ESRC END OF PROJECT REPORT - Amazon S3 · 2015-09-08 · ESRC END OF PROJECT REPORT ‘METAPHOR, THEORY AND THE EVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE ON ... their patterns of use over the 15 year

ESRC END OF PROJECT REPORT

‘METAPHOR, THEORY AND THE EVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE ON ORGANIZATIONS’

(Grant Ref. no. RES00022791)

Joep Cornelissen

Full Report

ObjectivesThis project addressed the role played by metaphors in academic and practitioner language regarding organizations and its implications for understanding and/or facilitating communication about organizations. Scholars within business and management have traditionally assumed that metaphors (ways of talking and thinking about one domain in terms of another) constitute one of the primary ways of framing and understanding the world of organizations as organizations themselves, as abstract phenomena, cannot be directly represented or experienced as single objects or entities. The ESRC-funded research addressed this issue by systematically examining the incidence of metaphors in academic and practitioner language about organizations, the roles played by those metaphors and their impacts in these settings of language use.

I summarise the success of the research with reference to the original objectives below: 1. Integrate literature from cognitive science, cognitive linguistics, applied linguistics and the social sciences with literature from business and management to provide a richer conceptual explanation of how and why metaphors are develeped, selected and retained in academic and practitioner settings. This was achieved by linking theoretical ideas and methods from cognitive science and cognitive and applied linguistics into the study’s theoretical framework, alongside issues of social context emphasised in much of the social science literature. Building on my earlier ideas, I linked the emerging framework to insights from the field research in a series of paper published in leading management and social science journals (e.g., Human Relations, 2005; Organization Studies, 2006; Journal of Management Studies, 2006). The theoretical framework, based on the results from the empirical analyses, suggests a set of specific principles labelled as the ‘optimality principles’ which are a set of constraints or rules under which metaphorical comparisons are most effective.

2. Investigating the incidence of metaphors in academic language over time coupled with an understanding of what characteristics of a metaphor may determine its selection and retention, to explain why certain metaphors are part of the ‘knowledge base’ in organization theory. To achieve this objective I compiled together with the RA working on the project a large dataset consisting of articles published in 23 business and management journals published over a 15-year period (1989-2003). I identified metaphors and metaphorical expressions involving the words ‘organization’ (and its inflexions; e.g. ‘organizational’, ‘organizations’), their patterns of use over the 15 year

To cite this output: Cornelissen, Joep (2007). Metaphor, theory and the evolution of knowledge on organisations: Full Research Report. ESRC End of Award Report, RES-000-22-0791. Swindon: ESRC

period, and then tested a set of hypotheses which suggested that four cognitive linguistic principles (the between-domains distance principle, the within-domains similarity principle, the concreteness principle and the relational principle) determine the aptness of a metaphor and account for its subsequent adoption and continued use over time. This dataset is unique in its scale and the diachronic (“through time”) design over a 15 year period.

3. Investigating the incidence of metaphors in general language use and its connection with metonymic expressions, to explore the connections between the metaphoric and metonymic in people’s language concerning organizations. I achieved this objective through a large-scale study of 3100 samples of talk about organizations extracted from the British National Corpus (BNC). The British National Corpus (BNC) is a 100 million word collection (‘corpus’) of samples of written and spoken language from a wide range of sources, designed to represent a wide cross-section of British English from the later part of the 20th century. It thus includes different genres such as professional as well as lay talk about the subject of organizations. I decided to use the BNC as it is broadly representative of current British English, as it provides rich data (in comparison to a much more specialised corpus of professional texts, for example) and allowed me to retrieve expressions about organizations that could be analysed for their metaphoric and metonymic character.

