools” (Weick 1993). Finding and operationalizing the metaphor is literally portrayed as a matter of life and death. But in the Mann Gulch case, there has been relevant research that insists that Weick might have gotten it wrong, assigned responsibility incorrectly, and has been irresponsible (Ciborra 2002; Basbøll 2010). Weick’s examples of metaphorizing are all based on secondary material that others had collected and that he subsequently used and reinterpreted. The “I am here” of direct engagement, and necessary presence to Other, never occurred. In Ricoeur’s terms, the ethics of research have not been respected. Metaphorizing demands creativity, openness, and liberty of expression. But narrative freedom requires responsibilization (Örtenblad et al. 2016). Two assumptions are crucial in Ricoeur’s conceptualization: (1) there is a reality that is to be named—​that is, there is mimesis (i.e., the imitative representation of reality in the arts and literature) wherein metaphors are linked up to “objects” and to their “narratives”; and, (2) not any link will do. Metaphorization demands ethical criteria of action; key to these criteria is the aim to foster a good life in relation to others, in proper institutions (Ricoeur 1974, 1978, 2004). Metaphor creation in research is, thus, really all about social ethical action. Research needs to be the “I am here” of a just relationship of engagement and relatedness.

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    439

Who Is the Researcher’s Self? We have already evoked the metaphor “Organizations are psychic prisons” as an illustration. It is a phrase found in the book Images of Organization (Morgan 1986), but actually there are not really “images” in the book, in the sense of visual illustrations or artwork. The title is metaphoric. And we, of course, have not really been discussing organizations, but metaphors as an invitation to research. Thus “organization” has here been a metaphorical entity throughout. Thus does metaphoric-​ality ever stop? In Ricoeur, there is a “stop,” namely the “self ” of the researcher who can proclaim “I am here.” But is the “self ” of the researcher just another metaphor; after all, whom are we really talking about? Is the term “researcher” not just a metaphor for all sorts of people, situations, and activities? Is “the researcher” perhaps a metaphor for a very diverse world of graduate students, academics, consultants, civil servants, etc? Jacques Derrida, in “White Mythology” (1982), has pursued a critique of research, metaphors, and Ricoeur. The authorial or researcher “I,” who stands in contact with the Other, is crucial to Ricoeur’s conceptualization of any invitation to ethical researching; Derrida forces us to acknowledge that we do not really know who or what that “I” is. Ricoeur demands presence to “Self and Other”; Derrida answers that all identity is unstable, in motion, and variable. The “Self ” is not conceptually consistent. Ricoeur’s ethical “Self ” may merely be an idealized metaphor for a form of virtue ethics. Derrida sees no way to make an ethical escape from the instabilities of metaphorization. Now some 40 years after Derrida wrote his essay, his assertion that research is “white mythology” seems more pertinent than ever. Derrida asserted that the key metaphor for research is coinage or moneymaking. The images on the coins get worn down with age, until there is nothing left: that is, reputations and academic market value dissipate. Today’s living metaphor or relationship of ipseity is tomorrow’s dead letter or idem. Research and researcher may start with a human face, but they lose that over time, until faceless conformity is all that remains. And all of this is happening in a world where economic value trumps all other forms of value; and wherein the assertion of racial superiority (whiteness) reigns supreme. Derrida’s social and economic pessimism is underpinned by some of the same values as Ricoeur’s optimism. However, while Ricoeur thinks that a contemporary researcher can personify good research ethics, Derrida thinks our distance from any such consistent or coherent “truth” or practices is all too great. Is the “ethical researcher” Ricoeur invites to the table a sustainable metaphor? Derrida was repeatedly attacked for his conceptualization of the instability of meaning of and between texts and the role therein of metaphor. Derrida and Ricoeur do not really disagree that much about the crucial role that metaphor plays in narrative creation. But their versions of the social-​political context differ. Derrida’s master metaphors are of uncertainty, doubt, and crisis in social injustice. He rejected “logocentric” thought wherein epistemological stability, objectivity, and rational action are (self-​evidently) assumed.

440    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO For Derrida, the one metaphor defers to the other, the one image or idea is buttressed by the other, on and on, in an unending process of relational metaphorization. But Derrida was not a relativist; his destabilization of the possibility of univocal scientific truth, expressed through language, as applied to social studies, was actually in service of his critical political agenda. “Anything goes” was not of his making (see also Feyerabend 1975). For Derrida (1982), (the detrimental effects of) globalized social-​economic relations drove nihilism. Derrida believed that justice had to be socially constructed; no scientific “Truth” guarantees it or will give it to us. In this matter, Ricoeur and Derrida agree; responsibility for the human condition is radically our own. Their difference is that knowledge for Derrida is precarious, uncertain, and unstable, also or especially when metaphors are used; while for Ricoeur the possibilities of stable awareness and knowing are much stronger, possibly even through (instead of in spite of) the use of metaphors. Derrida’s most prolific follower, Bernard Stiegler, contended that the “proletarianization” of the spirit in contemporary society is leading to entropic collapse, making the creation of effective life-​confirming metaphors (and the range of actions that may come with their use) much less possible than before (Stiegler 2018). However, Stiegler believed that the breakdown of relations, resulting in a social and political regime of mistrust, exploitation, and alienation, could be remastered by reinstating the “commons” and by the creation of a participatory economy. But since Stiegler’s suicide in 2020, his trust in any positive solutions to the proletarianization of the spirit, among others through the production of critical texts narrating new alternatives to the Anthropocene disaster, has to be questioned (Moore 2020a, 2020b; Nancy 2021). Was existence really tragic, after all? Stiegler generated powerful metaphors: for instance, technology as “pharmakon,” where the cure is also at once a poison—​and where innovation and economic growth are seen to be enablers, but also threaten to destroy human existence. We exist in a society that empoisons not only rivers and the air, but also relationships and politics; but also enables creativity, possibilities for cooperation, and the technics of innovation. Stiegler’s metaphors were meant to create and support new initiatives and the energies of humanness by explicitly making calls to action. But did Stiegler’s narrative metaphors turn (self-​)destructive, leading to despair or the metaphor of “There is no escape”? Ricoeur’s ethical self does not seem to have to pay a high price for its “goodness.” Derrida’s deconstruction of certainties created ambiguity and made enormous demands on the researcher and reader if any significant understanding is to be achieved. Derrida insisted on showing us that the webs of ideas, circumstances, interpretations, texts, and theories, implicated in any effort at “knowing,” were overwhelming, and often defeated our desire for knowledge. His work produced a great deal of misunderstanding and aggression against him. Research, like radical doubt and societal questioning, is certainly not self-​evidently supported by our research institutions. Stiegler’s overt outsider position was as a campaigner for a more socially and environmentally just society, but he realized that the pharmakon of his interventions could mean that one’s ideation could do more harm than good. Indeed, the pharmakon was his favorite metaphor; the hoped-​ for solution could turn out to be a poison. The critical scholar produces metaphors of

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    441 social criticism and possibility; ideas that were for Steigler (at least metaphorically) fatal (Moore 2020a, 2020b). The choice of metaphors is not innocent: “the who invents the what, which in turn reinvents the who” (Moore 2020a, 2020b). But what if the cycle stutters or collapses? The invitation to research is not innocuous.

How the Self of Openness (Maybe) Succeeds As we have seen, Ricoeur and Derrida agree that semiotic rigidity threatens the very possibility of doing research, but disagree about the researcher’s ability to semantically transcend contemporary social limits on ethical awareness and expression. Ricoeur champions the ethical researcher committed to doing justice to Other, while Derrida fears that there is always another idea, force, or factor creating doubt and uncertainty, and perhaps frustrating all good intentions. Research is a process of metaphorization, but can the researcher exert enough of the necessary ethical control over that process? In order to end the chapter positively, we choose to examine Henri Lefebvre’s rhythmanalysis (2004) as a potential way to make metaphors productive in research while allowing the self to come explicitly to the fore. Instead of generating radical uncertainty, Lefebvre reveals, in the final work written before his death, the potential for concrete human action. Lefebvre is not an uncritical optimist: for instance, he is very negative about the effects of rampant capitalism. Ricoeur is certainly less political than Lefebvre, but Lefebvre is much less possessed by radical doubt than both Derrida and Stiegler. Lefebvre is critical, but without the intensity of seeing a bleak dark side to research and social life. Lefebvre (2004) uses the metaphors of time and rhythm to set forth his approach to research(ing). The researcher is called upon to actively engage with the world they find around them, by paying close attention to human and nonhuman objects and their interactions, as well as the changes occurring from these interactions—​including changes happening in and because of researcher involvement with the researched. Lefebvre asserts that “[e]‌verywhere where there is interaction between a place, a time and the expenditure of energy, there is rhythm” (Lefebvre 2004: 15). Researchers need to be sensitive to “moments of discontinuity”; situations where one literally feels and senses that something may be amiss, strange, or different. Research is about how people engage with the world around them, and the sensory experiences that stem from this engagement. Lefebvre claims that sites of rhythm (or “rhythmic assemblages”) are to be found where a comparison of rhythms, through bodily engagement, leads to researcher understanding of: (1) the site’s dynamics, and (2) the researcher’s sensemaking. Research needs to focus on individuals living in or passing through concrete sites. Existence always happens somewhere and has its own rhythms (see also Weick 1979). Lefebvre (2004) surmises that sites of rhythm are continuously being shaped and

442    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO reshaped, which has an effect on individuals as they pass through or live in them. Examples of sites of rhythm (or rhythmic assemblages) include cities, markets, organizations, and office spaces. Lefebvre purports that when rhythm is acknowledged as a main organizing principle of everyday experience, increased insight into quotidian existence is facilitated. The basic research questions floating through rhythmanalysis entail: “How do people move about?” “How is motion and motility organized?” “How is physical relatedness governed?” “How is group activity coordinated?” Rhythm has to be interpreted metaphorically—​here we are not talking about 4/​4 or 6/​8 rhythms, for example, as one would do when discussing music, but rather about the proverbial ebbs and flows of feelings, impressions, thoughts, actions, and ideas, as we pass through rhythmic assemblages, which are assumed to possess their own rhythms. Both the rhythms and the “possession” thereof can only be rendered in research metaphorically, and by means of invitation. It is not possible to tell in advance which rhythms may be experienced in the field, as one moves through a site of rhythm, and what these may mean or signify to the onlooker, and which metaphors (if any) may subsequently be connected to this. Questions of rhythm can be used to analyze social interaction. By using phenomenological tools of observation, it is possible to metaphorically “see” relatedness. Hereby, for instance, capitalism’s influence on feelings and doing becomes researchable. By bringing representations of the lived rhythm of capitalism to the fore, research takes a step in the direction of possible change. Lefebvre believes that the linearity and standardization propagated by capitalism can never completely overtake one’s inner life or totally dominate everyday life. Consequently, one can position oneself differently toward the effects of capitalism (which is a view that Stiegler agreed with, but was afraid could be overwhelming, leaving the researcher(s) paralyzed and in effect stymied, for instance, in their use of metaphors). We propose that using the metaphors of rhythm helps to keep feelings of being overwhelmed at bay, since it is assumed that one’s own rhythms and the rhythm of a site always interact and that the one can never fully overtake the other. By taking in the rhythm(s) of a site, one can represent the site’s character and the sensual effects it evokes, and see how these impact on individuals (Lefebvre 2004). By paying close attention to the “little epiphanies” of the bodily experience of a site, consciousness of context is possible. Reflecting on one’s engagement with a research site can lead to insightful experiences of Self and Other in particular circumstances (Lyon 2019). Unexpected noises, murmurs, and silences provide potential renderings of how relatedness can be seen to be structured. Heightened awareness of lived networks of interaction can lead to epiphanies of social awareness. There are always multiple rhythms to be found, experienced, and denoted on any site. Individuals have their own rhythms as well, as do groups and organizations. For instance, when someone wants to get from one place to another in a city, in a specific length of time, their motility can be called “hasty,” “bossy,” “relaxed,” “sauntering,” “purposeful,” or whatever. On a very different aggregation level, a container ship brings goods from Asia to Europe and may be said to operate “efficiently,” “cheaply,” “wastefully,” or “uneconomically.” Chen (2017: 5, 4) indicates that consequently, for a researcher,

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    443 the method of identification [in rhythmanalysis] is to find assemblages of rhythms that have the capacity to make vivid the sensing of rhythms through a process of materialising the sensory. . . . Rhythms, that is to say “time-​spaces,” are produced by the effects of interrelating materiality. These temporal-​spatial relationships characterize the forms of rhythms [that can be found], and their formation and reformation are critical processes for rhythmanalysis.

This “materializing,” indeed, is a process of metaphorizing, otherwise rhythms or rhythmical experiences cannot be expressed in words (i.e., “language”). Rhythm-​based research requires active and unencumbered bodily engagement by the researcher with the research site. The goal is to represent the rhythms of work, transport, motility, and experience, in order to set forth a view of society and social life that can be critically debated and assessed. The use of metaphors is inevitable when this is done: how else can one express bodily sensations that come to the fore when rhythms are emphasized through “languaging”? Research and “researchership” can only be approached metaphorically, here through the themes of rhythm and the body. To do research is also to be affected by rhythms as one proceeds. In addition to analyzing the rhythms of a particular site, rhythmanalysis allows the researcher to sense, address, and lay bare the sensemaking efforts characteristic of the sites studied. Rhythmanalysis may be claimed to lead to a heightened awareness of lived experience and of the impact of social and physical sites on existence (Chen 2017). However, Lefebvre (2004) remained vague about the methodology of languaging his results (Nash 2020). Rhythmanalysis was meant to be a provocation against beliefs that what is heard and sensed plays a limited (or no) role in social existence or social studies (Lyon 2019). Lefebvre wrote up several descriptions and examples of rhythmanalysis based on his own experiences (and that of his frequent collaborator and last wife, Catherine Régulier). The sites of rhythm that are investigated are located in Paris and in a couple of Mediterranean cities (e.g., Montpellier). Herein the reader is treated to vibrant descriptions or “languaging” of space, movement, crowds, and co​determination of action and tempos. The flood of descriptors reveals the social relatedness metaphorically. Lefebvre’s descriptions and neologisms vividly reveal the immediate quotidian lived world, whereby immediacy and proximity to social existence is metaphorical. Herein lies the power of Lefebvre’s project: it records social proximity, opening possibilities for analysis by metaphorizing researcher (and reader) awareness, taking a position that Ricoeur, Derrida, and Stiegler believe is very problematic to take, since researchers and readers may be (literally) shredded or overcome by powerlessness or despair, stemming from capitalism and the contemporary environmental and climate challenges of what is being “languaged” as the “Anthropocene.” There has been a rise in research papers utilizing rhythmanalysis in recent years. Just two examples are Brighenti and Kärrholm (2018) and Nash (2020). Brighenti and Kärrholm (2018) investigate how the notion of rhythm can be explored in situations and moments of discomfort. The authors suggest integrating rhythmanalysis into the description of “territoriology.” Rhythm may be viewed as a metaphorical component of

444    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO territory. Rhythms can be portrayed as having intensity as well as presence, whereby rhythms are entangled in processes of territorialization. Both researchers and the researched could, or perhaps even should, be invited to reflect on these processes of territorialization. Nash (2020) illustrates this possibility when she concludes that she (being a researcher) noticed that people working in the City of London often refused to slow down while working and walking around, as they felt they had to “keep up” with what they saw as the rhythms of the companies occupying the City’s large and luxurious buildings and skyscrapers. Work and the necessity of performing never seemed to come to a halt; it was as if there was something “in the air” that made people work so hard, including after hours. Only after they had left the City could they allow themselves to fully recuperate. Their very bodies were territorialized by (sensations they experienced and the interpretations they made of) the metaphor of the City.

Conclusion Ricoeur’s (1974, 1978, 2004) invitation to research is an invitation to narrative, which naturally involves the use of metaphors. It is an invitation to hermeneutics, leading to seeing, understanding, and creatively managing the narrative, wherein interpretations of society, meaning, and “self ” are presented as an ethics. The invitation to do research is a call to interpret. The self-​understanding needed to observe and to write, and to narrate, is crucial to Ricoeur’s hermeneutic ethics. As we have indicated, Ricoeur’s trust in the researcher and the human self was questioned by Derrida’s assertion of unresolved and unresolvable doubt, which destabilizes confidence in the possibilities of hermeneutics. All metaphors may have a flip side of blankness where ethical commitment is uncertain; and they may also have been put forward without consideration of their ethical commitments. In addition, there is an infinite regress with metaphors, which is problematic; one metaphor may be buttressed by another, on and on. Ricoeur’s rock-​bottom of ethical assurance is for Derrida an unreachable ideal. Stiegler (2008, 2010) shows us the potential human price of unresolved concern when confronted by equal doses of uncertainty, pointing to the grave and adverse effects of consumerism, proletarianization, and the destruction of intergenerational learning. With Lefebvre, metaphorization takes a much more positive turn, wherein openness to circumstances and Other allows the researcher to make contact with the dynamics, creativity, and force of human activity, which may eventually bring about social change. At the very least, rhythmanalysis was meant to help the researcher and potentially also the researched to make sense of what they are experiencing in an age of rampant capitalism. Here, lived existence and its ingenuity form a potential source of confirmation and energy. Seeing research as an invitation to metaphor is actually “alive and kicking” today. It is presently being championed as “postqualitative inquiry” (St. Pierre 2011, 2018, 2019, 2021; Mazzei 2017, 2021), whereby it is claimed that “thinking with ideas” leads to experimental mappings rather than to the conventional narratives produced by applying

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    445 qualitative research methods. In effect, metaphor creation as the transformation of concepts is being proposed as crucial to generating new research narratives. In this way, the debate between Ricoeur’s embrace of the “humanist self ” as the source of renewal and ethics in research, and Derrida’s debunking of that “self ” and emphasis on the unpredictability of traces of “becoming,” is once again relevant. Lefebvre’s (2004) strategy of implementing research by focusing on relatedness (of Self and Other, and, and in, a particular context) through sensory experience has thus (re)appeared as actual. Ricoeur finds metaphors essential to doing research, as they can help to bring about informed human action. Derrida addresses the pitfalls and indeterminacy of depending on metaphors in research. Lefebvre illustrates how rigor and metaphor can come together when research is conducted (through rhythmanalysis). They all raise the question: when do we know that “languaging” matches up with the object under investigation? In this contribution, we have tried to put forward a view of research that stresses the entanglement of the researcher with whatever is being researched and how the research is done, and hence, the effects that research has on the researcher themselves, and the effects the latter has on what or who is being researched. This allowed us to explicitly address the metaphor of the “human face,” as well as its role, in research, which Stiegler thought to be largely impossible to highlight and Derrida deemed not to be acceptable anymore for many of our research institutions. Ricoeur believed that a human face could always be upheld in research, even though contemporary society successfully managed to move this face to the background of many research efforts. Lefebvre shows us that the human face, and human experience more generally, is part and parcel of rhythmanalysis, challenging contemporary ways of looking at research. Rhythmanalysis yields very different research narratives, from which we can see (or imagine) the object under investigation differently, in potentially novel and hitherto un(der)explored ways. Metaphors can play an influential role in framing these narratives.

