Business Strategy

Metaphor, Organisations and Strategy

The use of metaphors in business communications can be viewed from a

number of perspectives. For the purposes of this section, the literature is

divided into three main areas: firstly, the role and purpose of metaphors

from a linguistic perspective, secondly the use of metaphors in organisational

change, and finally the use of metaphor in competitive strategy.

metaphor: a linguistic perspective

A metaphor offers patterns of interrelationships, which are normally

nonexistent: that is, a creative metaphor is a novel and original way of

building a bridge between two different, usually separate, apparently

anomalous conceptual domains. If examined closely, they usually express

a logical inconsistency, incongruence or a contradiction (Black

1962; MacCormac 1985; Morgan 1986; Ortony 1979). It is the contradic-tions within the metaphor, which increase its value in communicating

new concepts, new visions and motivating innovation and new product

development.

Since the Lakoff and Johnson study (1980), metaphors are no longer

viewed as Socratic verbal ornamentation, a system of stylistic strategy

used to embellish speech. Linguists now believe that metaphors ‘actually

mirrored the cognitive processes that underlie abstract concepts’ (Danesi

and Perron 1999, 164). Johnson and Lakoff argue that abstract perceptions

are derived from a systematic ingestion of concrete perceptions

through metaphorical reasoning or mapping, and rename the output of

this process as conceptual metaphors. They traced the source of conceptualmetaphors

to image schemas (mental orientation; ontological thinking

and the third one, a mixture of the aforementioned two schemas),

which are defined as culture bound. A conceptual metaphor is the product

of a cultural groupthink. It produces a process of cumulative cultural

models of ideas and provides the ‘conceptual glue’ that keep a system of

culture together with a view to creating another one...