4. Undertaking an experimental study of academics’ understandings of metaphors and their perceived impact on organization theory. I achieved this objective through a survey with business and management scholars working at business schools in the United Kingdom, 250 of whom completed an on-line survey on their understanding of six metaphors-in-use in organization theory (‘organizational improvisation as jazz’, ‘organizational behaviour as theatre’, ‘organizational identity’, ‘organizational learning’, ‘organization as chaos’ and ‘organization as evolution’) and were asked to evaluate the impact of these metaphors in terms of advancing new insights or models and facilitating communication about organizations. In the initial proposal, I mentioned the use of experiments for this purpose rather than a quasi-experimental survey method. Through the insights from the other stages of the research on how metaphors are understood in actual settings of language use, I deemed it more important to use a method that would connect with scholars’ actual understandings of metaphors-in-use (rather than simulate such understandings in an experiment) and their perceptions of the impact of these metaphors on organization theory and the determinants of that impact.

5. Conducting in-depth qualitative studies of academics, managers and enterpreneurs to provide an interpretive understanding of how and why they use metaphors in their talk about organizations. As intimated above, I aimed to gather contextual and interpretive data on how academics use and understand a particular metaphor-in-use, the ‘organizational identity’ metaphor, which I gathered through participation in workshops and in the community of scholars working with this metaphor supplemented with email exchanges. For the groups of managers and enterpreneurs, I decided to follow an inductive approach whereby I identified metaphors that emerged in their talk about their organziations and different events or incidents within their jobs


(rather than a deductive approach where I search for their use of a particular metaphorical expression). I conducted in-depth interviews with senior communication managers talking about their organizations and incidents in their jobs. I addition, I collaborated with a PhD student at Leeds on the identification and analysis of metaphors in video-taped interviews of enterpreneurs giving speeches and meeting with stakeholders.

6. Disseminating the findings to appropriate academic, business and student related audiences. I consider the dissemination activity overall to have been exemplary, judged in terms of the publications to a range of academic stakeholders, keynote speeches at practitioner conferences and gatherings and a dedicated project website. Full details of each of these activities are provided in greater detail below.

MethodsThe research consisted of three stages:

Phase I – Linguistic analyses of a compiled academic corpus of texts and of the British National Corpus. The academic corpus consists of 4250 journal articles extracted from 23 business and management journals containing 1,291 metaphorical word combinations or expressions with 7,129 mentions over the period 1989-2003. The corpus extracted from the British National Corpus involves 3100 samples of talk about organizations; expressions featuring a Fortune 500 company name with three sentences of context. This phase of the research was expanded from my original proposal to include a linguistic analysis of a corpus of texts beyond the academic corpus.

Phase II – Survey of academics’ understanding of metaphors and their perceived impact.The link to the on-line survey was emailed to 2678 academics in business and management researching in ‘strategy’, ‘human resources’, ‘organization theory’, ‘organizational behaviour’, ‘business and information technology’ and ‘management’ at 102 business schools in the United Kingdom that are accredited as members of the Association of Business Schools (ABS). It resulted in 250 fully completed and usable responses.

Phase III – In-depth qualitative research with academics, managers and enterpreneurs.This involved a series of interviews with academics in the ‘organizational identity’ community through participation in a workshop (EGOS 2004) and email exchanges. I conducted 15 in-depth interviews with senior communication managers. In addition, I collaborated with a PhD student at Leeds on the identification and analysis of metaphors in 3 video-taped interviews of enterpreneurs giving speeches and meeting with stakeholders. The general idea of this phase of the research was to obtain rich, interpretive insights on the use of metaphors across these different settings of language use; and to link contextual and local instances of metaphor use to the more global approach adopted in the linguistic analyses and the survey.