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446    HUGO LETICHE AND IVO DE LOO Brown, Richard H. 1976. “Social Theory as Metaphor: On the Logic of Discovery for the Sciences of Conduct.” Theory and Society 3 (2): 169–​97. Brown, Richard Harvey. 1977. A Poetic for Sociology: Toward a Logic of Discovery for the Human Sciences. Cambridge, MA: Cambridge University Press. Chen, Yi. 2017. Practising Rhythmanalysis: Theories and Methodologies. London: Rowman & Littlefield. Chua, Wai Fong. 1986. “Radical Developments in Accounting Thought.” Accounting Review 61 (4): 601–​32. Ciborra, Claudio. 2002. The Labyrinths of Information: Challenging the Wisdom of Systems. Oxford: Oxford University Press. Deetz, Stanley. 2003. “Reclaiming the Legacy of the Linguistic Turn.” Organization 19 (3): 421–​9. Derrida, Jacques. 1982. “White Mythology: Metaphor in the Text of Philosophy.” In Margins of Philosophy, authored by Jacques Derrida, 207–​7 1. Translated, with additional notes, by Alan Bass. Chicago: Chicago University Press. Feyerabend, Paul. 1975. Against Method. London: New Left Books. Grant, David, Tom Keenoy, and Cliff Oswick. 1998. “Introduction: Organizational Discourse: Of Diversity, Dichotomy and Multi-​ disciplinarity.” In Discourse and Organization, edited by David Grant, Tom Keenoy, and Cliff Oswick, 1–​13. London: SAGE. Jackson, Norman, and Pippa Carter. 1991. “In Defence of Paradigm Incommensurability.” Organization Studies 12 (1): 109–​27. Lefebvre, Henri. 2004. Rhythmanalysis: Space, Time and Everyday Life. London: Continuum. Letiche, Hugo. 2010. “Polyphony and Its Other.” Organization Studies 31 (3): 261–​77. Lyon, Dawn. 2019. Rhythmanalysis: Research Methods. London: Bloomsbury. Mazzei, Lisa A. 2017. “Following the Contour of Concepts toward a Minor Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry 23 (9): 675–​85. Mazzei, Lisa A. 2021. “Postqualitative Inquiry: Or the Necessity of Theory.” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (2): 198–​200. Moore, Gerald. 2020a. “Bernard Stiegler, 1952–​2020.” Radical Philosophy 2 (8): 108–​12. Moore, Gerald. 2020b. “Cinq dates, trois titans.” Études Digitales 1 (9): 307–​14. Morgan, Gareth. 1986. Images of Organization. London: SAGE. Nancy, Jean-​Luc, ed. 2021. Amitiés de Bernard Stiegler. Paris: Éditions Galilée. Nash, Louise. 2020. “Performing Place: A Rhythmanalysis of the City of London.” Organization Studies 41 (3): 301–​21. Örtenblad, Anders. 2017. “Approaches to Using Metaphors in Organizational Analysis: Morgan’s Metaphors and Beyond.” In Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, edited by Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, and Linda L. Putnam, 54–​86. London: SAGE. Örtenblad, Anders, Linda L. Putnam, and Kiran Trehan. 2016. “Beyond Morgan’s Eight Metaphors: Adding to and Developing Organization Theory.” Human Relations 69 (4): 875–​89. Parker, Martin. 2023. “Against Management: Auto-​critique.” Organization 30 (2): 407–15. doi: 10.1177/​13505084211020922. Ricoeur, Paul. 1974. The Conflict of Interpretations: Essays in Hermeneutics. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press. Ricoeur, Paul. 1978. “The Metaphorical Process as Cognition, Imagination, and Feeling.” Critical Inquiry 5 (1): 143–​59. Ricoeur, Paul. 1992. Oneself as Another. Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

RESEARCH: INVITATION TO METAPHOR    447 Ricoeur, Paul. 2004. Memory, History, Forgetting. Chicago: University of Chicago Press. Said, Edward W. 1975. Beginnings: Intention and Method. New York: Basic Books. St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2011. “Anything Can and Does Happen.” Cultural Studies ↔ Critical Methodologies 11 (4): 386–​9. St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2018. “Writing Post Qualitative Inquiry.” Qualitative Inquiry 24 (9): 603–​8. St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2019. “Post Qualitative Inquiry, the Refusal of Method, and the Risk of the New.” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (1): 3–​9. St. Pierre, Elizabeth Adams. 2021. “Why Post Qualitative Inquiry?” Qualitative Inquiry 27 (2): 163–​6. Stiegler, Bernard. 2008. Technics and Time 2: Disorientation. Stanford, CA: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2010. Taking Care of Youth and the Generations. Redwood City, CA: Stanford University Press. Stiegler, Bernard. 2018. The Neganthropocone. London: Open Humanities Press. Weick, Karl E. 1979. The Social Psychology of Organizing, 2nd ed. New York: Random House. Weick, Karl E. 1993. “The Collapse of Sensemaking in Organizations: The Mann Gulch Disaster.” Administrative Science Quarterly 38 (4): 628–​52.

pa rt v i

EPILOGUE

chapter 28

organiz ati ona l m eta phors of t h e fu t u re Some Suggested Types of Further Research anders örtenblad

Introduction Each chapter in this book can be said to implicitly encourage further research within the area it deals with. Throughout the book, readers are also offered much advice for how to (better) use metaphors in their further research within the area of organization studies. An overview of some of the most important advice can be found in the introductory chapter (Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). Some chapters contain more explicitly expressed suggestions for further research. In particular, Audrin and Davoine (Chapter 9 in this volume) suggest the use of others among Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) metaphors besides the ones they used (or any other metaphors) to better understand organizational actors’ perceptions of digital transformation; Mitterhofer and Jordan (Chapter 16 in this volume) call for research on metaphors in dynamic visuals, such as interactive web pages and “lived media” (e.g., dress and architecture) as well as for alternative visual metaphors for organization and management; Bruni and Biscaro (Chapter 18 in this volume) suggest that research is conducted on the effect that researchers have on the very metaphors they elicit; and Biscaro and Bruni (Chapter 20 in this volume) call for a book fleshing out metaphors’ advantages and limitations, written with practitioners in mind. Rather than delving into any of the research themes in other chapters, which all deserve to be read in their own right, this chapter attempts to suggest some other themes for further research within the area of organization studies which can be conducted with the help of metaphor and metaphors. These suggestions mirror my own subjective

452   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD research interests and ideas. Nevertheless, many of them connect to themes dealt with in other chapters in this book, and I have tried to make explicit connections to those chapters, when relevant. The overall ambition is to stimulate further research in organizational studies using metaphors as well as to advance studies on the use of metaphor and metaphors in organization studies. Anyone is, of course, free to “steal” any of the ideas that I share here (but, if doing so, please cite this chapter). I first suggest a few types of studies of organization where metaphor and metaphors are used as a tool. The chapter ends with a suggestion for further work on the refinement of the concept of metaphor, which could therefore be regarded as a research area in itself.

Overviews of Metaphors for “Organization” Gareth Morgan’s original intention in presenting eight metaphors of organization—​in Images of Organization (Morgan 1986, 1996a, 2006)—​was not that we should be limited to these eight. As he wrote in his book, and has repeated many times since (see, e.g., Morgan 2011/​2017: 25; 2016; 2017: xxiii; Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume), he was actually encouraging readers in a creative way to come up with new, relevant metaphors that could help them to solve the particular problems they were facing. There are what appears to be a myriad of metaphors for “organization.” In addition to Morgan’s eight metaphors (1986, 1996a, 2006)—​that is, machine, organism, brain, culture, political system, psychic prison, flux and transformation, and instrument of domination—​metaphors such as the following have been suggested: “organization as palace” and “organization as tent” (Hedberg et al. 1976); “organization as text” (Morgan 1980); “organization as theatre” (Morgan 1980; Cornelissen 2004); “organization as military” (Deetz 1986: 175); “organization as place” (Tsoukas 1992); “organization as game” (e.g., Alvesson 1993); “organization as body” (Hassard et al. 2000); “organization as cyborg” (e.g., Parker 2000; Modliński and Gladden 2022); “organization as glass cage” and “organization as glass palace” (Gabriel 2005); “organization as Icehotel” (Pinto 2016); “organization as water exploiter” (Jermier and Forbes 2016; see also Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume); “organization as theme park” (Morgan 2016); and “organization as affect” (Grant and Oswick 2017). The above list is far from exhaustive (see also, e.g., Cornelissen et al. 2005; Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume; Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume, all of whom offer lists of suggested metaphors for organization). Metaphors for organization that are more or less explicitly presented in this book include “organization as music and dance” (Bendl and Schmidt, Chapter 7 in this volume; Rossi, Chapter 12 in this volume); “organization as sports” (Byers and Owusu, Chapter 11 in this volume); “organization as brightness/​darkness” (Linstead, Chapter 13 in this volume); and “organization as color” (Örtenblad and Alpaslan-​ Danisman, Chapter 14 in this volume).

ORGANIZATIONAL METAPHORS OF THE FUTURE    453 One of my own favorite metaphors for organization is “traffic,” highlighting the lack of clear borders between organizations as well as between any organization and its “environment.” The “organization as traffic” metaphor also emphasizes formal structure and problems stemming from establishing informal structures, such as in the Swedish town where the obligation to give way to traffic coming from the right (which is statutory in Sweden) is set aside, which might cause serious problems for visiting drivers. However, the “organization as traffic” metaphor has (at least) one main problem: the source and the target are too similar, especially since traffic is often regarded as “organized” (if not an organization in itself). Another metaphor that may have relevance for the area of organization studies is “ownership.” Such a metaphor emphasizes what is “mine” and what is “yours” in an organization. It could help us to better see and reflect upon statements such as “this is my area, not yours,” and “this employee does not thrive in our organization.” New metaphors are always welcome. In fact, new metaphors can even create a new reality (Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 145). However, as Morgan (2017: xxiv) has stated, “we do not need new metaphors for the sake of finding new metaphors.” Thus, there should ideally be a reason for them to be suggested. Several of the contributors to the present book have indicated such reasons. Letiche and De Loo (Chapter 27 in this volume) claim that creating new metaphors is a key function in research, and that research without new metaphors runs the risk of turning into mere repetition (see also Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume), and Bendl and Schmidt (Chapter 7 in this volume) suggest that metaphors can open up new avenues for understanding. Ritchie (Chapter 25 in this volume) reminds us that novel metaphors are simply more interesting and therefore may receive more attention and be more stimulating than old metaphors. The contemporary global, digital, and distributed nature of organizations and organizing demand new images, claims Cornelissen (Chapter 2 in this volume). Other challenges that give rise to a need for new images and metaphors include the development of electronic media (Morgan 2011/​2017), as well as challenges relating to gender, race, religion, social inequality, and planetary sustainability (Morgan 2016; see also Grant and Oswick 2017). Another type of reason for generating new metaphors is a need to capture or communicate key issues of practice in a new way (Morgan 2011/​2017: 26). Instead of generally encouraging the construction of new metaphors for organization, I want to suggest that one could make an inventory of those metaphors that have already been suggested. Such an inventory could, for instance, include analyses of existing metaphors, to see if any of them may count as a true complement, in its own right, to Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) set of eight metaphors. As Morgan himself has argued, many of the new metaphors and organization theories that have been developed since 1986, when his book first was published, can be made sense of by the eight metaphors (see Morgan 2011/​2017: 28–​9). One could, for instance, argue that the stream within organization studies that focuses on employees’ resistance—​“voice” (e.g., Fletcher and Watson 2007)—​is still referring to Morgan’s “organization as instrument of domination” metaphor. Morgan has, nonetheless, himself suggested metaphors that could complement his own, original set of eight metaphors: “organization as media,” “organizations as

454   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD economic systems,” “organizations as legal systems,” “viewing organizations through the lenses of gender and race,” “organizations as text and discourse” (Morgan 2011/​2017: 29), and “organization as global brain” (Morgan, cited in Grant and Oswick 2017: 207). Another suggestion for further research is the development of other sets of metaphors as an alternative to Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) set of eight. As Morgan (2016) has suggested himself, there can be no “definite” set of metaphors, since “no metaphor ever has a definitive or absolute meaning in and of itself ” (Morgan 2016: 1036). Thus, one idea for a new set of metaphors for organization would be a set of metaphors that makes sense within a particular culture where Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) set of metaphors does not (fully) make sense. Metaphors developed in one context may simply not make sense within another context (Case et al. 2017; see also Dell et al., Chapter 6 in this volume; Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume). One could, for example, aim at developing such a set of metaphors that would fully make sense to people in China or Asia more broadly. It may also be that the images that Morgan used are somewhat outdated and therefore need an update. One could, of course, also develop a set of second-​level metaphors for any existing metaphor, as Alvesson (2013) did for the culture metaphor.

Metaphors We X By One prolific idea for metaphorical research in the organizational area is to use metaphors to point out the most basic assumptions or understandings that the current literature rests upon, but it could also include (or mainly be based on) the study of metaphors-​ in-​use among organization members. Such metaphor-​based overviews could offer a basis for reflection, among both scholars and organization members (see, e.g., Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). The researcher could stick to describing common understandings of the phenomenon at stake, or—​as Morgan (1986, 1996a, 2006; see also Morgan 2011/​2017: 25, 2016, 2017: xxiii) did in Images of Organization—​also suggest new, alternative metaphors. A very topical example, though not one strongly related to the area of organization studies, is the book Metaphors of Coronavirus (Charteris-​Black 2021; see also Oswick et al. 2020). Not seldom, such works have a paraphrased version of the title of Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking book, Metaphors We Live By (1980), as their title. Gareth Morgan’s book Images of Organization (1986, 1996a, 2006) could perhaps have been called: “Metaphors We Organize By.” An example of an area where underlying assumptions have been pointed out through the help of metaphors is “communication.” In “Metaphors We Communicate By,” Krzeszowski (2020: 25, capitals in original replaced by emphasis) suggests four metaphors: “the conduit metaphor, the discourse is movement metaphor, the meaning is (phasers of) matter metaphor, and the barriers metaphor” (see also Putnam et al. 1996; Zierold 2009). Another example is Metaphors We Teach By (Badley and Van Brummelen 2012; see also Cortazzi and Jin 1999; Weick, Chapter 21 in this volume, who suggests that instructors metaphorize on both what they teach and how

ORGANIZATIONAL METAPHORS OF THE FUTURE    455 they teach). A notable example within the area of organization and management that has paraphrased Metaphors We Live By is Alvesson and Spicer’s (2011) Metaphors We Lead By, in which the following six metaphors for the leader were suggested: “gardener,” “cosy-​crafter,” “saint,” “cyborg,” “commander,” and “bully.” In the organization and management area, there are many aspects that could be investigated by such a metaphorical approach. One example is recruitment: “Metaphors We Recruit By.” One could, for instance, claim that the recruitment process has been approached as “fishing” or “leaf-​raking” in the search process and “weeding out” in the short-​listing part of the selection process, and that a common assumption about applicants is as “containers” (see, e.g., Lakoff and Johnson 1980: 29–​32) when they are interviewed and scrutinized in more depth (including psychological tests and reference taking). If digging deeply enough, one would reach the “true” self of the applicant. An alternative metaphor would, instead, be to view applicants as actors, who play different roles on different occasions; in this way, there would be no way to “find” anything other than different roles that the applicant has played. Metaphors-​in-​use among recruiters—​ such as “head-​hunting”—​could also be examined and included in such a work (see also Keenoy and Anthony 1992). Another example would be work, thus “Metaphors We Work By.” Is work, for us, for instance, mainly “vocation,” “duty,” “income,” “game,” or “self-​realization”? Yet another example is the academy, as in “Images of the Academy” (see also, e.g., Fuller 1985; Firat and Kabakçi Yurdakul 2012), where one may want to include metaphors such as “the academy as a class society” or even “the academy as a caste system.” Or why not “Metaphors for Shop Stewards,” for which one may want to suggest such metaphors as “supporter,” “defense attorney,” “therapist,” “friend,” “merchant,” “strict parent,” “devil’s advocate,” “Janus face,” “spectator,” “figurehead,” “chicken,” “prosecutor,” “turncoat/​ quisling,” and “grave digger,” as well as, suggested by Salaman (1979), “manager of discontent”? Another idea would be to explore the metaphors that lie behind how organizational scholars (and perhaps also practitioners) frame people in organizations, thus “Images of People (in Organizations).” It may be self-​evident for some that the cogwheel (or a cog in the wheel, or a cog of the machine) is how people are viewed in the “organization as machine” metaphor, that they are viewed as cells in the “organization as organism” metaphor, etc., but then again, one would not necessarily have to start with Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) metaphors in such a project. Another place to start would be in organization scholars’ metaphors-​in-​use for people in organizations, such as “organization member” and “organization actor” (see also Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). One could, of course, also include—​or even focus the study on—​organization members’ own metaphors-​in-​use, where one may find metaphors such as “workhorse,” “slave,” and “robot.” (See also Alvesson’s 2010 work on images of individuals as identity constructers; and Fairhurst’s metaphors for followers (2011).) There are also areas that in themselves have been developed on a “metaphor level”—​ that is, more or less through the suggestion and exploration of new metaphors—​the kind of metaphors that are easily identifiable as metaphors. One such area is the “spread of management ideas/​knowledge” (“knowledge spread” being, of course, in itself

456   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD a metaphor—​see, e.g., Greve 2015). It has been dealt with in terms of metaphors such as “translation” (Czarniawska and Sevón 1996; see also Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume); “travels” (Czarniawska and Joerges 1996); “editing” (Sahlin-​Andersson 1996); “journey,” “wave,” “colonizing,” and the meteorologically inspired metaphors of “pressure” and “front” (Swan et al. 2001); “bandwagoning” (Abrahamson and Rosenkopf 1993); “fashion following” (Abrahamson 1991, 1996); and “virus infection” (Røvik 2011). Such areas, where there are already many explicit, more or less alive metaphors in use, could still benefit from new suggestions or additions. For instance, one could explore the “meteor” analogy, shedding light on the constant movement of Tellus/​the organization, as well as the simultaneous danger and richness that a meteor/​management idea may bring. Of course, it is not enough to merely mention a suggested set of metaphors, as I have done above. There is a need for much more digging, into both the existing understandings of the phenomenon at stake—​through literature reviews and/​or empirical studies—​as well as the source domains that the metaphors build upon. For a good example, see the book I referred to above, by Alvesson and Spicer (2011). Any such study would—​on the basis of the advice stemming from the present book (for an overview, see Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume)—​also need to consider the context in which it is conducted; one might, for instance, get different results from a project on the “metaphors we recruit by” in two considerably different national cultures. “Metaphors we X by” studies could be conducted on the basis of different theories of the relationship between metaphor and meaning. If applying the conceptual metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson 1980), the researcher would suggest metaphors that represent the understandings identified, thus being more “faithful” to the language that is studied, since language in this theory is seen to constitute reality. The researcher would rely on any explicit metaphors that can be identified within the language in the literature or among the organization members studied, or otherwise suggest metaphors that are as “close” to the studied language as possible. From such a perspective, the metaphors identified could be made sense of by almost anyone within the same culture. The researcher could therefore claim to have identified the metaphors that actually underlie the understandings of the phenomenon at stake. An approach that is much more distanced and does not build as strongly on the conceptual metaphor theory is where the researcher—​still basing the “metaphors we X by” on studies of language (in literature and/​or in organizations)—​uses metaphors to caricature the understandings identified, rather than representing them as in the above approach. In this case, the researcher involves their own subjectivity much more intentionally, to say something interesting about the studied topic and the various understandings of it. Of the chapters in the present book, the ones that come closest to having characterized understandings within a particular area of organization studies through metaphors are Bendl and Schmidt’s (Chapter 7 in this volume) analysis of understandings of organizational diversity and discrimination in literature, and Audrin and Devoine’s (Chapter 9 in this volume) categorization of organization actors’ verbal expressions on

ORGANIZATIONAL METAPHORS OF THE FUTURE    457 digital transformation (but see also Arman and Wikström, Chapter 8 in this volume; Byers and Owusu, Chapter 11 in this volume).

