Metaphor

Conceptual Overview and Discussion

There is a continuous and growing interest in the study of metaphor within organizational research. This interest reflects the understanding that metaphors are central to human discourse and understanding. Metaphors connect realms of human experience and imagination. They guide our perceptions and interpretations of reality and help us formulate our visions and goals. In doing these things, metaphors facilitate and further our understanding of the world. Similarly, when we attempt to understand organizations (as scholars or as people working within them), we often use metaphors to make organizations compact, intelligible, and understood. As scholars, we use metaphors to theorize about organizations. Gareth Morgan's well-known classification of theories of organization in different root categories of metaphors, for example, assumes to describe and illustrate the variance in (actual and potential) theoretical perspectives in the field. The organization theorist Karl Weick similarly sets out guidelines for how organizational researchers can develop and build theories through the use of metaphors that, when they are projected onto organizational reality (or, rather, observations of organizational reality), may describe and explain aspects of it. In contrast with this projection approach, much research connected to traditions like sensemaking and discourse analysis has followed a more inductive approach in identifying processes of meaning-making around metaphors that are elicited at the level of people's language use. In this approach, metaphors are seen as devices or units of language that are deployed within particular conversations, sensemaking accounts, and contexts. Metaphors are analyzed for their locally specific uses and meanings. This contextual sensitivity in turn lends itself to making informed interpretations about the specific uses of a particular metaphor in context that may range beyond psychological or cognitive uses (understanding) to sociological uses of, for example, impression management, normative judgments, and legitimacy. Discourse and sensemaking analysts insist that the uses or meanings of a single metaphor may differ across speakers and contexts of language use, and that one therefore 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 with other parts of the discourse. The discursive view thus sees metaphors not only as available sensemaking devices that are triggered by events, but also as actively employed to manage interests in social interaction.

Application

Two exemplars of the study of metaphors in single case studies are the study by Dennis Gioia, James Thomas, Shawn Clark, and Kumar Chittipeddi on a strategic change within a public university in the United States; and Danna Greenberg's case study of undirected symbolic processes and their impact on the effectiveness of an organizational change. Dennis Gioia and his colleagues published a series of articles on a case study of a strategic change within a large public university in the United States. The case details how the incoming president envisioned the need for change because of significant fiscal and demographic trends. He set up a task force that was charged with designing a strategic planning process that would make the university competitive in the future academic and economic environment. Data were collected through participative observation by one of the authors, who collected field notes (diary and meeting summaries), transcripts of the task force meetings, interviews with members of the task force and other stakeholders, documentation relating to the actions of the task force, and reflective notes on the process. Data were inductively [Page 554]analyzed by the participant and the outside researchers and built up into coherent theoretical categories and themes. The account of the case is written up into a narrative that details the struggles of members of the task force to come to terms with the strategic change and the sensegiving of the new president. Members discussed the central notion of strategic planning through movement and direction metaphors, and discussed metaphorical representations of strategic planning units as constituent parts or atoms, planning machinery, and centers of excellence. The president also influenced the sensemaking of the group by supplying process or path metaphors of strategic change and by supplying a change model that became adopted by the group and ultimately institutionalized by the university. The president called for a strategic change to enable the university to pursue a path of selective excellence which in turn was meant to make it “a ‘Top-10’ public university.” Dennis Gioia and his colleagues demonstrate how, within contexts of ambiguity and change, sensegiving and sensemaking processes are rich with metaphors and symbols that are central to the construction of meaning and the communication of understanding.

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