ResultsThe key insights of the project can be summarised as follows:


1. The pervasiveness of metaphors. The linguistic analysis of the academic corpus demonstrated that metaphors are pervasive in academics’ theoretical language about organizations where they serve the purpose of ordering and clarifying existing ideas and understandings of organizations or actually consitute an interpretive scheme or model for interpreting organizations. The survey and the in-depth qualitative interviews with managers also highlighted the ‘cognitive unconscious’ (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999) development and use of many metaphors; they are often developed and used without any explicit or reflective awareness of how metaphors work or of the fact that a construct like ‘organizational identity’ is indeed metaphorical in its meaning. For example, the in-depth interviews with academics who have been working with the ‘organizational identity’ metaphor in different social communities (e.g., organizational behavior, strategy, organizational communication, discursive psychology) have imported this metaphor into their theorising and understand this metaphor in different ways because of the background assumptions and resident knowledge of the community involved (Journal of Management Studies, 2006). However, across all of these academic communities scholars are not explicitly aware that the organizational identity construct is metaphorical in its meanings and in the inferences that it produces. This finding suggested the need for a theoretical framework that brings the development of metaphorical thinking in theory building into the cognitive realm and is operational enough for scholars to use as part of their theory-building (Organization Studies, 2006). General users of the English language, managers and enterpreneurs also use metaphors extensively in their talk about organizations; typically for pragmatic reasons within their talk to illustrate or enforce an argument. Within the linguistic analysis of the BNC I found that expressions involving a company name are often metaphorical and that a large group of these metaphorical expressions followed a metaphor-from-metonymy pattern, where an expression develops a meaning through metonymy (a part-whole or whole-part substitution), a meaning that is then mapped metaphorically onto another domain or cues a further metaphorical interpretation (e.g., expressions such as “BP announced…” may cue a metaphorical interpretation of a company as a human agent, which follows from a metonymic substitution where the company name stands in for all of its members or for a specific spokesperson). I found very little evidence for expressions that followed a metonymy-within-metaphor pattern, which occurs when “a metonymically used entity is embedded within a (complex) metaphorical expression” (Goossens, 1995: 172). This finding challenges the orthodox view in organization theory where metonymies are seen to rely upon metaphors and are therefore often seen as a subclass of metaphor (e.g., Morgan, 1996). The importance of metonymies, as a kind of compression, in the role and understanding of organizational metaphors is thus important and one that has been incorporated into the general theoretical framework of the study (Organization Studies, 2006). The in-depth interviews with communication managers and entrepreneurs established that these two groups use metaphors extensively for pragmatic or rhetorical reasons within their talk with the exception of novel and complex incidents or events in their job, where


they mobilise metaphors for interpretive reasons. Such incidents and events are triggers for a heightened process of sensemaking (e.g., Weick, 1995); where professionals have to think harder or have to rethink their views and shift between interpretations (Louis and Sutton, 1991). They do so through an active and heightened use of metaphors in one or more utterances of their talk which allows them to think through novel, complex or changing elements of the incident or event that they are experiencing. This finding has important implications for research on sensemaking and managerial cognition and adds to a growing body of social constructionist research on the ability of managers to create and shape their own environments (e.g., Weick, 1995; Rindova and Fombrun, 1999). It adds to this research by drawing attention to the role of metaphorical imagination in managers’ sensemaking of and responses to events and stakeholders within and around the organization.

2. The determinants of the selection, retention and impact of metaphors.Using the academic corpus of texts, I explored different explanations for the selection and retention of metaphors in organization theory. The starting point of this research was the understanding that certain metaphors, such as seeing an organization as a machine, have had a lasting impact on organization theory, whereas other metaphors have had little impact and have since been ignored. Specifically, I developed and tested the proposition that the development, selection and subsequent retention of metaphors within organization theory is not an unconstrained process. Rather, I hypothesised that metaphors are found ‘apt’, create strong and meaningful imagery, and are more likely to be developed, selected and retained in the following circumstances: (1) when they relate concepts from distant semantic domains (the between-domains distance principle); (2) when the correspondence between the target and the source concepts is conceived as more exact (the within-domains similarity principle); (3) when the source concept that is referred to the target is concrete (the concreteness principle); and (4) when the nature of their commonality is relational rather than attributive (the relational principle). I found significant results for the link between aptness and the selection and retention of metaphors and found that the within-domains similarity and between-domains distance principles significantly contribute to the aptness of a metaphor, to a greater extent than the concreteness and relational principles. These findings provide an explanation for the direction and state of the body of knowledge in organization theory insofar as it is underpinned by metaphorical thinking, and are incorporated into the theoretical framework of the study (Organization Studies,2006). The paper with the empirical results is currently being revised after a second round rejection at Academy of Management Journal. I subsequently decided to explore the question in the survey of whether the same two main determinants of the selection and retention of metaphors; i.e. the between-domains distance and within-domains similarity principles, also accounted for their perceived impact in terms of facilitating or enhancing communication about interpretations of organizations or of generating a useful insight into organizations. I asked academics at UK business schools to rate different metaphors-in-use (‘organizational improvisation as jazz’, ‘organizational