Metaphors as Colored Lenses In a time of climate changes and other serious threats, we have begun to understand the importance of recycling various consumables as well as their packaging. Even metaphors could be recycled. For instance, any of Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) eight metaphors (or any other “existing” metaphor) could be used in a somewhat innovative and creative way by applying it where it seems to fit the least. Obvious examples would be to use the “organization as flux and transformation” metaphor (Morgan 1986, 1996a, 2006) in the study of an organization that is seemingly “not changing,” or the “organization as instrument of domination” metaphor (Morgan 1986, 1996a, 2006) when studying a seemingly harmonious and conflict-​free organization. Going one step further, metaphors can be used as “colored lenses” through which “everything” is viewed and made sense of.1 Thus, even that which is not obviously identified by the metaphor at stake would be viewed through it. The “organization as organism” metaphor, for example, could view “conflict” as a “wound” or as a “disease.” In this way, each existing metaphor could be explored further. The inspiration for such a type of metaphor study goes at least as far back as Smircich (1983; but there are also parallels with Pepper’s 1942/​ 1972: 91–​ 6, “root-​ metaphor method”) and her distinction between culture as variable and as root metaphor. As variable, the organization “has” a culture and culture is merely one variable among others in the organization. As root metaphor, the organization “is” culture and, thus, “everything” is interpreted as if it was culture. Alvesson (1995) has developed this distinction further and turned the root metaphor part of it into a type of study in its own right. In various publications, he has discussed the distinction between variable and root metaphor and used what I have called the “colored lens” approach (Örtenblad 2017). Not least in a study of a Swedish IT consultancy firm Alvesson (1995) interpreted, among other phenomena, the firm’s business idea and formal structure as if they were culture and hence symbols. This approach to studies is not elaborated in any real depth in the present book, but it is sometimes touched upon. Byers and Owusu (Chapter 11 in this volume) show how 1 

One could, of course, discuss which metaphor is the root metaphor when any particular metaphor is used as a variable. I would say that in this way one plausibly sees the metaphors/​variables as systems that interact to create a wholeness, thus taking the organism approach to metaphors (see Smircich 1983: 347), though it may also be the political systems approach. Thus, researchers who use many metaphors to “uncover” as many aspects of an organization as possible would still have to live with the fact that their own “meta-​metaphor” (Örtenblad 2017) is only one among many possibilities, one that merely offers a limited view of the organization studied (see also Morgan’s 1986, 1996a, 2006 chapter on the Multicom case, in which he showed how each metaphor could be used to serve completely different objectives according to the intent of the user—​see Morgan 2017: xix).

458   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD “sports” can be used both as a variable and as a root metaphor. Arnold (Chapter 19 in this volume) offers a critical examination of this type of research. I claim that this way of using metaphor is underused, and could favorably be employed with metaphors other than the culture metaphor. One reason for doing such research could, as Alvesson (1995) points out, be to explore what the metaphor could offer when used as a colored lens. Any of Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) metaphors could be used as such a colored lens. For instance, the “organization as instrument of domination” could either function as a variable, where only that which is obviously domination/​power would be identified, or if it functioned as a root metaphor/​colored lens, one would—​in a Foucault-​inspired way (see Arnold, Chapter 19 in this volume)—​instead interpret “everything” (about/​in the organization) as if it were domination/​power, including that which at first glance (and when domination/​power functions as a variable) would not appear as domination/​ power. From such a colored lens perspective, one could, for instance, interpret occasions when employees do exactly as they are told as a form of resistance. On the basis of the brain metaphor, one could view everything in an organization as if it was learning—​ a situation where an employee is reprimanded by their boss would, for instance, be interpreted as the employee learning about the organization’s norms; what might otherwise have been understood as a “conflict” would be regarded as if the organization members continuously were learning to get a better idea of each other’s limits, etc. Of course, metaphors other than those listed by Morgan (1986, 1996a, 2006) could be explored in this way. For example, “fashion/​fashion following” has in recent decades been used as a metaphor for knowledge about organization and management and its spread (Abrahamson 1991, 1996). Applied as variable—​which thus far has been the most common approach—​“fashion” would limit the study to those management ideas that are obviously “fashionable,” in terms of instantly receiving enormous attention from many people, all of whom want to be associated with the fashion, but which after a certain time disappear as rapidly as they popped up. Examples of such “management fashions” include the learning organization (e.g., Mastenbroek 1996), management by objectives (e.g., Schuster and Kindall 1974), and lean (e.g., Benders and van Bijsterveld 2000). Those management ideas that are not “fashions” are viewed as, for instance, “knowledge.” Using “fashion” as a root metaphor, however, offers a whole array of possibilities. In a similar manner to how Alvesson (2013) describes the use of culture as a root metaphor as a certain perspective that colors the researcher’s very understanding of an organization they are studying, using fashion as a root metaphor stipulates that “fashion” is applied as a perspective. It is thus used as a lens through which “everything” in an organization is viewed in terms of fashion, as more or less fashionable, and is not limited to that which “obviously” is fashionable. Huczynski (1993/​1996) is among the few who have indicated that those management ideas which are often viewed as “non-​fashions”—​such as “bureaucracy”—​are in fact also fashions. This stands in contrast to those many people who claim that a certain knowledge or term, such as “sustainability,” is “not merely a fashion” or is “more than simply a fashion—​it is here to stay.” Such a lens colors not only management ideas and knowledge in fashion nuances, but also other phenomena, such as architecture, design of meetings, etc. Organization members would be viewed as being exposed to fashion processes on a continuous basis.

ORGANIZATIONAL METAPHORS OF THE FUTURE    459 Moreover, while many researchers often want to believe that they are far more rational than the managers they study—​who are often regarded as gullible in their relation to new management ideas (Strang et al. 2014)—​it can be argued that management researchers too are so-​called fashion followers. Researchers (at least some of us) follow the same fashions as the managers by studying these new ideas (even if critically), but we also prefer certain academic concepts and theories over others, such as when “social construction” becomes a fashion of many PhD programs in organization studies. Likewise, among certain parts of the organizational research collective, “critical realism” is “the perspective to have,” while “postmodernism” or “interpretivism” are fashionable in other parts of the collective. Even “fashion” in itself could be regarded as a fashion (see, e.g., Örtenblad 1999; Clark 2004), and so, of course, could “metaphor”—​or perhaps it would be more correct to say that the interest among scholars in using and writing about metaphors, as well as the frequent use of a particular metaphor among many scholars during a certain, limited period of time, could be interpreted as “fashion,” rather than metaphor in itself being a fashion.

Reflecting on the Use of Metaphor: Metaphors We Metaphorize By In this book, it has been commented that metaphor itself is a metaphor, in that it is explained as a transfer of words (i.e., “transfer” in a metaphorical sense) (Müller, Chapter 4 in this volume; see also Gaggiotti et al., Chapter 23 in this volume). We have also seen how the research process itself can be metaphorized to help researchers reflect (Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). A next step forward in increasing awareness would be to metaphorize the very metaphorization process—​what is “metaphor/​metaphors” for researchers within the area of organization studies who are doing research with the help of metaphors? As Morgan (1996b: 239) has argued, “We use metaphors to talk about metaphor.” In fact, Morgan himself sometimes uses the metaphors he suggests as meta-​metaphors, such as when he uses the “law of requisite variety” (which he deals with when presenting the organism and brain metaphors) to explain the need for openness to the insights of different metaphors (Morgan 2006: 365; for another example, see Morgan 1996b: 236). Accordingly, “meta-​metaphors”2 are “metaphors we use metaphors by,” or “metaphors we metaphorize by” (or we might even refer to “meta-​metaphorization,” cf. Chia 1996). 2  Not to be confused with the meaning Brown (1977: 129) gives to the term “metametaphor,” which he uses for a (root) metaphor that incorporates other (root) metaphors; nor with the meaning Smith and Simmons (1983) give to the term “meta-​metaphor,” which they use for myths, fairy tales, and legends that provide clues to links between identified metaphors—​thus, something that is similar to the concept of “root metaphor.”

460   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD Together with colleagues, I have previously suggested that Morgan’s metaphors (1986, 1996a, 2006) can function as meta-​metaphors of any metaphor, inclusive of Morgan’s own set of metaphors (Örtenblad et al. 2016; Örtenblad 2017). For instance, each of Morgan’s eight metaphors could, in terms of their source domains, be viewed as representing a political interest—​the machine metaphor, for example, would (in an ideal-​typical way) be a clear candidate for representing management’s/​employers’ perspective/​stakeholder interest, while the instrument of domination metaphor could probably be a metaphor in the interest of employees and their trade unions. An important point when speaking of organization theory in terms of metaphors (Morgan 1980, 1986) is to state the point of departure—​“where does the researcher stand to view the world?”—​or the perspective of the researcher. This is, at least, if one views metaphors through the meta-​metaphor (Örtenblad 2017) of political systems, where each metaphor symbolizes or represents a certain (political) perspective (see also Johnsen, Chapter 5 in this volume). To illustrate the meta-​metaphor of political systems, let me share an exercise I have sometimes arranged for my students. In my teaching on organization theory and metaphors, I have sometimes used a newspaper article about a well-​known car manufacturer in Sweden, an article that was published in a liberal daily newspaper, together with another article—​about the same car manufacturer—​published in a small, very left-​wing newspaper. The students were asked to identify metaphorical expressions and to suggest the articles’ root metaphors (respectively), choosing from Morgan’s (1986, 1996a, 2006) eight metaphors. It was clear to the students that the root metaphor of the liberal article was “the car manufacturer as organism,” while the one for the article in the left-​wing newspaper was “the car manufacturer as instrument of domination.” When asked which one of these two articles was more “dangerous,” the students tended to answer that the liberal article, with its organism approach, was the more dangerous, in that it is less obvious that there is any metaphor or perspective at all than in the case of the left-​wing article. In addition to using Morgan’s metaphors as meta-​metaphors, I have also suggested elsewhere (Örtenblad 2017) metaphorical names for six different approaches to using metaphors in organization studies, which are therefore kinds of meta-​metaphors. Thus, metaphors can be used as “colored lenses” (through which everything is viewed, not only that which is obviously uncovered by the metaphor at stake), “eye-​openers,” “color maps” (an alternative label for this approach could be “metaphors as cake pieces”—​ each metaphor uncovers an aspect of the whole), “self-​ diagnostic instruments,” “pigeonholes,” and “cognitive innovations.” As a springboard for others who may want to take the idea of meta-​metaphors further, it may be helpful to offer some further examples of “metaphors for metaphors.” One obvious example is metaphor as “root,” as in the expression “root metaphor” (see, e.g., Morgan 2016), which is often used by organizational researchers (including in this book). Other examples are the terms “alive metaphor” and “dead metaphor” (see, e.g., Müller, Chapter 4 in this volume), along with similar terms, such as “waking”

ORGANIZATIONAL METAPHORS OF THE FUTURE    461 and “sleeping” metaphors and “fluid” and “frozen” metaphors. Tsoukas (1993) has suggested the following three perspectives on metaphors, which we could call meta-​ metaphors: metaphors as ways of thinking, metaphors as dispensable literary devices, and metaphors as potential ideological distortions. Lakoff and Johnson (2003) use and discuss the following “metaphors for metaphor”: “metaphors as (mathematical) mappings”; “metaphor as projection”; and “metaphors as neural maps.” When editing this book, I took notes on how “metaphor” is imaged among the contributors—​ sometimes their explicitly expressed images, but mostly my own interpretations of how they image “metaphor.” Examples from my notes and other sources, together with their suggested meanings, include the following: • metaphor as assistant: emphasizing the huge help metaphors can be to researchers, in a variety of ways; • metaphor as caricature: emphasizing the exaggeration of certain characteristics of whatever it is that the researcher is studying, in order to be either somewhat provocative or, at least, challenging; • metaphor as clue: emphasizing the helpfulness of metaphor for the researcher when it comes to solving mysteries; • metaphor as filter (Black 1962; Hesse 1988; Srivastva and Barrett 1988): emphasizing that a metaphor makes us focus on some things while neglecting others and, thus, the simultaneous enlightening and narrowing aspect of any metaphor; • metaphor as hologram: emphasizing that the researcher can get an idea of organization actors’ whole, basic understanding of something by identifying their metaphorical expressions; • metaphor as human face (Letiche and De Loo, Chapter 27 in this volume): emphasizing the researcher’s subjectivity, when suggesting a metaphor, but also the subjectivity of any organization actor when using or suggesting metaphors; • metaphor as iceberg: emphasizing both the capacity of any metaphor to express “more than a thousand words” and the potential of metaphorical expressions when it comes to indicating people’s deeper understandings; • metaphor as irony: emphasizing the differences between source and target, used for occasions when these are enormous (cf. Gareth Morgan, cited in Oswick and Grant, Chapter 3 in this volume); • metaphor as journey: emphasizing the capacity of metaphors to affect people’s perspectives and/​or the effort it takes to understand a metaphor; • metaphors as layers: emphasizing the potential of each metaphor to uncover aspects of the studied phenomenon; • metaphor as lens (e.g., Manning 1979: 663; Schoeneborn et al. 2016): emphasizing that metaphors are ways of seeing, in which different lenses “shape” the reality that is seen (Morgan 2016: 1034); • metaphor as mastermind: emphasizing that knowledge from one area helps to make sense of and shed light on another area;

462   ANDERS ÖRTENBLAD • metaphor as “opening up a world” (Ricoeur 1978: 148): emphasizing the power of metaphor to open up room for reflection and new things to be said; • metaphor as piece of a jigsaw puzzle: emphasizing the limited image obtained from using only one metaphor when studying a phenomenon; • metaphor as prison: emphasizing the risk of getting stuck within any certain metaphor; • metaphor as tool: emphasizing the usefulness of metaphors to accomplish something within, for example, research; • metaphor as voice: emphasizing the potential of metaphorical expressions to put something in terms of something else, thereby making it easier for organization actors to talk about issues they otherwise might not talk about (e.g., when the researcher elicits metaphors); • metaphor as weapon: emphasizing the often deliberate, darker, seductive ways in which metaphors can be used (see, e.g., Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume; see also Ohlsson and Rombach 2015). In addition to bringing increased awareness and transparency—​important values in their own right (see Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume)—​such a “meta-​metaphorization” may also have at least some potential to contribute to solving a problem often discussed by metaphor researchers: the question of to what extent any metaphor should be explained and made precise. This is a dilemma since, if any metaphor is defined too precisely, it will lose its metaphorical power (e.g., Cornelissen, Chapter 2 in this volume); if that happens, we might as well just use literal language. Any metaphor can be rendered precise through metonymy (e.g., Morgan 1996b, 2011/​2017, 2016; Schoeneborn et al. 2016), analogy (Tsoukas 1993), or second-​level metaphor (Alvesson 1993) (see also Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). As a complement—​and to avoid defining any particular metaphor too precisely (see Inns and Jones 1996: 123–​4)—​we may be helped by specifying exactly what we mean by “metaphor,” and which type of metaphor as well as which theory of metaphor we are employing, in terms of “meta-​metaphors.”

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Chapter 29

AF TERWORD: A NA L O G Y ALL THE WAY D OW N Analogical Thinking Is at the Core of Understanding Organizations Interpretively haridimos tsoukas

The idea that organizations are “abstract systems,” suggested a long time ago by Barnard (1938/​1968), has morphed over time into organizations conceived as “cognitive maps” (Weick 1979; Hodgkinson and Healy 2008) and “knowledge systems” (Tsoukas and Mylonopoulos 2004). Central to these notions are conceptual categories (hereafter: categories) and their relationships. Specifically, a social system is thought to be organized insofar as interdependent actions are assembled “into sensible sequences that generate sensible outcomes” (Weick 1979: 3). People interlock their behaviors by means of consensually validated rules to create sensible outcomes: that is, patterns of interconnected categories (Weick 1979; Tsoukas et al. 2020). Organization is formed on the mind. An organized system has removed equivocality sufficiently by establishing, either by design or through emergence, a set of logically connected categories. These categories are quasi-​stable representations of actors, situations, and behaviors. A social system becomes organized insofar as types of behavior, in types of situations, are systematically connected to types of actors (Tsoukas 2019: 22). For example, a police officer in a patrol car receives a call from the center that there may be violent incident taking place in a residence. The call for action on the officer’s part is immediate: “a domestic incident, involving a possibly a person with psychological problems; go out and check” (van Hulst and Tsoukas 2021: 10). Notice the ingredients of an organizational response: a type of situation (possible domestic violence), a type of actor (police officer), and a type of behavior (check out [and do what is necessary]) are all connected in the mind of the officer involved.

468   HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS As representations, categories are abstractions: that is, they pull together instances that are similar—​[instances of] “family row,” [instances of] “intervening in a potentially dangerous family row,” etc. Abstract categories set expectations about concrete cases. The police officer knows next to nothing about this particular case but, based on previous experiences, packed economically into abstract categories, the officer has certain expectations and follows a routine to deal with the situation. Abstraction, thus, enables trans-​contextual action (Tsoukas 2019). At the same time, however, action is necessarily context-​bound. In this episode, upon checking the case of likely domestic violence, the police officer notices “a guy run[ning] toward us, fists clenched, holding big knives” (van Hulst and Tsoukas 2021: 10). The routine police behavior of “checking out” is now evolving into self-​defense in the face of danger. The category “check out [and do what is needed]” is extended to “beware: you are faced with a potentially dangerous individual.” The police officer is effective insofar as they are able to glide from one category to another—​from an abstract to a concrete category. The motor that drives conceptual gliding (or extension) is analogy. As Hofstadter and Sander (2013: 187) remark, people “understand situations in terms of pre-​existing concepts, and at the same time . . . modify those concepts under the influence of new situations.” A word such as “dangerous” may seem abstract. However, the power of abstract words comes from the fact that they evoke a set of concrete images, all derived from experiences that one has had, either directly or vicariously, over the course of one’s life. (Hofstadter and Sander 2013: 335)

There is, thus, no escape from analogy making. We swim in an ocean of analogies, all the time. Indeed, thinking takes place by constantly categorizing through analogy making (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). This is particularly shown when people are confronted with new situations. Categorizing through analogy enables people to perceive similarities between situations already encountered (personally or vicariously) and a new one presently faced. Even mundane perceptions (“this is a chair”) make connections between two mental entities (this concrete object in front of me and the abstract concept I have stored in my memory). Other, more novel perceptions involve more sophisticated acts of categorization, ranging from “this is a dangerous individual,” through “a paintbrush is a kind of pump” (Schön 1979: 260) and “my job is a prison” (Glucksberg et al. 1997: 333; Tsoukas 2019: 175), to “Messenger RNA (mRNA) vaccines teach our cells how to make a protein that will trigger an immune response inside our bodies” (Centers for Disease Control and Prevention 2022) and “all men are created equal” (US Declaration of Independence). Categorizing through analogy enables us to extrapolate hitherto accumulated knowledge to new situations and, thus, to set expectations and draw inferences (Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Categorization becomes more inventive, the more effort one needs to make to create an ad hoc, abstract, superordinate category in order to understand a statement. This is usually the case when a metaphorical expression is used, in which an abstract category