behaviour as theatre’, ‘organizational identity’, ‘organizational learning’, ‘organization as chaos’ and ‘organization as evolution’) in terms of their impact on theory building. I then examined whether, and to what extent, these metaphors had helped in clarifying and advancing their understanding of organizations. The results indicated that the ability of a metaphor to advance and clarify theoretical understandings of organizations is based upon (1) the degree to which that metaphor is seen to capture multiple salient features of organizations and (2) the ease with which the metaphor is understood. In contrast with the linguistic analysis of the academic corpus, the survey suggested that the between-domains distance of a metaphor does not determine the perceived impact of a metaphor; perhaps because a ‘close’ distance between a domain such as theatre or jazz on the one hand and organizations on the other may already lead to meaningful and effective metaphorical comparisons (BritishJournal of Management,2007).

3. The differences between novel and conventional and basic and complex metaphors. When I compared the linguistic analysis of the academic corpus with the in-depth interviews of managers and enterpreneurs it appeared that academics often actively construct complex metaphorical thought that is made up of smaller metaphorical parts whereas practitioners tend to use instances of basic and conventional metaphors that are part of our everyday language. A basic metaphor is the most basic metaphorical description of a target domain and has a minimal structure. Complex metaphors are formed from basic ones through further conceptual blending and elaboration, that is, the fitting together of small metaphorical “pieces” into larger wholes (Cornelissen, 2005). Basic metaphors in managerial and entrepreneurial talk include common metaphoric patterns such as ‘organizations are containers’ (e.g., expressions where the preposition in cues a metaphorical interpretation of an organization as a container) and ‘more is up’ (e.g., as in the expression “sales are up this year”). In contrast, academics construct elaborate metaphorical schemes such as the contingency theory of organizations which cues a view of an organization as an adaptive ‘agent’ who can ‘move’ and ‘act’ and change its ‘form’ or ‘structure’ in response to an ‘environment’; which involves a whole series of basic metaphors that are combined together into a more complex metaphorical image. One important reason for this difference is that the use of metaphors across these contexts of language use and genres of talk is very different. In the scientific genre of business and management metaphors are often used as constitutive ‘models’ to “explore” and “extend” thought and are combined together into more complex modes of reasoning, whereas in the professional genre of business and management metaphors have often more pragmatic or illustrative uses and may not be elaborated into more complex modes of thought (Organization Studies, under review, see also Skorczynska and Deignan, 2006).

4. The embodied basis of many basic and complex metaphors. An important result which emerged from the three stages of the research is that for a metaphoric conceptualization of organizations or of job-specific incidents to arise there must be a connection between elements of distinct conceptual representations or domains (Cornelissen, 2005). Such a connection is often


based on a perceived or constructed correspondence between the target domain of organizations and a source domain that relates to our embodied experiences as human beings (that is, human motor action in the sense of bodily movements, the physical senses, the bodily manipulation of physical objects and the felt experience of bodily engagement with objects). For example, the basic metaphor of ‘more is up’ as in “sales are up this year” involves a straightforward correlation between two domains: as objects or substances accumulate in greater quantities, their level often rises. This correlation is grounded in our embodied experience of observing or feeling a rise and/or fall of levels of piles and fluids as more is added or subtracted. Similarly, complex metaphors in organization theory such as seeing an organization as a an adaptive ‘agent’ who ‘acts’ and ‘adapts’ (that is, ‘moves’) in relation to the changing ‘surroundings’ (which is a complex metaphor that is central to institutional theory, contingency theory, complexity theory, the resource-based view and capability theories of the firm) are grounded in embodied experience; in this case involving an imaginary instance where one considers what it may be like (as an organization) to move one’s body in a certain way and what it must feel like to act upon the ‘surroundings’ in a certain manner (Organization Studies, under review).