AFTERWORD: ANALOGY ALL THE WAY DOWN    469 does not exist a priori and the listener needs ad hoc to construct it, in order to understand the statement (Hofstadter and Sander 2013: 232). A metaphoric statement is typically of the form “X is a Y,” where X is the metaphor topic and Y the metaphor vehicle (Tsoukas 1991, 1993; Glucksberg et al. 1997: 328; Cornelissen 2005; Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). For example, in the statement “our organization is a garbage can,” “our organization” is the topic and “garbage can” is the vehicle. To understand it, we create an ad hoc, abstract, superordinate category, consisting of the essential (or prototypical) features of the vehicle (i.e., things thrown in, in an accidental and messy way), to which the particular topic is attributed. Thus, “my organization” is stipulated to be a member of the new category, whose prototypical member is the standard garbage can. The listener realizes that my organization is messy and chaotic, and decisions within it are unpredictable, depending on accidental occurrences in choice opportunities. Similarly, metaphorical terms such as “enacted environments” (Weick 1995, 2009) attribute “environments,” traditionally thought to be outside—​ independent—​ of agents, to the new category “enactment,” whose prototypical members are legislative acts of will (Weick 1995). Metaphors, in short, are property attributions that can create new categories through recategorization (Lakoff and Johnson 1999). As mentioned, qua knowledge systems, organizations create repertoires of knowledge through the categories they institute, which are helpful for guiding trans-​contextual action. But when people act, they inevitably glide through levels of abstraction. Moreover, at a higher level of abstraction, when as observers-​cum-​actors we try to understand what is going on in organizations in order to better cope with, or act in, them, we may deliberately seek to categorize organizations as machines, brains, psychic prisons, etc. (Morgan 1997). By doing so, we assign organizations to certain categories in order to reveal, explore, and discuss particular features shared with prototypical members of the respective vehicles (Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). These features are abstract categories, which predispose us to look for certain things in organizational life. Thus, an organization viewed as a machine orients our perception to regularity, predictability, control, design, etc. Viewing it as a complex system, we tend to see adaptability, interactivity, emergence, open-​endedness, etc. In this interpretive view, organization is on the metaphorical mind—​it reveals itself depending on how we turn the kaleidoscope. The more perspectives we apply, the more complex an understanding we are able to obtain (Tsoukas 2005, 2017; Örtenblad, Chapter 1 and Chapter 28 in this volume). At an even higher level of abstraction, to the extent that the “metaphor” metaphor (i.e., the metaphorical idea that we understand the world metaphorically—​X is what “X is Y” discloses) has become a standard metaphor, it is more abstract than particular metaphorical descriptions (e.g., organizations are brains; routines are like genes; environments are enacted), thus making the latter subcategories of the former. The established superordinate category “organizational reality is metaphorically constructed” allows us to distinguish between the core property of organizational reality (i.e., that its main features are metaphorically disclosed) and more contingent properties (i.e., particular metaphorical descriptions). Indeed, as several chapters in this

470   HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS illuminating Handbook show, the “metaphor” metaphor can be deliberately used to enhance practical and intellectual creativity (Part III in this volume). To the extent, therefore, that the “metaphor” metaphor has become a standard abstract category (i.e., it is taken for granted), it serves as “a kind of silent backdrop” (Hofstadter and Sander 2013: 231), which is tacitly activated to facilitate understanding of particular metaphorical descriptions. What the linguistic turn in organization studies, compellingly initiated by the publication of Gareth Morgan’s Images of Organization (Morgan 1997; Örtenblad et al. 2017), has successfully achieved is to establish the tacit hermeneutical backdrop whereby the abstract category “organizations reveal their properties metaphorically” guarantees understanding of particular metaphorical statements (Morgan 1996). In that sense, we have seen a shift in the root metaphor or, put differently, in the underlying “images of thought” (Deleuze 2004: 164) that guide inquiry (Chia 1996; Tsoukas 2019: 3–​4; Örtenblad, Chapter 1 in this volume). From viewing organizations as objectively given, we now tend to see them as constructed through language. It is a big shift, which reflexively reminds us, more broadly, that what we take to be real is underpinned by human-​made images and taken-​for-​granted root metaphors (Grant and Oswick 1996; Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008). We can, thus, resurface them, in both organizational practice and research, and experiment with new ones (Chia 1996; Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). The content, use, and consequences of metaphorical redescriptions and the associated analogical thinking they give rise to vary, and need to be empirically explored through discourse analysis, ethnographic studies, or experiments. In some contexts, for instance, certain old images and metaphors may have become standard abstract categories that are taken for granted, resisting displacement. Notice how ubiquitous the following are: the chronological image of time, the image of motion as a prototype for understanding change, the image of organization as a container, or the image of research as a blueprint (Tsoukas and Chia 2002; Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008; Alvesson et al., Chapter 15 in this volume). Other, relatively new, in historical terms, metaphors and images, such as organizations as flows, as complex systems, as holographic structures, or as instruments of domination, are increasingly accepted. As several chapters in this Handbook show, demonstrating the existence of metaphorical constructions, accounting for metaphorical diversity, and showing the processes through which particular consequences are accomplished is a fascinating line of research to pursue (Örtenblad, Chapter 1 and Chapter 28 in this volume). For example, the acceptance of the machine metaphor is connected with the Industrial Revolution, the rise of bureaucracy, and the ascendance of classical science, just like the increasing acceptance of organizations as complex systems is linked with globalization, ubiquitous digital connectivity, ongoing change, and the rise of post-​Newtonian science (Toulmin 1990; Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008). As critical realists remind us (Reed, Chapter 26 in this volume), socio-​material relations and power structures matter for the emergence and standardization of particular metaphors, since they make their use plausible. The rhetorical mobilization of certain metaphors is a political process, both in the organizations we study and in the scholarly practices and organizations that make

AFTERWORD: ANALOGY ALL THE WAY DOWN    471 such studying possible, which needs to be explored (Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008; Sackmann, Chapter 22 in this volume). However, it should be noted that what particular metaphorical descriptions and images reveal—​that is, what prototypical members of the vehicle (e.g., brains, complex systems, psychic prisons, etc.) will be suggested to share with the topic—​needs to be systematically worked out. Even “complex metaphors” (Cornelissen and Kafouros 2008) are not rich enough to offer detailed analytical suggestions. Thus, theory development is needed. For example, Weick (1979: 119–​20) acknowledges the metaphorical roots of his evolutionary theory of organizing and proceeds to analytically develop how variation, selection, and retention work in organizing (for similar examples, see Tsoukas 1991, 1993; Cornelissen 2005). Beer’s Viable Systems Model was developed by explicitly modelling firms on the human nervous system (Beer 1981, 1984). Cohen et al. (1972) suggested that organizations are, partly at least, “garbage cans”—​“organized anarchies” in which choice opportunities bring together problematic preferences, unclear technologies, and fluid participation. Other examples include recent “dynamic” theorizing of organizational routines (Feldman et al. 2021), time (Hernes 2014), and becoming (Tsoukas and Chia 2002), to mention a few (for more examples on “metaphors we organize by,” see Örtenblad, Chapter 28 in this volume). For the sake of illustration, in the rest of this Afterword, I will focus on one example, namely organizational improvisation, which has been explored by drawing on relevant images and analogies in the performing arts. In the late 1990s, several scholars suggested that, in order to obtain a more dynamic understanding of organizations, we should look at how artists improvise, especially in jazz and theater. The idea that organizations may be seen as, for example, jazz bands was refreshingly suggestive. The underlying idea was to seek to understand organizations in “performative terms” (Hatch 1999: 82)—​not as static structures but as ongoing accomplishments (Tsoukas 2019). Viewing organizations performatively directs attention to how organizational members, like performing artists, react, in real time, in novel ways, to changing circumstances (Barrett 1998; Crossan 1998; Weick 1998; Vera and Crossan 2004, 2005). We know from jazz bands and improvisational theater that improvisation is both intentional and spontaneous, goal-​directed and situationally responsive, drawing on resources available and inventive. If these features are shared by all kinds of skilled improvisation, how might they be theorized further, especially in organizational contexts? If theory is seen as endless metaphorizing—​the offering of metaphorical redes­ criptions and analogies in order to inspire and guide practitioners—​perhaps theorizing, in the strict sense of the term, is superfluous. On this view, what the practical mind needs is a refined sensibility, cultivated perhaps by the arts and humanities, to spot similarities and reframe experienced situations accordingly (Chia 1996; cf. Örtenblad, Chapter 28 in this volume). However, desirable as this undoubtedly is, I doubt it is sufficient. Metaphors orient thinking and motivate action but tend to be thin in content—​ they suggest creative insights but do not develop them in depth (Bendor 2010: 157). If, for instance, we believe that “equality” is a concept that does not apply only to objects

472   HARIDIMOS TSOUKAS but should be extended to people, what might it include and why? Metaphorical insights need to be fleshed out, discussed, tested, and refined, hence the need for theoria—​a way of seeing. Thus, developing theoretically the metaphorical insight that “organizations are like jazz bands” invites us to think more systematically about the prototypical properties of jazz bands that are carried over into the ad hoc category we will create in order to understand this metaphorical description, and whose other member is suggested to be “organizations.” Hatch (1999) has suggested that these prototypical properties include, among others, soloing, comping, and trading fours, which indicate, respectively, taking the lead, supporting others’ leads, and switching between leading and supporting, which, in turn, find their organizational “parallel” (Hatch 1999: 81) in teamwork collaboration. Such a metaphorical redescription enriches our understanding insofar as it encourages us, practitioners and scholars alike, to look for how organizing is accomplished as, among other things, a bodily mediated process—​“to hear and feel organizing,” as Hatch (1999: 82, italics in the original) aptly puts it. However, remaining at the level of spotting parallels is not enough. To enhance explanatory power, which let us not forget is the essence of theorizing, namely to be able to coherently account for diverse instances of improvisation, we need more analytical depth, which will come about by increasing abstraction. Abstraction is important in order to identify the salient features of the phenomenon at hand (Tsoukas 1991, 1993; Gentner 2010; Hofstadter and Sander 2013). Once salient features have been identified, they can be analogically extended to new situations (Tsoukas 2019: chap. 14). Thus, more abstract questions need to be raised that take us beyond merely spotting obvious parallels to identifying structural features. For example: What enables diverse individuals to be simultaneously spontaneous and deliberate, creative and coherently acting? How is situational creativity related to accumulated experience and skill? How are mind and body joined up in the face of unexpected occurrences, in which effective responses are needed? Notice that such questions go beyond particular object attributes (e.g., solo, comping, etc.) to explore abstract relational structures (or mechanisms or processes) that account for improvisation across domains. Once we have built an abstract theoretical framework of improvisation, particular instances of improvisation—​be they in music, theater, or organizations—​will be seen as subcategories of the more abstract, superordinate category “general improvisation.” The addition of a higher level of abstraction (i.e., the addition of the superordinate category) will enable us to distinguish the core features of improvisation from its contingent features that are derived from particular contexts (Hofstadter and Sander 2013: 203). In conclusion, in this Afterword I have argued the following. First, analogical thinking drives both thinking and organizing. Second, categorizing through analogy enables practitioners and scholars alike to extrapolate hitherto accumulated knowledge to new situations and, thus, to draw inferences. Third, demonstrating and teasing out the implications of the use of metaphorical language in both organizational life and organizational research is an important line of research. Fourth, suggestive, inspiring, and action-​inducing as new metaphorical insights may be, they will yield explanatory

AFTERWORD: ANALOGY ALL THE WAY DOWN    473 benefits only insofar as they are further developed analytically—​both metaphorical insights and theoretical abstraction matter. This brilliant Handbook, so knowledgeably edited by Anders Örtenblad, takes the conversation about the role of metaphors in organizational life and research to a higher level of sophistication, offering insights, thought-​provoking ideas, and research leads, and inviting us to pose ever more subtle questions.

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Index

For the benefit of digital users, indexed terms that span two pages (e.g., 52–​53) may, on occasion, appear on only one of those pages.  Note: Tables and figures are indicated by t and f following the page number Aboriginal Australian  108 abstract concepts  46–​47, 60, 67, 406 analogies and analogical thinking  467, 468–​70, 472 gesture  287, 288, 289–​90, 294–​95 meaning of a word  85–​86, 92 abuse/​misuse  6, 31–​32 academic proletariat (metaphor)  254–​56 academic publishing  254, 255 academy (metaphor)  455 accessibility: original meaning  73, 125 Achilles is a lion (metaphor)  437 activation metaphors  317 active metaphors  25, 74–​75, 76f, 82 adaptive systems  348 Adiga, Aravind  222–​23 advertisements  272, 274, 281–​82 affect  225, 392, 393, 452 African-​American workers  233, 237, 238 agency  33, 423, 424–​25, 430–​31 “Age of Reason, The” (Paine)  214–​15 aggression  182–​86 aging workforce  141–​43, 145–​46, 233, 238 Albion Mills  212–​13 Alden Times 232 Aldrich, Virgil  267, 269–​70 Alexander, Cecil Frances  213 allegories 269 Allen, Frances  346–​47 “All fists clenched into one” (Heartfield)  270, 271f “All things bright and beautiful” (hymn) (Alexander) 213 Alpaslan-​Danisman, Sumeyra  18–​19, 21, 28, 189, 225, 230–​41, 395, 452

Alvesson, Mats  44, 140, 220, 300, 376, 391–​92, 437, 470 critical metaphor analysis  315, 322, 324–​25 empirical organizational research/​ studies  29, 178, 251–​62, 395 organizational metaphors of the future  452, 454–​55, 456, 457–​58, 459, 462 sports metaphors  179–​80, 182–​86, 188, 190–​91 use of metaphors in organizational studies  2, 6–​7, 13, 17–​18, 19, 21–​22, 23 ambiguity  339, 415–​16 ambiguous metaphor valence  398–​401, 399f American football  354–​55 amoeba (metaphor)  361 analogies and analogical thinking  45–​46, 52, 61–​62, 467–​73 role of metaphor in organizational studies  2–​3, 6–​7, 13–​14, 16, 23–​24, 34 analysis: research  260–​62 analytical philosophy  25, 378–​79 meaning of a word  87, 88–​89, 90–​91, 93–​94, 97 valence  395–​96, 396t, 398 Andrew, Jane  436–​37 anger  380–​81 angry person is a pressurized container, an (metaphor) 378 anomalies 269 Anthropocene  440, 443 anthropology  73, 258, 378–​79 anthropomorphization 272 antistructuralist paradigm  398 antithesis  239, 240 anxiety reduction  31–​32

476   Index Apple see Jobs, Steve applications (digital)  158, 161 Applied Linguistics  70–​7 1 appropriation, cultural  26, 110 archetype  399–​400 architectural design  265–​66, 338 Aristotle  25, 48, 380, 405–​6, 415–​16 spectrum of metaphor  71–​72, 75, 76, 82 Arman, Rebecka  18–​19, 26, 86, 137–​47, 400, 456–​57 Arnold, Lorin Basden  19, 21, 22, 30, 178, 394, 452, 457–​58 critical metaphor analysis  314–​25 art and art studies  33, 408, 409, 412–​13, 417, 471–​72, see also visual metaphors Artificial Friends  166, 170 Artificial Intelligence  151, 155t, 157, 158–​59 artificial respiration  76–​77 Art of War, The (Sun Tzu)  350 Asian labour  233–​34 “as if ” construction  xxiv Asimov, Isaac  172 “aspect seeing” (Wittgenstein)  267 assistant (metaphor)  461 Associated Press  168 associations  11–​12, 47 associative thinking  342 assumption digger literature review  257 astronomical metaphors  411 Atkinson, Bill  410 attention, focus of  77, 78f, 91, 254 attitude formation  392 Audrin, Bertrand  20, 23, 27, 151–​54, 155t, 155–​62, 398, 451, 456–​57 Austin, Heather Marie  18, 19, 20, 32, 180, 241, 394–​95, 454, 455–​56, 459 translation  375–​77, 377f, 378–​87, 381t authoritarianism  critical realism  427–​28, 429–​30, 431 empiricism  421, 427 positivism 421 autonomy 338 Avatar (metaphor)  356 awareness  xxiii, 462 role of metaphor in organizational studies  16–​18, 23, 24, 26, 29, 31 Aymara vocabulary of work  381t, 381–​82, 387

backgrounding  78f Badham, Richard  349 Badley, Ken  454–​55 Bakhtin, Mikhail M.  70–​7 1, 72 ballet  199, 200 ballroom dance waltz (metaphor)  200 bandwagoning (metaphor)  455–​56 bankers and banking  309–​10, 362–​63 baroque emblematics  268f, 268–​70 Barrett, Frank  xxiii–​xxv, 5–​6, 13, 20, 200, 461, 471 barriers (metaphor)  454–​55 Barthes, Roland  275–​77 baseball 183t, 351, 354–​55 “Baseball, Football, and Basketball: Models for Business” (Keidel)  349 basketball  182–​86, 183t, 351, 354–​55 Bathurst, Ralph J.  204–​5 battle (metaphor)  81, 82, 319–​20, 353, 355 Baudelaire, Charles  221–​22 Baudrillard, Jean  217–​18 beachcombing (metaphor)  258 becoming  146–​47, 200–​1, 471 beehive (metaphor)  352 Beer, Stafford  471 beliefs  348, 354, 355 Bell, Emma  140, 141, 266, 280 Bendl, Regine  17, 20, 26, 50, 86, 115–​32, 117t, 391–​92, 452, 453 bend situations (metaphor)  410 Bergson, Henri  92 Bernanos, Georges  172 Berniker, Eli  198–​99, 201–​4, 209 Big Data  151, 155t, 159–​60, 161, 169 binary system (metaphor)  411n.7 biological life (metaphor)  141–​42, 143–​44, 146–​47 biosciences  430–​31 Biscaro, Claudio  6, 19, 20, 21–​22, 23, 30, 152–​53 creative journey  331–​42, 335t, 397 validity/​reliability  178, 300–​2, 303t, 304–​11, 391–​92, 451 role of metaphor in organizational studies  47, 48–​49 black box (metaphor)  129–​30, 237, 240 black ceiling (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23

Index   477 black employment (metaphor)  237, 238 black hole (metaphor)  225 Black, Max  1–​3, 10–​11, 25, 47–​48, 267, 269–​70, 461 spectrum of metaphor  73, 74–​75, 76–​77 validity/​reliability  300, 301, 309–​10 black/​white (metaphors)  173 color metaphors  230, 232, 233–​34, 237, 238, 239 gesture  288–​89, 294 Blake, William  28, 212–​15, 216, 224–​25 blending  46–​49 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  60–​61 diversity/​discrimination  117t, 122–​23, 124, 127–​28, 129 blind/​ness (metaphor)  221–​22, 223–​24, 225–​26 blinker (metaphor)  256–​57 blue (metaphor)  235, 236–​37, 238, 239 blueprint: research  257–​58, 470 bluewash (metaphor)  385 blue-​/​white-​collar workers (metaphors)  28, 231, 232, 236, 238–​39 bodily experience and memory  290, 378, 452, 472 body language  108, 204–​5, 208, 265–​66, 272–​73 body of water (metaphor)  410 body without organs (metaphor)  116, 117t Bokeno, R. Michael  348, 349, 351 boundary words  167, 338 Bourgeois, Warren  5, 43–​44, 52–​53, 64–​65, 167 Boxenbaum, Eve  44, 49–​50 boxing (metaphor)  76–​77, 81, 82, 340–​41 box thinking (metaphor)  256–​57 brain  3–​4, 27, 101–​2, 146, 147, 361, 387, 452 analogies and analogical thinking  469–​70, 471 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  58, 62, 65 digital transformation and organization  152–​53, 154, 155t, 157–​59, 161 valence  399, 401 Brass Check, The (Sinclair)  232 Brentano, Franz  91 Brexit  219–​20 brightness  21, 27 brightsiding  213, 218