Activities The principal dissemination activities are summarised below:

Construction of a dedicated website for the main study with background papers, published articles and a metaphor search engine that retrieves the frequency of particular organizational metaphors over the period 1989-2003: http://lubswww2.leeds.ac.uk/metaphors/

Dissemination of the metaphor analysis methodology through a paper (second round with Academy of Management Journal) and a dedicated website (part of the ESRC METNET project sponsored by the UK National Centre for Research Methods) which contains materials on metaphor analysis in spoken and written discourse: http://creet.open.ac.uk/projects/metaphor-analysis/index.cfm

Special track on metaphor at the European Group of Organization Studies (EGOS) conference in Bergen (2006), jointly organised by Dr Joep Cornelissen (Leeds), Professor Cliff Oswick (Leicester), Professor Nelson Phillips (Imperial) and Professor Lars Christensen (Odense).

Papers of the study presented to academic colleagues at the British Academy of Management conference (2005), EGOS (2006), Researching and Applying Metaphor Conference (2006), Beyond Knowledge Management Conference (2006) and at Warwick Business School (2007), Tanaka Business School (Imperial College) (2007), HEC Paris (2007), CSO (Sciences-Po) Paris (2007) and Manchester Business School (2007).


Workshops with doctoral students ( Manchester Metropolitan University, Leeds University Business School, the Sixth International Conference on HRD Research and Practice Across Europe) on ‘theory construction as disciplined imagination’ based on the theoretical framework developed in the study.

Seminar presentations to practitioners; keynote speeches on metaphors and sensemaking of communication managers at the 1st Hellenic Corporate Communications Conference (250-300 senior managers; keynote speech alongside Alistair Campbell, former Director of Strategy and Communications, Prime Minister’s office) April 2006, at the annual conference of the Swiss Association of Communications and Media Research, March 2007 and at the European Council on Corporate Communications of the Conference Board, February 2006; presentations at the Reputation Institute’s 9th and 10th

International Conference, May 2005 and May 2006.

Publications in professional magazines (‘What about the stakeholders?’, Communication Director, January 2007; and (in Dutch) ‘Best practices bestaan niet’, Communicatie, 2006, 37-39)

Contribution to capacity building activities in the sector; “Reflections on writing a small grant application”, invited presentation at British Academy of Management (BAM)/Advanced Institute of Management (AIM) workshops on ESRC grant writing, London (November 2005 and 2007) and Manchester (November 2006); “Writing and publishing”, invited presentation at AIM Fellows’ careers workshop, London, June 2006 and BAM/AIM workshop on Advanced Journal Publishing, Durham, October 2005 and October 2006.

OutputsMy strategy has been to engage with four groups in the dissemination of the results: (a) academics within business and management, and particularly in the area of organization theory; (b) leading social scientists who study metaphors in spoken and written data; (c) practitioners (managers, entrepreneurs) across different organizations, and (d) students who study organizations as part of an advanced post-graduate degree in business and management or the social sciences. Initially, I sought to generate debate around my preliminary theoretical framework and initial empirical results, and engage with the academic business and management community. My conference activity in 2006, publications during 2005 and 2006 (see below) and the organization of a track at EGOS were the means of engaging with this group (‘a’). Once the majority of the linguistic analyses were completed, I engaged with leading social scientists who study metaphors. I became one of the founders of the Metaphor Network (METNET); a group of social scientists and linguists from the UK, the US and continental Europe who (through further support from the ESRC) developed a generic methodology for metaphor analysis in the social sciences. My own methodologies played a key part in the development of the generic methodology. The generic methodology has been used to train social scientists and training materials are available from the website. Through my involvement in