British Academy of Management  239 British National Corpus  46 British Telecom (BT)  275, 277, 278f Brooks, Rodney  168–​69 Brown, Richard Harvey  1–​3, 4, 7, 8, 12, 13, 252, 435–​36, 459n.2 Bruni. Elena  19, 20, 21–​22, 23, 30 creative journey  331–​42, 335t, 397 validity/​reliability  178, 300–​2, 303t, 304–​11, 391–​92, 451 Bryant, Gay  407 Brynjolfsson, Erik  151, 155–​56, 174 bully (metaphor)  454–​55 bureaucracy  216, 414–​15, 458, 470–​7 1 Bureau of Labor Statistics  234 Burrell, W. Gibson  28, 86, 398 darkness/​light  213–​14, 215, 217–​18, 224–​25 business case  141–​42, 143 Byers, Terri  23, 27, 178–​91, 183t, 395, 452, 456–​58 Caicedo, Mikael Holmgren  18, 19, 20, 32, 180, 241, 394–​95, 454, 455–​56, 459 translation  375–​77, 377f, 378–​87, 381t cake pieces (metaphor)  460 Cambridge Advanced Learner’s Dictionary  363–​64 camera lens (metaphor)  348 Cameron, Lynne  5n.3, 13–​14, 15, 17, 70–​7 1, 240–​41, 287–​88, 293–​94 conceptual metaphors  406, 407–​8, 409n.4, 412–​13, 416–​17 Campa, Riccardo  169, 171 Ćapek, Karel  168 carbon nanotubes  334–​38 career-​of-​metaphor hypothesis  50 career paths  137–​38 caretaking jobs  166, 172 caricature  456, 461 Case, Peter  18, 19, 20, 32, 180, 241, 394–​95, 454, 455–​56, 459 Indigenous metaphors  102, 107–​8, 109, 111 translation  375–​77, 377f, 378–​87, 381t Cassirer, Ernst  86–​87, 93, 94–​95 caste exploitation  222–​23 catachresis  74–​75 catalyst (metaphor)  316 categorization  19, 20, 49–​51, 380, 468–​69

478   Index celestial objects (metaphor)  411 change  317–​18, 401 change the universe (metaphor)  409–​12 Charteris-​Black, Jonathan  454 chassé-​croisé (community dance)  26, 130–​31 Checkers and Rallys (restaurant chain)  346–​47 Chia, Robert  2, 251, 459, 470, 471–​72 China  18, 108, 233, 234, 238, 380–​81, 454 Cicero  375, 379 Cienki, Alan  20, 21–​22, 29–​30, 76, 240–​41, 310–​11 metaphor in gesture  286–​95 circumplex model of affect  392, 393 clean and cheerful (metaphor)  412–​13 climate change  101, 457 Clinton, Hilary  407 close systems  348 clue (metaphor)  461 CMT see conceptual metaphor theory coaching (sports)  183t Cochran, William Gemmell  303t, 307 coding  30, 272, 286–​87 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  405–​6 empirical studies  259, 260–​61, 306, 307, 308 coffee (metaphor)  334–​37 cognition and cognitive processes  24, 353, 460, 467 defining role of metaphor in organizational studies  44–​45, 46–​49, 51 translation  376–​77, 377f, 378 cognitive flexibility  334–​37, 341 cognitive linguistics  70–​7 1, 309, 378–​79, 380 cognitively embedded  50–​51 cognitive metaphor theory (Lakoff and Johnson)  15, 25, 60, 75, 91, 97, 265–​67 cognitive psychology  364 Cohen, Jacob  303t, 307 coinage (metaphor)  439 coldness (metaphor)  85, 91, 92–​93, 95, 96 Coleman, Debi  415 collaboration 47 collars, colored (metaphor)  231, 232–​36 colonialization  102–​3, 105, 109, 383, 384, 455–​56 colored lens approach  34 critical metaphor analysis  315, 317–​19, 320, 322, 323, 324, 325

sports metaphors  179–​80, 182, 187, 188, 189–​91 color map  161–​62 color metaphors  21, 28, 230–​31, 241, 452 colored collars  231, 232–​36 multiple meanings of colors  236–​39 universality of color metaphors  239–​41 commander (metaphor)  308–​9, 454–​55 commercialization  189–​90 “Common Sense” (Paine)  214–​15 communication studies  167 communicative interaction  76–​77, 361–​62, 454–​55 comparison approach  10–​11, 12, 15–​16, 17, 48 competition  27, 178–​81, 190–​91, 221, 414 alternative sports metaphors  189–​90 drawbacks of sports metaphors  186–​87, 188 management education  353–​54, 355 overview of sports metaphors  181–​86, 183t comping (musical term)  472 complementary metaphors  23, 27–​28, 161–​62 complexity,  46–​47, 130, 261, 270, 367, 370–​7 1, 387, 470, 471 Indigenous metaphors  106, 111 music and dance  196–​97, 204, 206–​7, 209 sports metaphors  181, 186, 188, 189 use of metaphors in organizational studies  2, 4, 22–​23, 31 computer-​assisted content analysis  307 computer development is physics/​governance (metaphor) 411 Concept and Object (Ueber Begriff und Gegenstan) (Frege)  88 conceptual blending  24 conceptual combination theory  310 conceptual expansion/​integration/​ reframing  334–​37 conceptual gliding (extension)  468 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  197, 265–​66, 380, 456, 467 cognition/​rhetoric  33, 405–​8, 415–​17 critical realism  424, 425–​26, 428, 429 defining role of metaphor  46–​49 generalization  19–​20, 21 gesture and  287–​89 research analysis  409–​15 research methodology  408–​95

Index   479 source domains  13–​14, 15–​16 spectrum of metaphor  75 use of metaphor in organizational studies  16, 17, 18, 23–​24 conceptual renewal  33–​34 conceptual systems  2, 14 conduit (metaphor)  287–​88, 454–​55 confessional tales  261–​62 conflict resolution/​management  11, 290, 457–​58 confusion  341–​42 conscious and unconscious  28, 74, 74f, 76f, 213–​14 conservative ideology  236–​37 considering as weighing (metaphor)  288 conspiracy theories  220–​21 construction process (metaphor)  259 “constructive postmodernism”  4 consultancy work  181–​82, 237–​38, 274–​75 consumption  28, 213–​14, 217–​18, 266, 273, 279–​81 containers (metaphor)  455, 470 context-​dependency  18–​20, 24 contextualized/​decontextualized metaphors  49–​51, 65, 109 color metaphors  240–​41 empirical organizational research/​ studies  304, 306 music and dance  206–​7 role of metaphor in organizational studies  15, 18–​19, 27–​28 translation  378, 384 contracting  52–​53 contradiction 4 conventionalization  50–​51 multimodality of discourse  77, 78f, 81 spectrum of metaphor  73, 74, 74f, 75, 76f conversations  78–​79, 85, 261 cooperation  178, 182 coopetition 178 Cornelissen, Joep P.  60, 86, 115–​16, 137–​38, 152, 178, 289–​90, 337 analogies and analogical thinking  468–​69, 470–​7 1 critical metaphor analysis  315–​16, 319–​20, 325 defining the role of metaphor  43–​53 empirical studies  300–​1, 303t, 307, 309–​10, 311

Indigenous metaphors  102, 107–​9, 110, 111 metaphors and valence  391–​92, 397 music-​and dance-​related metaphors  197, 200, 206–​7 organizational metaphors of the future  452, 453, 462 seductive quality of metaphors  361 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  3, 5n.3, 6, 10–​11, 12, 13–​14, 16–​17, 18–​19, 21, 23, 24 visual metaphors  265–​66, 272–​73, 279–​80 corporate agents  45–​46 corporate crime/​corruption  219 corporate social responsibility (CSR)  219 corporate takeovers  178 corpus (metaphors)  116, 117t correctedness  21–​22 correspondence view of metaphor  24, 60–​61, 67 cosy-​crafter (metaphor)  454–​55 counterintuitive metaphors  425–​26 counter-​metaphors  29, 64, 143–​44, 251, 262 courses and coursework  346, 353 covering all the bases (metaphor)  181–​82 Covid-​19 pandemic  154, 210, 220–​21, 317, 319–​20, 368–​69, 430–​31 “Crafting Strategy” (Mintzberg)  356 crafting workshops  350 creating (cultural integration) (metaphor)  349 creative problem-​solving  6 creativity and creative work  xxiv–​xxv, 74f, 258, 331–​32, 341–​42, 440, 452 color metaphors  233–​34, 238 creative journey  332–​41, 335t defining the role of metaphor  44, 48, 50–​51 music and dance  198–​99, 201–​4 use of metaphor in organizational studies  5, 6, 13, 23, 31, 33–​34 visual metaphors  274, 281–​82 Crisis of European Science (Husserl)  91–​92 critical academics  436–​37 critical discourse  398 critical geographers  221–​22 critical management studies  28, 143–​44, 213–​14 critical metaphor analysis  318–​22 critical organization metaphor studies  30, 314, 322–​25

480   Index Critical Perspectives on Accounting (Andrew)  436–​37 critical public relations  219 critical realism (CR)  17, 33, 420–​21, 430–​31, 459, 470–​7 1 metaphorical analysis and  423–​26 mutant neoliberalism and  420–​21, 426–​30 organization studies and  421–​23 critical thinking  4 Croatia  383–​63 croccantino (foie gras dish)  337 crystalization 376 CSR see corporate social responsibility Cuban missile crisis (1962)  31–​32, 365–​66, 367, 368–​69, 370 cultural relativism  239, 240–​41, 379 culture and cultural metaphor  101–​2, 180, 407–​8 defining the role of metaphor  44–​45, 49–​51 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138–​39, 141–​42, 143, 146, 147 management education  351, 355–​56 Māori people  103–​4, 109, 111 seductive quality of metaphors  361, 368 translation  383–​84 use of metaphor in organizational studies  3–​4, 6–​7, 19, 24, 34 valence  399, 401 Cuna people  382 curator/​choreographer of emotions (metaphor) 316 customer satisfaction  186 cyborgs (mechanized humans)  168, 174–​75, 452, 454–​55 Czarniawska, Barbara  2–​3, 5–​6, 8, 12, 17–​18, 27, 154 robots at work  166–​75 dance see music and dance darkness and light  xxiv–​xxv, 212–​14, 395, 452 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  408, 409, 412–​13, 417 diversity/​discrimination  128–​29 Enlightenment  214–​16 glass cages/​palaces  213–​14, 216–​18 mainstream uses of  218–​20 memory and hauntology  213–​14, 218, 221–​23, 225

organizational miasma  213–​14, 220–​21 sports metaphors  187, 188–​91 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  21, 23, 25, 27, 28, 33 dark side (metaphor)  212–​13, 218, 220, 223–​26 dark triad of personality  393–​94 Darling, Kate  170 DARPA see Defense Advanced Research Project Agency data collection and analysis  xxiii, 258–​59, 261 data processing/​connectivity  157, 158–​59 data triangulation  304 dating (cultural due diligence) (metaphor)  349 Davidson, Donald  10n.4 Davison, Jane  266, 277, 278f Davoine, Eric  20, 23, 27, 151–​54, 155–​62, 155t, 398, 451, 456–​57 dead metaphors  xxiv, 391–​92, 436–​37, 460–​61 spectrum of metaphor  70–​7 1, 72, 73–​74, 74f, 75, 82 use of metaphor in organizational studies  2, 12–​13, 16, 25 dead ringer (metaphor)  181–​82 deafness 289 death and end of life (metaphors)  26, 399–​400 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138–​39, 140–​41 visual metaphors  279–​81 decision-​making  187, 190, 281–​82, 354–​55, 361 digital transformation and  157, 158–​59, 161 deductive metaphors  391–​92 deep metaphors  7 Deetz, Stanley  2, 5n.2, 398, 406–​7, 416, 417, 437, 452 Defense Advanced Research Project Agency (DARPA)  168–​69 defense industry  178–​79, 182–​86, 352 dehumanization  156–​57, 161, 171–​73 Dell, Kiri  18, 19, 26, 101–​12, 398, 454 De Loo, Ivo  17, 22, 33–​34, 179–​80, 434–​45, 453, 461 dementia 170 De Mestral, George  331 democratic society (metaphor)  400 demongraphy 145 demons (metaphor)  116, 117t denaturalization: visual metaphors  266, 274–​82, 276f, 278f, 279f, 281f denim (advert)  266–​67

Index   481 Derrida, Jacques  33–​34, 92, 123–​24 darkness and light  220–​22, 224–​25 researchers and research work  435, 439–​41, 443, 444–​45 descriptive metaphors  17, 26, 130, 324, 391–​92, 434 design: research  257–​59 desire is hunger (metaphor)  376–​77, 377f, 378 diachronic perspective  275–​77 dialogical texts  261 dialogic discourse  398 dictionaries  15–​16 different lenses  59n.2 different situations as different spaces (metaphor) 293 digital automation  155–​57, 155t digital radio  50 digital transformation and organization  23, 27, 61–​62, 130, 151–​53, 161–​62, 451, 456–​57, 470–​7 1 brains and  152–​53, 154, 155t, 157–​59, 161 darkness and light  219–​20, 223 instruments of domination and  152–​53, 154, 155t, 159–​61 machines and  152–​53, 154, 155–​57, 155t, 161 metaphors of digital transformation  153–​54, 155t digital walls  117t, 124–​25 digit (metaphor)  152–​53, 154, 161–​62 directedness  91, 96 disability  115, 124–​25, 221–​22, 223–​24, 225–​26 discontinuity  441–​42 discourse analysis  274–​75, 292, 315, 351, 407–​8, 417, 453–​54, 470 discourse dynamics framework  14, 15, 20, 46, 51 discourse is movement (metaphor)  454–​55 discrimination  26, 115–​16, 131–​32, 429, 456–​57 describing/​constituting/​(re) producing  129–​31 exploring metaphors for  123–​29 metaphors in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) literature  116–​23, 117t discursive factors  424–​25 visual metaphors  266, 273, 274–​80, 276f, 278f, 279f displacement 72

dissimilarity  9–​10 dissonance  58, 63–​65, 67–​68 distance  30, 318–​19, 337, 340–​41 distort reality (metaphor)  409–​12, 415, 416–​17 diversity  26, 102–​3, 115–​16, 131–​32, 143, 178–​79, 456–​57 describing/​constituting/​(re) producing  129–​31 exploring metaphors for  123–​29 metaphors in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) literature  115–​23, 117t “Diversity icebreaker”  237–​38 divisional organizations  349 domain assumptions  421 domains see source domains; target domains domains-​interaction view/​approach  11–​12, 15–​16, 17, 23–​24, 48–​49, 50–​51 dormant metaphors  70–​7 1, 74–​75, 76f, 77, 82 double metaphorizing loop  385–​86 downsizing 141 Dracula (Stoker)  223–​24 Driver, Michaela  6, 323, 324 driving (metaphor)  319 dropout (metaphor)  411, 415 drop your tools (metaphor)  438 dull, dangerous, and dirty jobs (DDD)  166, 168–​69 Dunbar, Kevin Niall  309–​10 Durie, Mason  104 dyadic relations  267 dynamic 471 dynamic discourse analysis  416–​17 dynamic meaning-​making  25 EBSCO 116 eco-​coreness  397 economic systems (metaphor)  453–​54 ecosystem (metaphor)  178–​79 Edison, Thomas  341 editability  338–​39 editing (metaphor)  455–​56 education  xxiv–​xxv, 1, 31, 171, 316 effect (gestures)  289–​90 efficiency  141–​42, 155, 156, 332–​33, 348, 353–​54 Einstein, Albert  170, 411 Eisenhardt, Kathleen  346, 348 ELAN  293–​94

482   Index electricity  337–​38, 341 electric wires (metaphor)  310, 337–​38 electromagnetic spectrum  225 electronic transmission (metaphor)  410 elementary propositions  89 elicited metaphors  6, 391–​92, 451 critical metaphor analysis  315–​17, 322 empirical studies  301, 302, 303t, 304, 305, 308, 311 see also invited metaphor elitism  30, 320–​21, 325, 413 emancipation  315, 321, 324–​25 embodied sensemaking  27–​28, 130 gesture 292 music and dance  206–​7, 208–​9 translation  376–​77, 378, 380–​81, 386–​87 visual metaphors  273 emergence  422, 423, 424–​25 emotion is temperature (metaphor)  406 emotion is warmth (metaphor)  411n.6 emotions  27–​28, 392, 394 empathy  182–​86 emphasis/​de-​emphasis  353–​54 empirical organizational research/​studies  29, 251–​52, 262, 300–​2, 303t, 456 metaphorical reflexivity  251, 252–​53, 255–​57, 258 metaphors of methodology  256–​62 occupational identity  253–​56 reliability  21–​22, 30, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 305–​8, 311 representativeness  21–​22, 30, 46, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 304–​5, 311 validity  21–​22, 30, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 308–​11 employees  43, 52–​53, 104, 186, 198, 321, 399, 453–​54, 460 digital transformation and organization  154, 156, 158, 159–​61 use of metaphor in organizational studies  6, 9, 11 employers see management enacted environments (metaphor)  468–​70 enacting 292 encoded terms  123, 125, 153, 240 energy-​providing technology  339 Enlightenment, The  28, 93, 214–​16 entrenched metaphors  74–​75, 76f, 82

entrepreneurial effectuation  205 entrepreneurs  26, 105–​6, 111, 200–​1, 277–​79, 289–​90, 310–​11, 349, 417, 429, 436 environmental degradation  101 environmental workers  234 epistemology  44, 89, 421, 422, 437, 439–​40 Erie Railroad  275–​77, 276f essence of things  92–​93 ethics  life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138 researchers and research work  438, 439–​41, 444 sports metaphors  178–​79, 190 ethnicity  115, 122–​23, 238–​39, 316 ethnocentrism 109 ethnographic writing/​images  261–​62, 273, 279–​81, 302, 470 Ettinger, Yair  383 Event Structure Metaphor  294 evil (metaphor)  414 evolution  26, 138–​40, 156, 275–​77, 276f, 295, 430–​31, 471 experiencing the social  382 experiential metaphors  350 experimentation xxiv experts 259 explaining  96–​97, 430–​31 explanatory critique  33, 421, 423 explicit metaphorical expressions  20, 26, 47–​48, 397–​98, 456 exploitation  160, 161, 222–​23, 323, 436 Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors (Örtenblad) 4n.1 extended cognition  416–​17 external locus of control  367–​68 eye-​openers (metaphor)  460 face-​to-​face interaction  76, 108, 286–​87 factory closures  138–​39, 141 facts 89 fading  213–​14 faith  124–​25 fame is light (metaphor)  411n.6 families  26, 102, 105, 110, 111, 217–​18, 253, 351 fashion/​fashion following (metaphor)  455–​56, 458, 459

Index   483 Fauconnier, Gilles  60, 123–​24, 290, 310, 337 Faust  253–​54 feelings 90 female high-​performance runners (metaphor) 183t femininity  18–​19, 235 fieldwork: research  259–​60 fight a good fight (metaphor)  183t films and film-​making  224–​25, 265–​66, 340, 350 filter (metaphor)  461 finance and financial statements  142, 275, 277, 278f, 309–​10 fire (ambition) (metaphor)  349 firewall (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122, 125 first-​level metaphors  391–​92 first principles thinking  356–​57 Fischer, Johan  349, 351 fishing (metaphor)  455 fixed intrinsic valence  18–​19 fixed metaphors  18–​19, 25, 67, 82 Fleiss, Joseph L.  303t, 307 flexibility  197, 254 floodlight (metaphor)  223 flower (metaphor)  395–​96 flow (metaphor)  470 fluid metaphors  18–​19, 460–​61 flux  3–​4, 101–​2, 138–​39, 146, 200–​1, 399, 401, 452, 457 folk dance (metaphor)  200 football see soccer Football League (England)  223 Forbes, Linda C.  5, 317–​18 Ford (motor company)  280–​81, 281f foregrounding  25, 78–​79, 78f, 80f framing and reframing  57, 105, 123, 161, 180–​ 81, 197, 238–​39, 331–​32, 455 creativity and creative work  331–​32, 334–​37, 340–​41 critical metaphor analysis  322, 324 empirical studies  305, 309 gesture  293–​94 management education  347, 352–​53, 355 researchers and research work  435–​37 role of metaphor in organizational studies  45, 46, 50 translation  376–​77, 380