METNET and through a presentation at the Researching and Applying Metaphor (RAAM) conference (2006) I communicated effectively with leading social scientists (‘b’). My attention then focused on engaging managers and entrepreneurs in business with my research findings and the implications (group ‘c’), which was done through presentations to professional bodies and professional groups and through articles in professional magazines. So far, this has involved engagement with communication managers, which flowed naturally out of the qualitative part of the study, but I am now turning to managers in other functional areas and entrepreneurs in terms of drawing out lessons for them. I currently have a short paper under review at MIT Sloan Management Review, a journal that is widely read by managers worldwide. Within my original plan, I anticipated writing a research monograph on the project but instead have decided to produce a series of more targeted outputs (see list below) for an academic audience (groups ‘a’ and ‘b’) and a general text on organizational metaphors for post-graduate students (group ‘d’). I have a contract with Sage for a book provisionally entitled ‘Organizations: New metaphors and images for understanding organizations’ which will incorporate the main results from the study but will be written as a ‘mainstream’ text that can be read by students on post-graduate business and management and social science degrees. The text will be delivered in the summer of 2008.

Publications

2005

Cornelissen, J.P., Kafouros, M., and Lock, A.R. (2005), “Metaphorical images of organization: How organizational researchers develop and select organizational metaphors”, Human Relations, 58 (12), 1545-1578.

2006

Cornelissen, J.P. (2006), “Making sense of theory construction: Metaphor and disciplined imagination”, Organization Studies, 27 (11), 1579-1597 (lead article).

Cornelissen, J.P (2006), “Metaphor in organization theory: Progress and the past”, Academy of Management Review, 31 (2), 485-488 (invited commentary).

Cornelissen, J.P. (2006), “Metaphor and the dynamics of knowledge in organization theory: A case study of the organizational identity Metaphor”, Journal of Management Studies, 43 (4), 683-709 (lead article).

2007

Cornelissen, J.P., Haslam, S.A. and J.M.T. Balmer (2007), “Social identity, organizational identity and corporate identity: Towards an integrated understanding of processes, patternings and products”, British Journal of Management, 18, S1-S16.


Cornelissen, J.P. (2007), “Metonymy and metaphor in language about organizations: A corpus-based study of company names”, Journal of Management Studies, in press.

Cornelissen, J.P., and Kafouros, M. (2007), “Metaphors and theory building in organization theory: what determines the impact of a metaphor on theory building?”, British Journal of Management.

Under review and in preparation

Cornelissen, J.P. and Kafouros, M., “On the origins of organization theory: Primary metaphors and primary scenes in theorizing about organizations”, second round at Organization Studies.

Cornelissen, J.P., “Metaphors as the site and substance of sensemaking”, second round at Academy of Management Journal.

Cornelissen, J.P., “Enacting imagined worlds: experience and imagination in the face of novelty and complexity”, Strategic Management Journal, under review.

Cornelissen, J.P. and Pitt, L.F., “Experience and imagination in the face of novelty and complexity”, under review at MIT Sloan Management Review.

Cornelissen, J.P., and Kafouros, M., “Images of organization: A cognitive linguistic analysis of conceptual metaphors in organization theory”, currently being revised after a second round rejection at Academy of Management Journal.

Cornelissen, J.P., Organizations: New metaphors and images for understanding organizations. London: Sage, in preparation.

ImpactsProminent scholars in business and management underlined the value of the study with their support. Karl Weick, the Rensis Likert Distinguished University Professor of Organizational Behavior and Psychology at the University of Michigan Business School wrote to me and said that the study’s theoretical framework does “a great job of summarizing the core notion of ‘disciplined imagination’” in theory construction and “has helped me rethink how I work”. Gareth Morgan, Professor of Organizational Behaviour and Distinguished Research Professor at York University noted that the framework “really pulls the research on metaphor together” and cites it in the current version of his best-selling Images of Organization (Sage, 2006) as an “excellent” illustration of how metaphors work and generate emergent understandings of organizations.