France Against the Robots (Bernanos)  172 Frege, Gottlob  88–​89, 91–​92 Frey, Carl Benedikt  170–​7 1 front (metaphor)  455–​56 frozen (metaphor)  460–​61 fruit salad/​fruit cake (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122, 127, 129–​30 Fuda, Peter  349 functionalist paradigm  398 future see past/​future Gabriel, Yiannis  6, 28 darkness/​light as metaphors  124, 213–​14, 216–​ 18, 220–​21, 224–​25, 452 empirical organizational research  29, 178, 251–​62, 395 Gaggiotti, Hugo  18, 19, 20, 32, 180, 241, 394–​ 95, 454, 455–​56, 459 translation  375–​77, 377f, 378–​87, 381t game/​game plan/​gamesman (metaphor)  29, 178–​79, 181–​86, 254, 255–​56 gap-​spotting (metaphor)  256, 257 garbage can (metaphor)  468–​69, 471 gardener and gardening (metaphor)  31–​32, 366–​67, 454–​55 gatekeepers  339, 341, 342 Gates, Bill  411–​12 gender and genderless metaphors  26, 145–​46, 187, 238–​39, 320, 351, 356–​57, 453–​54 diversity/​discrimination,  115, 116, 117t, 122–​23, 124–​25, 126–​27, 129, 130–​32 generalization  19–​21, 22 generative power of metaphor/​s  2, 52–​53, 67, 130, 167, 293–​94, 357, 391–​92, 398 creativity and creative work  334–​38 critical metaphor analysis  315, 324 critical realism  422, 425–​26, 427–​28, 429 music and dance  197, 209 generic metaphors  406 geolocation  159–​60 geometry  92, 93 gesture  46, 286–​87 conceptual metaphor theory  287–​89 creativity and creative work  339–​40 empirical organizational research/​ studies  307, 310–​11 method for analysing metaphor in  291–​94

484   Index gesture (cont.) multimodality of discourse  76–​77, 79–​80, 81–​82 music and dance  205, 208 studies in organizational contexts  289–​91 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  21–​22, 25, 29–​30 value of studying metaphor in organizational contexts  294–​95 visual metaphors  265–​67 Gibbs, Raymond  2–​3, 5n.3, 13–​14, 376–​77, 378–​79, 406 gig economy  52–​53 glass  cages and palaces (metaphor)  xxiv–​xxv, 28, 213–​14, 216–​18, 452 chains (metaphor)  117t, 122–​23 cliff (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122 elevator/​escalator (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23, 130 slipper (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23 walls (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23, 129, 130 glass ceiling (metaphor)  25, 26 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  407–​8 diversity/​discrimination  115–​23, 124–​25, 129–​30 Glucksberg, Sam  2–​3, 10, 50–​51, 230–​31, 468, 469 Gocycle  346–​47 gold-​collar worker (metaphor)  232, 234, 238 gong qi (communal vessel, 公器) 385 good metaphor  9–​10, 16 Gosling, Jonathan  18, 19, 20, 32, 180, 241, 394–​95, 454, 455–​56, 459 translation  375–​77, 377f, 378–​87, 381t go to guy (metaphor)  181–​82 governance systems (sports)  189 government workers  234, 238 grammaticalization  73, 74f, 75, 82 Grant, David  167, 361, 437, 470 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  57–​68 digital transformation  152, 159–​60, 162 metaphors and valence  391–​92, 397, 398 organizational metaphors of the future  452, 453–​54, 461 use of metaphors  9–​10, 17–​19, 24

grass-​fed beef  50 Greater Hippas (Plato)  87 green-​collar workers (metaphor)  234, 237 green metaphor  25, 237–​38 greenwash (metaphor)  385 grey-​collar workers (metaphor)  233, 238 grouping  30, 47 guest speakers  350 Haaretz (Ettinger)  383 hacking  219–​20, 413 halal markets (metaphor)  349, 351 Hall, Edward T.  102, 107–​8 hall of fame (sports)  183t Hamilton, Alexander  411 Hargie, Owen  309–​10 Harried Leisure Class, The (Linder)  169 Harris, Olivia  381–​82, 381t hauntology  213–​14, 221–​23, 225 haute cuisine  50 Hawthorne Studies  216 head-​hunting (metaphor)  455 health and wellbeing  104–​5, 290, 319–​20, 382 Heartfield, John  270, 271f hearts and minds (metaphor)  349 hedonic tone see valence helix (metaphor)  350 Heracleous, Loizos T.  273, 305 herd immunity (metaphor)  368–​69 hermeneutics  274–​75, 444 Hesse, Mary  4, 8, 10n.4, 44, 461 heteronormativity  115, 124–​25, 128, 130 high-​arousal emotions  393 high/​low context cultures  102, 107–​8 high-​technology  272, 355–​56 historical metaphor theories  25 Hobbes, Thomas  267n.2, 268–​70, 268f, 277 hockey 183t holding 292 hologram (metaphor)  461, 470 homogenization 109 homo homini lupus (“man to man is an arrant wolfe”) (metaphor)  267 house with four walls (metaphor)  25, 26, 102, 104–​5, 110, 111

Index   485 “How Does Philosophy Illuminate the Study of Organizations?” (Tsoukas)  212–​13 human-​centric organizational life  27–​28 human experiences  xxiv human face (metaphor)  445, 461 human memory  12 human resource management (HRM)  43, 142, 187 hurdles in the pipeline (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122, 126–​27, 129–​30 Husserl, Edmund  91–​92, 93–​94, 96 Hutchinson, Lucy  215 hypothetical-​deductive method of science  88 IBM 414 iceberg (metaphor)  461 Icehotel (metaphor)  396, 397–​98, 452 iconoclastic constructivism  421 ideas and ideation  generation/​elaboration/​championing/​ production/​implementation  333–​41, 335t, 342 gestures  289–​90 researchers and research work  434, 435 idem identity  438, 439 identification processes  21–​22 identity  28, 320, 429 darkness and light  213–​14, 216, 217–​18 meaning of a word  90, 96–​97 occupational and  253–​56 researchers and research work  434, 437–​38 ideological distortions  460–​61 idioms 46 illegality and legality (employment)  237, 238–​39 illocutionary speech acts  395 images see visual metaphors Images of Organization (Morgan)  xxv, 102, 380–​81, 452, 454–​55, 470 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  57, 58, 62, 66 management education  353, 354–​55 researchers and research work  436, 437, 438, 439 uses of metaphors in organizational studies  4–​5, 4n.1, 5n.2, 8–​9, 18 valence  398–​401, 399f imagination metaphors  197, 375–​76

diversity/​discrimination  122–​23, 124, 128–​29 empirical organizational research  252, 256–​ 57, 258, 260, 262 immortiality  139–​40 impact 277 impact subphase (idea implementation)  334, 340–​41 implicit assertions  47–​48 implicit similes  10 importance is size (metaphor)  411n.6 impressionist tales  261–​62 improvisation  198–​99, 200–​5, 207, 348, 471, 472 (in)accessibility is distance (metaphor)  411n.6 India  222–​23 Indigenous metaphors  26, 101–​3, 109–​12 Māori context and their metaphors  103–​7 universal applicability of  107–​9 individualistic cultures  108 inductive metaphors  391–​92 Industry 4.0 phenomena  151, 155–​56, 155t inequality  178–​79, 453 influence metaphors  317 information processing  219–​20, 362, 364, 367, 368, 370 information technology  155, 157, 158, 161, 171 information warfare  219–​20 ingroups/​outgroups  187 innovation  26, 200–​1, 349, 380, 414, 425–​26, 436, 440, 460 creativity and creative work  332, 342 Indigenous metaphors  102, 105–​6, 111 sports metaphors  180–​81, 190–​91 visual metaphors  272, 274, 281–​82 Inns, Dawn  5n.3, 6, 7, 8, 9–​10, 13, 14, 21, 300, 315, 316–​17, 462 insight  xxiv, 96, 253, 259 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphors  61–​62, 63, 64, 66 defining role of metaphor  47, 48–​49 diversity/​discrimination  115–​16, 129 sports metaphors  189–​91 institutionalization  50, 52–​53, 221, 425 instruction: shaped by metaphors  352–​54 instruction manual (metaphor)  258–​59 instructor as “book” (metaphor)  316

486   Index instrumental view of organizations  179–​80 instruments of domination (metaphor)  3–​4, 27, 101–​2, 470 critical metaphor analysis  321–​22 digital transformation  152–​53, 155t, 159–​61 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  143–​44, 146–​47 valence 399 intellectual craftsperson (metaphor)  29, 254, 255 intentionality 91 interaction approach  10–​11, 156, 267 interactive metaphoric meaning  78, 79 intermediate-​distance metaphors  309–​10, 391–​92 internal branding  317, 319 International Organization for Standardization (ISO)  274–​75 Internet of Things  160–​61, 217–​18 interpretation processes  4, 21–​22, 351, 407, 459 interpretive discourse  398 interpretive flexibility  270, 281–​82 interpretive metaphor analysis  138, 231 interpretive paradigm  398 intersectionality 320 intersection of arts and technology  412–​13 interviews  279–​81 introspection 354 intuition 93 invitation to research (metaphor)  434 invited metaphors  6 see also elicited metaphors  ipseity identity  438, 439 iRobot (company)  168–​69 Iron Cage (metaphor)  216 irony  2–​3, 17–​18, 24, 46, 397, 461 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  66, 67–​68 irrationality  27–​28 Isaacson, Walter  408–​15 Ishiguro, Kazuo  166, 170 ISO see International Organization for Standardization Israel 383 Italy  290, 384 Jacobides, Michael G.  348 Jaguar (motor company)  280–​81, 281f

jamband (metaphor)  xxiv–​xxv, 27–​28, 198, 199, 202t music/​dance related metaphors  200–​1, 204, 206–​7 Japan  108, 172–​73, 385, 401 jazz (metaphor)  xxiv–​xxv, 25, 27–​28, 197, 198–​99, 471, 472 music/​dance related metaphors  200–​4, 202t, 206, 207, 350 Jefferson, Thomas  411 jigsaw puzzle (metaphor)  462 Jobs, Steve  33, 405, 408–​9, 417 analysis of biography  409–​15 Johnsen, Hans Christian Garmann  17, 18–​20, 25, 32, 89, 95, 179–​80, 460 meaning of a word  85–​97 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  17, 18–​20, 25, 32 valence  391–​402, 396t, 399f Johnson, Boris  219 Johnson, Mark  15, 25, 75, 319, 376 critical realism  423–​24, 425 gesture  287–​88, 293 management education  346–​47, 355–​56 meaning of a word  91, 97 translation  376, 378 visual metaphors  265–​67 Jordan, Silvia  19, 20, 21, 29, 178, 230–​31, 350, 395, 451 visual metaphors  265–​70, 268f, 271f, 272–​ 82, 276f, 278f, 279f, 281f journalism 168 journeys (metaphor)  289–​90, 302, 346–​47, 455–​56, 461 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  406, 409, 414 creativity and  332–​41, 335t judicial opinions  181–​82 Jung, Carl  399–​400 Kala Lagaw Ya (Pama-​Nyungan language)  376–​77 kaleidoscope careers (metaphor)  116, 117t kaleidoscope (sports)  187, 189, 190–​91 Kanter, Rosabeth Moss  346, 348 Kant, Immanuel  92, 93–​94, 174, 214–​15 Kappa index (Cohen)  303t, 307 Kappa index (Fleiss)  303t, 307

Index   487 Kelly, Simon  144 Kennedy, John F.  365–​66, 370 Keenoy, Tom  455 Keynes, John Maynard  170 keywords 46 kinship networks  26, 102, 105, 110, 111 knowing is seeing (metaphor)  378, 407, 411n.6 knowledge and knowledge development  8–​9, 158, 171, 234, 265–​66, 362, 440–​41 analogies and analogical thinking  467, 469, 472–​73 defining the role of metaphor  43, 44, 46–​47, 48 diversity/​discrimination  125, 128 empirical organizational research  257–​58 Indigenous metaphors  103, 106, 108, 110, 112 meaning of words  86–​87, 96 music and dance  197, 200–​1, 209 sports metaphors  182–​86, 188 König, Andreas  302, 307, 308, 339 Kotter, John  346, 351 Kottke, Daniel  409–​10 Krzeszowski, Tomasz Pawel  454–​55 labels 27 labor (metaphor)  414 labour of love (metaphor)  254, 255 Lakoff, George  15, 25, 60, 75, 319, 376 critical realism  423–​24, 425 gesture  287–​88, 293 management education  346–​47, 355–​56 meaning of a word  91, 97 translation  376, 378, 386–​87 visual metaphors  265–​67 language  xxiii, 45, 72, 261, 267, 314–​15, 395, 456 challenging limits of  93–​95 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  406–​7, 415–​16 power and  314–​15, 316–​17 research and researchers  435–​36, 437, 438, 443, 445 splitting language and mind  87–​91, 92 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  1–​2, 6, 13–​14, 18, 25, 32, 33–​34 valence  394–​95 Lao Tzu  350, 383–​84 Las Vegas  217–​18 law of requisite variety  459

layers (metaphor)  461 leadership  2, 86, 215, 308–​9, 429–​30, 454–​55 management education  349, 350, 351, 353, 354–​56 seductive quality of metaphors  368, 370 sports metaphors  178–​79, 181–​82, 188–​89, 190 leaf-​raking (metaphor)  455 leaky pipeline (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23, 126–​27, 129–​30 lean (metaphor)  458 learning cycles  xxiv, 347, 358f learning organization (metaphor)  458 lecturers 290 Lefebvre, Henri  33–​34, 435, 441–​42, 443, 444–​45 legal systems (metaphor)  453–​54 legitimacy  221, 279–​80, 367–​68 Lego bricks (toy)  304, 305 lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual and asexual persons (LGBTQIA)  115, 129, 130 less is more (metaphor)  338 Letiche, Hugo  17, 22, 33–​34, 179–​80, 434–​45, 453, 461 Leviathan (Hobbes)  267n.2, 268–​70, 268f, 277 lexicalization  73, 74f, 75, 76f, 82 lexicology  70–​7 1, 74 LGBTQIA see lesbian, gay, bisexual, transgender, queer, intersexual and asexual persons liberal ideology  236–​37, 426–​27 libertarianism  427, 428, 429–​30 life balance/​puzzle (metaphor)  146 life course  144–​46 life cycle model of metaphor  12 life as interwoven  26, 102, 106, 111 life is a journey (metaphor)  406 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  25, 26, 137–​39, 146–​47, 181–​82, 302, 401, 406, 428, 440 aging life images  141–​43, 145–​46 death/​end of life images  138–​39, 140–​41 evolution images  138–​40 life course images  138–​39, 144–​46 political arena images  138–​39, 143–​44, 146–​47 spectrum of metaphor  74, 82

488   Index light see darkness and light like: meaning of  386 Lima, Paula Lenz Costa  376–​77, 377f, 386–​87 liminality 272 Linder, Staffan Burenstam  169 linear meaning  27–​28 linguistic representation  376–​77, 377f linguistics and linguistic metaphor  4, 17–​18, 23–​24, 25, 88, 123–​24, 130, 167, 399 critical realism  420, 424 defining the role of metaphor  44–​46, 51 multimodal forms of discourse  70–​7 1 spectrum of metaphor  72, 73 visual metaphors and  265–​67 see also translation Linstead, Stephen A.  21, 28, 116, 117t, 187, 212–​26 lion (metaphor)  47–​49 Lisa (computer)  414 literal gestures  307 literal meaning  xxiv defining the role of metaphor  52, 363, 367–​68, 460–​61, 462 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  1–​2, 10n.4, 13, 15–​16 literary metaphor theory  378–​79, 405–​6, 408 literature reviews and searches  29, 116–​23, 117t, 138, 256–​57, 456 live/​alive metaphors  xxiv, 317, 391–​92, 436–​ 37, 460–​61 spectrum of metaphors  70–​7 1, 73–​74, 74f, 82 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  12, 16, 25 lived experience  320, 417, 443 lived media  282 local metaphors  101 location in space  412 Locke, John  87 Loden, Marilyn  115–​16 logic  101–​2 logical empiricism  97 logical positivism  89, 90, 91, 95, 96–​97 London, City of (metaphor)  443–​44 long-​distance metaphors  309–​10 loungification  223–​24 low-​arousal emotions  393 Mac (computer)  413, 414 McAfee, Andrew  151, 155–​56, 174

McCallum, Daniel Craig  275–​77, 276f McCrea, Kirsten  233 McDonald’s (metaphor)  362–​63 Machiavelli, Niccolo  350, 353 McKinsey Global Institute  171 machine (metaphor)  60, 272–​73, 437, 470–​7 1 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  409, 410 defining role of metaphor  45, 47–​48, 49–​50, 52–​53 digital transformation and organization  152–​53, 154, 155t, 155–​57, 161 Indigenous metaphors  101–​2, 104 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138–​39, 141–​43, 146 management education  348, 349, 353–​54 seductive quality of metaphors  361, 362, 363 translation  380–​81, 385–​86, 387 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  3–​4, 26, 27 valence  400, 412–​13 Malaysia  380–​81 management  25–​28, 47, 86, 153–​54, 178, 218, 282, 320, 347–​50 music and dance  199, 200–​1, 205, 206 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  6, 11, 23 management by objectives (metaphor)  458 management education  31, 346–​47 catalyzing new metaphors  346, 356–​57 driving change  346, 356–​58, 358f enhancing students’ understanding of complex concepts  347–​51 exploring/​reflecting on conceptual frames of individuals/​organizations  352–​56 Management and Organization Studies (MOS)  115–​23, 117t, 131–​32 Mandarin (language)  385 Mangham, Iain  167, 430–​31 manipulation 92 Mann Gulch forest fire  438 Manning, Peter K.  2–​3, 5n.2, 167, 301, 397, 461 man as warrior/​woman as caretaker (metaphor)  116, 117t Māori people: Indigenous metaphors  103–​7 mapping  309–​10, 406, 444–​45 creativity and creative work  337–​38 gesture  291–​92, 293 translation  376–​77, 380

Index   489 “March of the machine makes idle hands” (The New York Times) 170 Marcus Lanz (German talk-​show)  79–​80 marriage (metaphor)  178–​79, 349, 351, 383, 412 Marshall, Alasdair J.  349 Marx, Karl  223–​24 masculinity  18–​19, 399–​400 mask (authenticity) (metaphor)  349 mastermind (metaphor)  461 master tropes  45–​46, 66 Mātauranga Māori (body of knowledge)  103 material walls  117t, 124–​25, 126, 129, 130–​31 maternal wall (metaphor)  116, 117t mathematics  91, 92, 290 mating (cultural legitimacy) (metaphor)  349 Maui (personifying innovation)  26, 102, 105–​6, 111 “Mauipreneur”  105–​6 Meadows, Paul  3–​4 meaning is (phasers of) matter (metaphor)  454–​55 meaning-​making  xxiii, 145–​46, 318–​19 diversity/​discrimination  123–​25, 130 empirical studies  306, 309–​10 Indigenous metaphors  108–​9 spectrum of metaphor  72, 77, 82 translation  384, 386 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  2, 25 words and  85–​87, 91, 95–​96, 97 mechanistic meaning  27–​28 media (metaphor)  453–​54 melting pot (metaphor)  116, 117t, 127–​28, 130 memes  282, 410 Memoirs of the Blind (Derrida)  221–​22 memory  213–​14, 218, 221–​23, 225, 240, 304 mental images  368, 369–​70 mental stimulation: gestures  294–​95 meta-​metaphors  34, 459n.2, 460–​62 metáphorá (Ancient Greek)  71–​72 metaphora (modern Greek vehicles)  375–​76 Metaphor (Black)  267 metaphor clusters  5–​6 metaphorical imposition and manipulation 376 metaphorical thinking/​imagery  3–​4, 103–​4, 107 metaphoricity 25 multimodal discourse  76–​77, 78–​79, 78f

spectrum of metaphor  71, 73, 75 temporal dynamics in multimodal discourse  79–​82, 80f Metaphor Identification Procedure (MIP)  291, 306–​7 metaphor-​in-​use  2 metaphorization  2, 32, 67, 251, 435 metaphor-​led discourse analysis approach  24, 33, 407 recommendations for using metaphors  17, 18, 19–​20, 21 source domains  14, 15–​16 metaphor-​philosophers  25 metaphor scenarios  293–​94 Metaphors of Coronavirus (Charteris-​Black)  454 metaphor/​s  xxiii–​xxv, 1–​3, 33, 67–​68 alternative ways of thinking  57–​58, 59n.1, 60–​61 application in research  29–​30 building-​blocks  101–​2 deep and dark corners  352 defining/​refining/​redefining  1–​3, 7–​16, 24, 44–​51, 57–​58 defining role/​status of  43–​44, 51–​53, 58–​60 origins of  61–​63, 71–​72 recommendations for interest in  16–​23 reflecting on use of  459–​62 scope for other tropes  65–​67 theoretical considerations  24–​25 use/​abuse of  3–​7, 31–​32, 167 metaphors of the field  5n.2, 11, 30, 167, 301 “Metaphors We Communicate By” (Krzeszowski)  454–​55 Metaphors We Lead By (Alvesson and Spicer)  454–​55, 456 Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson)  91, 346–​47, 454–​55 Metaphors We Teach By (Badley and Van Brummelen)  454–​55 ‘metaphors we X by’  34, 45–​46 metaphysics  89, 90 meta-​pragmatic perspective  240–​41 meteor (metaphor)  455–​56 meteorologically inspired metaphors  455–​56 Methodists 213 methodology  21–​22, 355 empirical organizational research  256–​62, 301, 302, 311

490   Index metonymy  46, 167, 397, 410, 462 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphors  , 64, 65 use of metaphors in organizational studies  2–​3, 6–​7, 13–​14, 16 middle-​of-​the road view  239 Midgley, Mary  95 Mies van der Rohe, Ludwig  338 MIG-​G (gesture guidelines)  291–​93 military metaphors  355–​56, 425, 452 Mill, John Stuart  88 Milton: A Poem in Two Books (Blake)  212–​13 Milton, John  28, 212–​14, 215, 224–​26 mimesis 438 mind  87, 91, 94 mindsets: management education  352–​56 Mintzberg, Henry  346, 349, 356 MIP see Metaphor Identification Procedure Mitterhofer, Hermann  19, 20, 21, 29, 178, 230–​ 31, 350, 395, 451 visual metaphors  265–​70, 268f, 271f, 272–​ 82, 276f, 278f, 279f, 281f mixed martial arts  183t mixing metaphors  117t, 122–​23, 124, 127–​28, 129–​30 Moana (Disney film)  105–​6 modern architecture  50 Modernism  214–​15 mommy track (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122–​23 moneyball (metaphor)  182, 183t, 187 “monobiscuitous”  287–​88 monological texts  261 monomodal metaphors  267, 282 “monster” metaphor  7–​9, 10–​11, 13 morality 138 more is up (metaphor)  376–​77, 377f, 378, 406 Morgan, Gareth  xxv, 26, 32, 34, 67–​68, 101–​2, 300, 394, 470 alternative ways of thinking about metaphor  57–​58, 59n.1, 60–​61 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  8–​ 9, 12–​13, 57–​58 defining the role/​status of metaphor  44, 47–​48, 51–​52, 58–​60 digital transformation and organization,  152–​ 53, 154, 155, 157, 158–​61, 162 management education  350, 353, 354–​55, 356

metaphors and organizations  86–​87, 97, 138–​39, 146 recommendations for using metaphors  17–​ 18, 23 reflecting on use of metaphors  459, 460 researchers and research work  435, 436, 437, 438, 439 resonance/​dissonance  58, 63–​65, 67–​68 scope for other tropes  65–​67 theoretical considerations  24, 25 translation  380–​81, 386–​87 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  3–​5, 5n.2, 6, 7 valence  398–​402, 399f morphology  43–​44 mosaic (metaphor)  116, 122 motor industry  280–​81, 281f, 385, 460 mountain-​climbing (metaphor)  350 movie (self-​reflection) (metaphor)  348 Müller, Cornelia  21, 25, 291, 292, 339–​40, 391–​92, 459, 460–​61 sleeping/​waking metaphors  70–​75, 74f, 76–​77, 76f, 78–​82, 78f, 80f multifaceted replication  382 multimodal discourse  70–​7 1, 76–​77, 78–​79, 78f, 82 temporal dynamics of metaphoricity  79–​82, 80f see also spectrum of metaphor multimodal metaphors  267, 282, 286–​87 multinationals 399 multiparadigm inquiry  398 multiplicity  130, 337–​38, 350–​51, 381 critical metaphor analysis  319–​20, 322, 323–​24, 325 role of metaphor in organizational studies  23, 24, 25, 30 multisectoral partnerships  188 Munro, Iain  219–​20 Munsterberg, Hugo  218 murder (metaphor)  141, 280 music and dance (metaphor)  xxiv–​xxv, 196–​99, 209, 265–​66, 290, 340, 353, 452 analogies and analogical thinking  471, 472 better use of metaphors in organization studies  206–​9 related metaphors for organization/​ management  200–​5, 202t

Index   491 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  23, 26, 27–​28 mutant neoliberalism  420–​21, 426–​30 mystery creation (metaphor)  258 Mythologies (Barthes)  275–​77 myths  94, 95, 96–​97, 277 Myths We Live By, The (Midgley)  95 names and naming  89, 94, 438 narrative metaphors  293–​94, 436 National Black Worker Project (NBWCP)  233 naturally occurring metaphors  6, 30, 323–​24 empirical studies  301, 302, 303t, 305, 308 visual metaphors  274–​77, 281–​82 Nazi Germany  235 NBWCP see National Black Worker Project near-​universality  379, 380–​81 negative metaphors  391–​92, 393–​94, 397, 399–​400 negativity  6, 27, 32 neo-​Kantian school  25, 87, 91, 93, 94, 96, 97 neoliberalism  315, 321–​22, 428, 429, 430–​31 nethnographies 282 neutrality  30, 318–​19, 406–​7 valence  395–​96, 396t, 399, 400, 401 new metaphors  349, 453, 454, 455–​56 New Oxford Dictionary in English, The  124–​25, 126, 127 New Ways of Working  151, 152, 155t, 157, 158–​ 59, 160, 161 New York Times, The 170 New Zealand see Māori people: Indigenous metaphors nightmares (metaphor)  116, 117t nihilism  439–​40 Noble, David E.  171 Nonconformity  213, 218–​19 non-​Indigenous communities  103, 109–​10, 111 nonmetaphorical language  45–​46 nonverbal metaphors  29, 108, 265–​66 non-​Western cultures  19 normative discourse  398 normative metaphors  17, 425–​26 novel metaphors  407–​8, 453, 468 diversity/​discrimination  130, 131–​32 management education  357–​58, 358f spectrum of metaphor  74–​75, 76f, 82

Oakland Athletics  182 Obama, Barack  71, 79–​80, 80f, 81–​82 Objectivism and the Study of Man (Skjervheim) 88 objectivization 92 objects 89 occult (metaphor)  223–​24 occupational identity  253–​56 old age is a withered stalk (metaphor)  405–​6 older people  138–​39, 142–​43, 145 “On Denoting” (Russell)  88–​89 online activity monitoring tools  159–​61 online tracking  159–​60 “only” a metaphor  12 On Sense and Reference (Über Sinn und Bedeutung) (Frege)  88 ontology  435–​36 open-​access/​source publication  324–​25 opening up a world (metaphor)  462 open systems  201–​4 opportunism 254 oppression  30, 316–​17, 321, 324 optimum overlap  9–​10 oral transmission  108 orange-​collar workers (metaphor)  234, 239, 240 order and disorder  28, 213–​14 Order and Disorder (Hutchinson)  215 organic metaphors  356 organism (metaphor)  3–​4, 101–​2, 146, 178–​79, 361, 387 valence  399, 400 organization/​al actors  11, 20, 22, 27, 30, 207, 317 brain and digital transformation  157, 158 digital transformation  152–​54, 155, 161–​62 visual metaphors  265, 273 organizational bedazzlement  28, 213–​14, 225 organizational change  6, 200–​1, 206 organizational communication  6–​7 organizational conflict  178 organizational context  188 organizational death  279–​81 organizational design  349 organizational development (OD)  273 organizational hierarchies  275–​77, 276f, 281–​82 organizational learning  158–​59 organizational life  207–​9 organizational memory  13 organizational metaphors  315–​18

492   Index organizational miasma  28, 213–​14, 220–​21 organizational misbehavior  218–​19 organizational secrecy  219–​20 organizational studies  xxiii, 1–​2, 3–​4, 25–​28 organizational transformation  6 organization members  158, 455 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  6, 11–​12, 13–​14, 15–​16, 20, 21 Organization Studies (journal)  212–​13 organization theory  6–​7, 423, 452–​54 organized misbehaviour  28 original metaphors  356 Örtenblad, Anders  130, 225, 308–​9, 332, 357, 437, 438 analogies and analogical thinking  468–​69, 470–​73 color metaphors,  230–​41 critical metaphor analysis  315, 317–​18, 322, 325 digital transformation  151–​53, 154, 155, 157, 159–​60, 161–​62 life metaphor  138, 140, 146 metaphors and valence  391–​92, 394, 395, 398 music and dance-​related metaphors  196–​97 organizational metaphors of the future  451–​62 sports metaphors  179–​80, 188, 189, 190 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  1–​34, 4n.1 Osteria Francescana (restaurant)  337 Ortony, Andrew  10, 362 Oswick, Cliff  108–​9, 123, 167, 273, 304, 309–​10, 361, 470 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  57–​68 defining role of metaphor  48, 49–​50, 51, 52–​53 digital transformation  152, 159–​60, 162 metaphors and valence  391–​92, 397, 398 organizational metaphors of the future  452, 453–​54, 461 use of metaphors  2–​3, 5, 6, 9–​10, 17–​19, 23–​24 Other  318–​19, 321–​22, 325, 439, 441, 442 other-​as-​figurine (metaphor)  382 Our Iceberg is Melting (Kotter and Rathgeber) 351 Out of Context (Weick)  348

out-​of-​the-​box thinking  342 outsider perspective  318–​19, 321–​22, 325 ownership (metaphor)  453 Owusu, Charles  23, 27, 178–​91, 183t, 395, 452, 456–​58 Page, Steven W.  349 Paine, Tom  214–​15 paintbrush as pump (metaphor)  337 palliative death (metaphor)  141 paradigm shifts  2, 64, 123, 425–​26 “Paradigms, Metaphors, and Puzzle Solving in Organization Theory” (Morgan)  3–​ 4, 95 Paradise Lost (Milton)  215, 225–​26 paradox  4, 197 partiality  9, 24, 59 particulars 376 Parton, Dolly  66 past/​future  286–​87, 293 Patagonia (company)  317–​18 path dependency  139–​40, 146 pedagogue (metaphor)  308–​9 Pepper, Stephen  7, 457 perception  xxiii, 4, 230, 364, 370–​7 1, 406 performance  144, 160–​61, 186, 189, 198, 265–​66, 277, 471 perlocutionary speech acts  395, 399 personal development processes  366 perspective  xxiv–​xxv, 252, 434 translation  379–​82, 381t use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  2, 4, 17–​18, 32–​34 petroleum industry  280 phallus (metaphor)  116, 117t phantasmagoria (metaphor)  116, 122, 128, 129, 130 pharmakon  440–​41 phenomenology school  25, 87, 91, 92–​94, 96, 97 philosophers and philosophy  33–​34, 58, 87–​91, 106–​7 valence  395–​96, 396t Philosophy of Arithmetic (Husserl)  91 photographic images  273 phraseology  70–​7 1 physical entities  288–​89 physicalized language  89 physics  33, 408, 409–​12, 417

Index   493 Picasso, Pablo  267, 413–​14 picking someone’s brain (metaphor)  259 pictorial turn see visual metaphors pigeon-​holing approach  460 benefits of metaphors in critical research  315, 316, 317, 318 digital transformation  151–​53, 154 issues with metaphors in critical research  318–​19, 320 suggested improvements for critical research  322, 323–​24, 325 Pinder, Craig C.  5, 43–​44, 52–​53, 64–​65, 167 pink (metaphor)  232, 235–​36, 239, 240 Pinto, Jonathan  5–​6, 17, 18–​20, 32, 89, 95, 179–​80, 452 valence  391–​402, 396t, 399f pirates (metaphors)  33, 408, 409, 413–​15, 417 Pixar 340 place (metaphor)  452 Plato 87 Plato’s Cave  128–​29 play (metaphor)  414 Poetics (Aristotle)  71–​72 poets and poetry  1–​2, 70–​72, 73, 82, 383 police officers  467, 468 politics and political arena (metaphor)  3–​4, 26, 79–​82, 101–​2, 181–​82, 224–​25, 289–​ 90, 321 critical realism  425–​27, 430–​31 color metaphors  234–​35, 236–​37, 238–​39 gesture  289–​91, 293–​94 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138–​39, 143–​44, 146–​47 valence  399, 400 visual metaphors  266–​70, 268f, 271f polyphony  27–​28, 206–​7, 208 polysemy see complexity positive humanism  399 positive metaphors  391–​92, 399 positive organizational behavior (POB)  392, 393–​94, 397 positive organizational scholarship (POS)  392, 393–​94, 397 positive psychology  392, 393–​94 positivism  44, 421 positivity  xxiii, 27, 32, 401 posthumanism 272 postmodernism  214–​15, 459

postqualitative inquiry  444–​45 poststructuralism  395–​96, 396t, 398, 399, 421 potentiality 6 pottery making  356 power  159–​60, 254–​55, 367, 400, 470–​7 1 critical metaphor analysis  314–​15, 316–​17, 321–​22, 323 critical realism  423, 424–​26 Pragglejaz Group  291, 306–​7, 408 pragmatism  32, 188, 292, 395, 396t, 398 pressure (metaphor)  455–​56 primary metaphor  376–​77, 378 Prince, The (Machiavelli)  350 privacy  160–​61 probability 277 probing  334–​37 problem-​solving and analysis  6, 189, 309–​10, 332–​33, 334–​37, 340, 355 production and productivity  266, 273, 279–​81, 400 production subphase (idea implementation)  334, 340 professional organizations  349 professors 290 profitability  348, 353–​54 projected metaphors  391–​92 propositions 89 pseudo-​science  90–​91, 95 psychic prisons (metaphor)  3–​4, 101–​2, 452, 462, 469, 471 critical metaphor analysis  321 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  146, 147 researchers and research work  436, 437, 439 valence  399–​400 psychologism  91–​92 psychology  28, 213–​14, 218, 392, 393, 394 purity 397 purple (metaphor)  239 Putnam, Linda  2–​3, 6–​7, 46, 88–​89, 129–​30, 398, 454–​55 puzzler (metaphor)  316 Q index (Cochran)  303t, 307 quantified self  117t, 160–​61 quarterly earnings communications (study)  339 queen bee (metaphor)  115–​16, 117t, 122 quilt (metaphor)  116, 117t, 127–​28, 130

494   Index “Race against the machine” (Brynjolfsson and McAfee)  155–​56 race and racial discrimination  214–​15, 356–​57, 429, 439 diversity/​discrimination  122–​23 empirical organizational research/​ studies  254–​55 Indigenous metaphors  102–​4 radical humanist paradigm  398 radicalized organizations  399 radical structuralist paradigm  398 rainbow culture  236, 240 rāranga (life as interwoven)  26, 102, 106, 111 raters’ agreement: statistical assessments  307 Rathgeber, Holger  351 rationality  11, 27–​28, 101–​2, 178–​79, 399 darkness and light  216, 218 digital transformation  156–​57, 158–​59, 160–​61 raves (metaphor)  200 reality  32, 101–​2, 304, 437 critical metaphor analysis  314, 315 distort reality (metaphor)  409–​12, 415, 416–​17 diversity/​discrimination  123–​24, 130–​31 empirical organizational research/​ studies  259, 261–​62 meaning of a word  93–​94 valence 395 reality is a pliable object (metaphor)  409–​10 reasoning  45–​47, 196–​97, 286–​87, 295 rebellion: researchers  254–​56 rebirth 397 recruitment 455 red aggression (metaphor)  240 red-​collar workers  234–​35, 238 red ink behaviour (metaphor)  231 red light (metaphor)  231 red management (metaphor)  236 red politics (metaphor)  236–​37 reductionism  64, 96, 224–​25 Reed College  413–​14 Reed, Michael  5, 17, 33, 189, 398, 420–​31, 470–​71 reference and inference  322, 376, 472–​73 empirical studies  308, 309–​10, 311 gesture  291–​92, 293 meaning of a word  91–​92, 94–​95, 96, 97 reflection-​triggering interview questions  258 reflective thinking  5, 196–​97, 370–​7 1, 459–​62

reflexivity  17–​18, 44, 188, 323 empirical organizational research  251, 252–​53, 255–​57, 258 Régulier, Catherine  443 Reichardt, Carl  362–​63 reification 109 “Reinventing organizations”  237–​38 relationality  27–​28, 199, 206–​7 relevance 86 reliability: empirical studies  21–​22, 30, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 305–​8, 311 religion  171, 212–​13, 253–​54, 309–​10, 453 replica 375 representational gestures  289–​90, 291, 292 representativeness: empirical studies  21–​22, 30, 46, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 304–​5, 311, 320–​21, 322 reproduction 422 researchers and research work  xxiii, 33–​34, 47, 325, 391–​92, 434–​35, 444–​45 access to and publication of  324–​25 application of metaphors in research  29, 30 definition of metaphor/​s  11, 13, 16 embracing the mess  323–​24 exploitation/​silencing  323 highlighting position of  322 recommendations for using metaphors  17, 21–​22, 23 researcher as gamesman  254–​56 self of openness  441–​44 “self ” of the researcher  439–​41 semiotics versus semantics  435–​37 suggestions for improvement of critical metaphor analysis  322–​25 trustworthiness/​identity of the researcher  434, 437–​38 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  2, 5, 7 research subjects: voice  22, 30, 33–​34 resemblance in experience  293 residual patterns of understanding  67 resistance  254–​56, 279–​80 resonance  49–​50, 51, 58, 62, 63–​65, 67–​68 rethinking/​reimaging/​reconceptualizing  197 retirement  138–​39, 142, 144, 145–​46 retrospective metaphoric accounts  304–​5 reverence  26, 106–​7, 112 rhetoric 167