On reflection, I believe that these comments from prominent scholars in organization theory provide an important benchmark against which the project can be judged. The results of the study are published or forthcoming in leading international journals and the emerging theoretical framework has reinvigorated debate on the role of metaphor in organization theory as evidenced by the exchange between Cliff Oswick and Philip Jones


and myself in the Academy of Management Review (2006), by the specialised track at EGOS and by the Special Topic Section that is linked to the track and is forthcoming in Organization Studies (2008). Besides a strong academic impact, the project also engaged with managers through various media (conferences, professional gatherings and professional magazines). I ensured that the findings were targeted at senior communication managers in the UK and continental Europe and am now aiming to disseminate the results with an international group of senior managers through a short paper in MIT Sloan Management Review. Finally, the results and materials from the project are destined to reach current and future students (who may go on to become managers, entrepreneurs or academics) through my forthcoming text Organizations: New metaphors and images for understanding organizations and through reference to the theoretical framework in Morgan’s best-selling text Images of Organization.

I conclude that the study has had a high level of impact academically and on business thinking, thereby fully justifying my original application, the design of the research and the dissemination strategy.

Future Research Priorities If metaphors are central to our understanding of organizations and events within them – as the study has demonstrated – then at least three issues need to be addressed in future research. First, it will be important to conduct further linguistic analyses of metaphors in spoken and written academic and professional texts as well as further qualitative studies of managers in functional areas other than communications to corroborate, extend and/or challenge the main results of the study. Second, it will be important for academics to discuss methods of metaphor analysis within business and management research and the social sciences more generally. Third, there is scope for further applied research on how and why managers and entrepreneurs use metaphors to make sense of and adapt to novel and complex circumstances affecting their firms. It is hoped that the present project will provide a stimulus to such work.

I have begun to address the last two of these issues through participation in the METNET programme of developing protocols for metaphor analysis and of training social scientists in such protocols. The current series of METNET workshops ended in 2006 and will be written up into an edited book with training materials. I am addressing the third area through supervision of an ESRC CASE doctoral studentship part-funded by the Chartered Institute of Public Relations which focuses on sensemaking of communication managers. Once this is completed, it is my intention to submit a large grant proposal to the ESRC for a project designed to extend this line of work to different groups of managers with different functional backgrounds and working across different industries.

(4,882 words excluding references)


References

Cornelissen, J.P. 2005. Beyond compare: Metaphor in organization theory’. Academy of Management Review 30: 751-764.

Goossens, L. 1995. Metaphtonomy: The interaction of metaphor and metonymy in expressions for linguistic action. In L. Goossens et al. (eds.), By word of mouth: Metaphor, metonymy and linguistic action in a cognitive perspective: 159-174.

Lakoff, G., and Johnson, M. 1999. Philosophy in the flesh. New York: Basic Books

Louis, M.R., and Sutton, R.I. 1991. Switching cognitive gears: From habits of mind to active thinking. Human Relations, 44 (1): 55-76.

Morgan, G. 1996. Is there anything more to be said about metaphor?. In D. Grant and C. Oswick (eds.), Metaphor and organizations: 227-240. London: Sage.

Morgan, G. 2006. Images of organization. Beverly Hills, CA: Sage, updated second edition.

Rindova, V., and Fombrun, C. 1999. Constructing competitive advantage: The role of firm-constituent interactions. Strategic Management Journal, 20 (8): 691-710.

Skorczynska, H., and Deignan, A. 2006. Readership and purpose in the choice of economics metaphors. Metaphor and Symbol, 21: 87-104.

Weick, K. E. 1995. Sensemaking in Organizations. Thousand Oaks, CA: Sage.


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ESRC END OF PROJECT REPORT - Amazon S3 · 2015-09-08 · ESRC END OF PROJECT REPORT ‘METAPHOR, THEORY AND THE EVOLUTION OF KNOWLEDGE ON ... their patterns of use over the 15 year