Index   495 Rhetorica ad Herennium (attrib. Cicero)  375 rhythmanalysis  17, 435, 441–​45 Ricoeur, Paul  15–​16, 33–​34, 300, 462 fieldwork 438 rhythmanalysis  17, 435, 441–​45 “self/​other”  439–​41 semiotics versus semantics  436–​37 “Rights of Man, The” (Paine)  214–​15 risk representation technology (risk matrices)  275, 277–​80, 279f, 281–​82 risk-​taking  178–​79, 190 Ritchie, L. David  14, 17, 18–​20, 21–​22, 33, 240–​41, 391–​92, 453 Mac computer  405–​17 rivalry (sports)  178–​79, 181, 183t, 190 Robotics Challenge  168–​69 robot pets  170 robots at work  25, 27, 143, 166n.1, 380–​81, 455 difference between the organic/​the mechanical  168–​74 observations of the future  174–​75 theory/​practice of metaphors/​ organizing  167–​68 root metaphors  44, 151–​52, 213–​14, 252, 391–​ 92, 470, 471 critical metaphor analysis  316, 317–​18 critical realism  428 empirical studies  308–​10 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138, 141–​42, 144, 146 sports metaphors  179–​80, 186, 189–​90 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  5n.3, 7, 19–​20, 28, 30, 33 rose colored lens (sports)  186–​87, 190–​91 Rorty, Richard  123–​24, 265–​66 Rossi, Paula  23, 27–​28, 182–​86, 196–​209, 202t Rossum’s Universal Robots (Čapek)  168 Rottig, Daniel  349, 351 Rouleau, Linda  44, 49–​50, 282 routines are like genes (metaphor)  469–​70 rugby union  189–​90 rule-​following  200 Russell, Bertrand  88–​89 Russia  383–​63 Sackmann, Sonja  6, 11, 31–​32, 152, 179, 319, 361, 366, 394, 406, 452, 462, 470–​7 1

seductive quality of metaphors  361–​7 1, 364f, 369t sacrificial killing (metaphor)  141 saint (metaphor)  454–​55 salient-​nonsalient continuum  383 salient (visible) connections  48 Sandberg, Jörgen  29, 44, 178, 251–​62, 395 scaffold (metaphor)  334–​37 scalar 393 schematic metaphors  293–​94 Schmidt, Angelika  17, 20, 26, 50, 86, 115–​32, 117t, 391–​92, 452, 453 Schoeneborn, Dennis  5–​7, 13, 115–​16, 146–​47, 200–​1, 361, 461, 462 scholars see researchers and research work Schön, Donald  2, 5n.3, 7, 12, 167, 293–​94, 331–​32, 334, 335t, 337, 468 science fiction  409–​10, 414 science and scientific theory  2, 3–​4, 214–​15, 258–​59, 470–​7 1 meaning of a word  89, 90–​91 valence  393, 395 science as a vocation (metaphor)  253–​54 Scientific Management  43–​44 scorpion dance (metaphor)  411–​12 scrutiny 216 Sculley, John  410 search and destroy (metaphor)  349 Searle, John R.  10n.4, 395 second-​level metaphors  6–​7, 391–​92, 462 Second Machine Age, The (Brynjolfsson and McAfee)  155–​56, 174 second order metaphor  376 security blankets (metaphor)  399–​400 seductive quality of metaphors  31–​32, 319, 361–​62, 370–​7 1, 381–​82 avoiding negative consequences of  369–​70 conditions of higher seduction quality  367–​69, 369t illustrations of seduction process  365–​67 nature/​value of metaphors in organizational settings  362–​65, 364f seeing-​as  2, 269–​70, 379, 394 conceptual metaphor theory (CMT)  406–​7, 416 seeing/​non-​seeing  47–​48, 57–​58, 123, 197, 221–​22, 223–​24, 267, 471–​72

496   Index “self ”: researchers and research work  255–​58, 439–​44 self-​diagnostic instruments (metaphor)  460 “Self and Other”  439, 441, 442, 444–​45 self-​service technologies  152, 156, 158, 160 semantics  xxiii, 33–​34, 51, 277–​79 critical metaphor analysis  315–​16, 325 researchers and research work  435–​37, 438 spectrum of metaphor  72, 78, 79 seminars 342 semiotics, critical  46, 224–​25, 272, 435–​37, 438, 441 sensemaking/​sensegiving  111, 141, 180–​81, 280, 422 defining the role of metaphor  46–​48, 51 digital transformation and organization  152 diversity/​discrimination  117t, 122 empirical studies  304, 305, 309 meaning of a word  87, 88, 91–​92, 94–​95, 96, 97 music and dance  201–​5, 206–​7, 208–​9 researchers and research work  438, 441–​42, 443 translation  380, 386–​87 sensory input/​content  376 sentences  436–​37 sex industry workers  235, 238 shadiness and shadows  xxiv–​xxv, 128–​29, 215, 221–​23, 399–​400 Shakespeare, William  350 shampoo  340–​41 shapeshifting  26, 106–​7, 112 shared responsibility  33–​34 shared understanding  31, 378, 386–​87 shared vision  340 s**t disturber (metaphor)  316 shop stewards (metaphors)  455 “shortcuts” 20 sign language (deafness)  289, 292 silenced voices  316, 317–​18, 321, 324 Silicon Valley  410, 413–​14 similarity and dissimilarity  9–​10, 48, 49–​50, 123 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  62–​63, 66, 67–​68 translation  386–​87 similarity-​in-​difference  66 similes  2–​3, 23–​24, 61–​62, 167, 267

simulation-​memories of perceptions  415–​16 Sinclair, Upton  232 skiing (metaphor)  346–​47 Skjervheim, Hans  88 slam dunk (metaphor)  183t slaves (metaphor)  116, 117t, 166, 173–​74, 455 sleeping metaphors  25, 71, 76–​77, 78f, 460–​61 smell 46 Smircich, Linda  7, 179–​80, 186, 189–​90, 457, 457n.1 snowball (accountability) (metaphor)  349 soccer (metaphor)  348, 349, 351 social capital  6–​7 social constructivism  103, 110, 123, 141, 178–​79, 314 social ontology  421, 422, 423 social reality  20, 44, 49–​50, 314, 315, 316–​17, 409–​10, 416, 422 social robots  169–​70, 172, 174 social sciences/​studies  xxiii, 27, 44, 96–​97, 167, 225, 266, 421 researchers and research work  435–​36, 437 valence 393 social structure  422 Society of Friends (Quakers)  213 sociocultural evolutionary processes  239 socio-​cultural experiences  378 sociology  deviance perspective  28, 213–​14, 218–​19, 221, 222–​23 view of metaphor  24, 57, 59, 109, 145, 218 visual metaphors  266, 279–​80 socio-​material relations  33, 420, 422, 424–​25, 470–​7 1 Socrates 87 softball (metaphor)  351 soloing (musical term)  472 Sophists 87 sound  46, 265–​66, 337 source domains  2–​3, 18–​19, 24, 25, 31, 73, 130, 179–​80, 350 color metaphors  230–​31, 238 creativity and creative work  331, 337–​38, 340–​42 defining metaphor  7–​12, 13–​16 defining/​refining/​redefining metaphor  67–​68 defining the role of metaphor  48, 50–​51

Index   497 empirical studies  302, 308–​10 gesture  288–​90, 291, 293 Indigenous metaphors  108–​9, 110 translation  376–​77 valence  394, 398 sovereignty  270, 270n.3 Soviet Union  365–​66 space  33, 91–​92, 408, 409–​12, 417 spatialization metaphors  13–​14 spectacle 216 Spectres of Marx (Derrida)  221–​22 spectrum of metaphor  70–​75, 74f, 76f, 82 see also multimodal discourse  speculative constructivism  130–​31 speech  290–​91, 292, 293, 294, 395 Spicer, André  454–​55, 456 Spiller, Chellie  18, 19, 26, 101–​12, 398, 454 spinal cord damage  338–​39 spirituality  107, 414, 415 sport entrepreneurship  189 sport metaphors  178–​81, 190–​91, 452, 457–​58 alternatives  188–​90 brief overview of  181–​86, 183t drawbacks of  186–​88 management education  348, 349, 351, 353, 354–​55 sport paradox (metaphor)  23, 25, 27, 189 Sprache und Mythos (Language and Myth) (Cassirer)  93, 94–​95 stacking  337–​38 stairways to heaven (metaphor)  277, 278f, 281–​82 Staniland, Nimbus  18, 19, 26, 101–​12, 398, 454 star (metaphor)  411–​12 Star Trek  409–​10 Star Wars Jedi (metaphor)  346–​47, 414, 415 states of affairs  89 stem cells (metaphor)  349 Sternberg, Robert J.  9–​11 stewardship  26, 106–​7, 112 Stiegler, Bernard  33–​34, 435, 440–​41, 442, 443, 444, 445 stock car auto racing  183t Stoker, Bram  223–​24 storytelling (metaphor)  108, 261–​62 strategies and strategic management  11, 137–​38, 350, 356, 361 stroke (gesture)  288, 291

strong metaphors  391–​92 structural embeddedness  420 structure-​mapping theory  337–​38 structure and structural perspectives  33, 45–​46 critical realism  423, 430 translation  379–​80 valence  395–​96, 396t, 398 styles of discourse  2–​3 submerged metaphors  xxiv sub-​metaphors  13, 26, 138–​39 suggested metaphors  22 Sun Tzu  350 super metaphors  15, 397 super tropes  2–​3 suppression  28, 30, 213–​14, 316, 321, 322, 325 surface-​level metaphors  7, 391–​92 surfing (metaphor)  361 surgery (metaphor)  31–​32, 365–​66, 367 sustainability  xxiv–​xxv, 26, 101, 209, 453, 458 ageing  142–​43 death/​end of life  140, 141 evolution  139–​40 life course  144–​46 life/​life-​worlds metaphor  138, 146–​47 management education  347–​48, 355, 356–​57 politics and political arena  143–​44 valence 397 sustainable illumination  225 Sweden  453, 457, 460 symbolism  2, 167, 260, 305, 395, 457 critical realism  420, 424, 427 Indigenous metaphors  108, 109–​10 sports metaphors  180, 183t, 190–​91 visual metaphors  267, 269, 277–​79 symphony orchestra (metaphor)  27–​28, 198, 199, 200–​1, 202t, 204–​5 better use of music/​dance metaphors  206–​7, 208 synecdoche  2–​3, 46, 167, 397 syntactic metaphoric meaning  78, 79, 406–​7 synthesis  239, 240–​41, 331–​32 synthetic language/​knowledge  88–​89, 91 systematically distorted communication  221 systematicity  15, 30, 287–​88, 293–​94, 337, 407 System of Logic, Ratiocinative and Inductive (Mill) 88 systems theory-​based courses  355

498   Index taken-​for-​granted metaphors  2, 101–​2, 189, 262, 425–​26, 470 critical metaphor analysis  316–​17 role of metaphor  43, 49, 50 visual metaphors  266, 274, 275, 277, 281–​82 tales of the field (metaphor)  261–​62 Tango Argentino (metaphor)  27–​28, 198, 199, 200–​1, 202t, 205 better use of music/​dance metaphors  206–​7, 208 tangos  xxiv–​xxv Taoism 353 Tao te Ching (Lao Tzu)  350, 383–​84 target domains  2–​3, 24, 31–​32, 140, 179–​80, 277, 376, 394, 453 color metaphors  230–​31, 236, 238 creativity and creative work  331, 334–​38, 339, 340–​42 defining metaphor  7–​8, 9–​12, 13, 16 defining the role of metaphor  48–​49, 50–​51, 67–​68 diversity/​discrimination  117t, 130 empirical studies  302, 308–​10 gesture  288, 289–​90, 291, 293–​94 Indigenous metaphors  108–​9, 110 seductive quality of metaphors  362, 363–​ 66, 367, 368–​69, 369t, 370 translation  376–​77 Taylor, Frederick Winslow  43–​44, 348 teamwork  188–​89 technical/​calculative business-​oriented perspective 138 technical metaphors  124, 126–​27, 129, 130, 427 technological unemployment  170 Technology Trap, The (Frey)  170–​7 1 Teflon effect (metaphor)  116, 117t temporality see time and temporality temporary pop-​up organizations  398 tenor 379 tent (metaphor)  452 territoriology  443–​44 tertium comparationis  267n.1, 269, 270, 274–​75, 277–​79 Te Tiriti o Waitangi (Māori document)  103–​4 Te Whare a Maui (The House of Maui)  105–​6 Te Whare Tapa Wha (house with four walls)  25, 26, 102, 104–​5, 110, 111 textile industries  137–​38

texts as containers  287–​88 Thatchenkery, Tojo Joseph  123–​24 theater (metaphor)  348, 452, 471, 472 theme park (metaphor)  452 theory development/​construction  6, 197, 198, 309–​10, 361 theory as metaphor  3–​4 there is no escape (metaphor)  440 thesis  239–​40 thick description (metaphor)  261 thinking  57–​58, 59n.1, 60–​61, 197, 294–​95, 460–​61 Thorpe, Richard  346–​47 “Three Rules of Robotics” (Asimov)  172 till barriers do them part (metaphor)  383 time and temporality  18–​19, 26, 79–​82, 106–​7, 376–​77, 441–​42, 470 time is a machine (metaphor)  410 time is money (metaphor)  376–​77 time and temporality  18–​19, 286–​88, 290, 293 Tinker, Tony  5 tone (transference)  108 tool (metaphor)  462 topoi  269–​70, 281–​82 tossed salad (metaphor)  116, 117t, 122, 127, 130 totemic figures (Cuna people)  382 touching 292 tour-​guide (metaphor)  316 Tourangeau, Roger  9–​11 toxicity 221 Toy Story 3 (film)  340 traceability of data  159–​60 tracing 292 track (metaphor)  126–​27 “tracks” of metaphor studies  6–​7 Tractatus Logico-​Philosophicus (Wittgenstein)  88–​89 trading fours  472 traffic lights (metaphor)  277–​79, 279f, 280, 281–​82 traffic (metaphor)  9–​10, 453 trajectories 145 transcendentalism 94 transference  72, 85–​86, 123, 340–​41, 375, 459 Indigenous metaphors  102, 107–​8, 109, 111, 112 visual metaphors  269–​70, 274–​75 transformation  3–​4, 101–​2, 155–​56, 200–​1, 361, 416–​17, 422

Index   499 suggested future research  452, 457 valence  399, 401 transitions 145 translation  375–​76, 386–​87, 455–​56 challenges of  382–​84 disciplinary perspectives  379–​82, 381f illustrations of problems  384–​86 linguistic representation  376–​77, 377f ubiquity of metaphor  378–​79 use of metaphor/​s in organization studies  5, 6, 19, 32, see also linguistics and linguistic metaphor transmission medium  261 transparency  16–​17, 28, 46, 159–​60, 462 darkness and light  213–​14, 217 spectrum of metaphor  73, 74–​75, 74f, 76f, 77, 81 Transport and General Workers’ Union (TGWU)  279–​80, 281f trash talk (metaphor)  183t travelability: Indigenous metaphors  102, 109–​10, 111 travels (metaphor)  455–​56 tree (metaphor)  275–​77, 276f, 281–​82 triadic relations  267 tropes  2–​3 trustworthiness: researchers and research work  437–​38 Tsoukas, Haridimos  197, 212–​13, 218, 303t, 310, 337–​38, 361 analogies and analogical thinking  467–​73 organizational metaphors of the future  452, 460–​61, 462 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  2–​3, 4, 5, 6–​7, 9, 10–​11, 12, 13, 15–​16, 34 tunnel vision (metaphor)  256–​57 tupuna (ancestors)  107 Turkey  383, 384–​85 two-​dimensional visuals  273 two heads are better than one (metaphor)  384–​85 ultra-​running  182–​86, 183t ultraviolet light  225 uncertainty  27–​28, 198–​99, 259, 441, 444 seductive quality of metaphors  361–​63, 367, 370–​7 1

Uncle Sam (metaphor)  280–​81, 281f underdogs  254–​55 understanding  96–​97, 196–​97, 314, 453 unemployment  170–​7 1 unheard voices  316 unifinality 397 United Nations Permanent Forum on Indigenous issues  103 United States  236–​37, 290, 365–​66 Universal Basic Income  171, 174–​75 Universal Declaration of Human Rights (UDHR) (1948)  173–​74 universality  101, 406 color metaphors  231, 238–​41 Indigenous metaphors  107–​10, 112 translation  378–​79, 380, 382, 383, 386–​87 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  1, 18, 19, 20, 26, 28, 32 universals 376 University of Leicester  221 unknown through known  24 unspecified metaphor valence  398–​401, 399f useful metaphors  262 valence  391–​92, 401–​2 metaphors and  394–​401, 396t, 399f positive/​negative/​neutral  393–​94 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  18–​19, 32 validity: empirical studies  21–​22, 30, 300–​1, 302, 303t, 308–​11 value maximization/​creation/​neutrality  52, 155–​56, 186, 255–​56, 348, 354, 355 vampire (metaphor)  144, 223–​24 Van Brummelen, Harro  454–​55 variable approach: sports metaphors  7, 180, 182, 187, 189–​90 Vaughan, Diane  213–​14, 218–​19, 221 vector 393 vehicle 379 Velcro (fasting technology)  331 Venus (metaphor)  91–​92 verbal anchoring/​explanation  272 verbal metaphors  25, 29, 94, 230–​31, 339 spectrum of metaphor  72, 73–​75, 76, 76f, 79–​80, 81 visual metaphors  265–​66, 274 Viable Systems Model (Beer)  471

500   Index video-​recording  29–​30 Vienna Circle  89 virtual/​remote organizations  157, 158 virus infection (metaphor)  455–​56 visual metaphors  46, 230–​31, 265–​66, 281–​82, 286, 319, 412–​13, 451, 470 definition of  266–​70, 268f, 271f denaturalization of  266, 274–​82, 276f, 278f, 279f, 281f management education  350, 356 organizational research and  272–​74 use of metaphor/​s in organizational studies  21–​22, 25, 29 see also art and art studies  vitality  73, 74f, 74–​75, 76f, 77, 78f vocabularies  46, 108 vocation  253–​54, 255 vocationist (metaphor)  29 voice: research subjects  22, 30 voice (metaphor)  462 volunteering and voluntary sector  122, 178–​79 waking metaphors  25, 71, 76–​77, 78f, 81 Wall Street Journal, The 116 war (metaphor)  178–​79, 182–​86, 352, 353, 355–​56, 409, 425 watches  340–​41 water resources  317–​18, 452 wave (metaphor)  25, 27, 410, 455–​56 digital transformation  152–​53, 154, 161–​62 weak metaphors  391–​92 weapon (metaphor)  462 weaving (metaphor)  26, 102, 106, 111 Weber, Max  213–​14, 216, 253–​54, 255–​56 webnographies 282 weeding out (metaphor)  455 Weick, Cynthia W.  19, 23, 31, 179–​80, 397, 452, 453, 454–​55 management classroom  346–​58, 358f Weick, Karl E.  115–​16, 314, 438, 441–​42, 467, 468–​69, 471 weight (metaphor)  319

Wells Fargo  362–​63 Western Electric  216 whānau (kinship networks)  26, 102, 105, 110, 111 “What is Enlightenment?” (Kant)  214–​15 What We Do in the Shadows (tv series)  223–​24 “When I Consider How My Light is Spent (On His Blindness)” (Milton)  225–​26 whistleblowing  219–​20 white see black/​white metaphors “White Mythology” (Derrida)  439 whiteness  124–​25 White Tiger, The (Adiga)  222–​23 wicked problems  63 Wikström, Ewa  18–​19, 26, 86, 137–​47, 400, 456–​57 “Will machines devour man?” (The New York Times) 170 window of opportunity (metaphor)  310–​11 Wittgenstein, Ludwig  88–​89, 90–​91, 267, 394–​95 women  115, 122, 129, 235, 316, 320 words  bring mind back in  87, 91–​93 challenging limits of language  93–​95 getting meaning of  85–​87 metaphors and study of organisations  86–​87, 95–​97 splitting language and mind  87–​91 workhorse (metaphor)  9, 455 working class  232–​33 workplace illumination  216 workshops  342, 350 work (wapu) (Aymara people)  381t, 381–​82 work and workers  279–​80, 281f, 320, 321–​22, 399, 455 Wozniak, Steve  413 writing up research  260–​62 yellow-​collar workers (metaphor)  233–​34, 238 youthfulness (metaphor)  142–​43, 144, 146–​47 zero valence  394