Exploring Morgan’s Metaphors

Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies

Anders Örtenblad, Kiran Trehan, Linda L. Putnam, Anders Ortenblad, Kiran Trehan, Linda L. Putnam

• Publisher: SAGE Publications, Inc
• Year: 2016
• Print ISBN: 9781506318776
• eBook ISBN: 9781506318790
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

Gareth Morgan's monumental book, Images of Organization, revolutionized the field of organization theory. In honor of Morgan's classic text, this edited volume, Exploring Morgan's Metaphors: Theory, Research, and Practice in Organizational Studies, illustrates how Morgan's eight metaphors inform research, practice, and organizational intervention in a variety of contexts. Including contributions from well-known experts in their fields, specifically, Joep Cornelisen, Cliff Oswick, David Grant, Hari Tsoukas,  and Gareth Morgan, this new text offers fresh perspectives and sets forth new metaphors for conceptualizing organizations in today's workforce. Readers will gain insights and guidelines into the different ways that Morgan's metaphors and metaphorical thinking can be used to better understand organizational life, as well as how to study and develop organizations.

PART I Making Sense of Images of Organization

1 Introduction From Theory to Application of Metaphor in Organizational Analysis

Linda L. Putnam

Anders Örtenblad

Kiran Trehan

Most scholars would agree that Gareth Morgan’s book Images of Organization has made a major impact on organizational studies (Morgan, 1986). It has been 30 years since the first publication of the book. During that time, Images of Organization has been cited over 15,496 times (Google Scholar, 2015) and was translated into 14 languages (Morgan, 2015). For the English-language versions alone, the first edition sold over 250,000 copies (Oswick & Grant, 2015) and the 1996 and 2006 editions sold more than 100,000 copies (Maggie Stanley, Sage, August 2015, personal communication). In addition, Morgan has produced two substantial revisions of the book (Morgan, 1996a, 2006), a book on imagination (Morgan, 1993), and a special edition for executives (Morgan, 1998). As Case et al. note later in Chapter 12, “it is nothing short of an organizational tour de force.”

This edited volume pays tribute to Gareth Morgan and his seminal contribution of Images of Organization. As Grant and Oswick (1996, p. 11) noted on the 10th anniversary of this book, “It remains a highly influential piece doing exactly what it sets out to achieve—encouraging new ways of thinking and seeing organizations.” Not much has been written about the ways that scholars and practitioners use Morgan’s book for theory development, research, and practical reflection. This volume aims to fill this gap by providing specific exemplars of how contributors have applied Morgan’s metaphors to research, theory, and organizational analysis. Its overall aim is to help practitioners, theorists, and students employ Morgan’s book for critical evaluation and for ways to see organizations differently. To this end, this introduction offers a brief summary of Morgan’s Images of Organization, explores uses and critiques of this book, highlights recent developments on the evaluation of metaphors, and offers an overview of the chapters in this volume. As a companion to Images, the preface suggests ways that chapters in this volume could be used in conjunction with Morgan’s book.

Overview of Morgan’s Images of Organization

Images of Organization (hereafter referred to as Images) was first published in 1986 and grew out of Morgan’s work on the links between organizational theories and the fundamental assumptions on which they were based (see Morgan, 2011; reprinted in Chapter 2 of this volume). As Morgan (2011) points out in Chapter 2 of this volume, he came to the idea of metaphor by reflecting back on his co-authored book, Sociological Paradigms and Organizational Analysis (Burrell & Morgan, 1979), particularly how a given metaphor or theory sometimes locks scholars into narrow assumptions about the nature of organizations. As he began to “run with the idea” of “theory as metaphor,” Morgan developed Images not simply as a set of different lenses for viewing organizations but to explicate the philosophical foundations for generating knowledge and analyzing complex organizations (Jermier & Forbes, 2011).

Metaphor then is a process that drives knowledge generation as well as puzzle solving. Defined as a way of understanding one situation in terms of another, metaphor asserts that A is like B by transferring information from a well-known source to a relatively unfamiliar target. When we say that an organization is like a sports team, we transfer information from what we know about sports teams (e.g., competitive, winners and losers, strives to outdo the other side, makes end runs) to a particular organization as the target.

Yet, as Morgan (1986) explicitly contends, metaphor yields only partial insights in that it accents some features while it distorts others; for example, a sports team may also create stress and anxiety among members in terms of “making the team.” The typical use of a sports metaphor rarely captures the psychological aspects of this image; hence, features remain hidden in the background. In this way, the use of metaphor is inherently paradoxical in that it promotes both seeing and not seeing (Morgan, 1996b).

Thus, to uncover hidden features, Morgan (1986, 1996a, 2006) adopts a pluralistic approach that includes multiple metaphors—each of them simultaneously revealing while concealing the nature of an organization. In this way, he presents a different model of knowing and exploring complex organizations. Consistent with this stance, Morgan (2011, p. 467) treats “organizations [as] multidimensional, socially constructed realities where different aspects can coexist in complementary, conflicting, hence paradoxical ways.” Therefore, he views puzzle solving about issues and developing knowledge about organizations as stemming from the dynamic interplay of multiple perspectives—comparing and contrasting, challenging, critically assessing, and deeply reflecting on the metaphorical foundations of the field (Jermier & Forbes, 2011).

Consistent with this foundation, Morgan (1986) sets forth eight images of organizations that function as root metaphors. Each metaphor embodies its own concepts and images that could splinter and develop into categories and submetaphors as ways to broaden or deepen organizational understanding. In effect, each metaphor is robust, encompasses its own vocabulary of images, and brings into focus particular features of an organization. The eight metaphors are machines, organisms, brains, cultures, political systems, psychic prisons, flux and transformation, and instruments of domination.

1. The machine metaphor highlights efficient production through focusing on inputs and outputs, organizational design, and routinized procedures. It covers organizational theories such as classical management, bureaucracy, and scientific management.
2. The organism metaphor casts an organization as a living system by focusing on life cycles, species, ecology, birth and death, adaptation, and survival. It encompasses open systems theory, contingency theories, population ecology, and evolutionary theories of organizations.
3. The brain metaphor centers on the learning capacities of organizations by emphasizing information processing, cognitive functioning, right and left brain functioning, memory, and holographic images. It embraces cybernetics, learning theories, and information theory.
4. The culture metaphor underscores values, beliefs, symbols, norms, and shared meanings and treats organizations as accomplishments that are socially constructed.
5. The political systems metaphor aligns organizations with governance systems, interest-based needs, conflicts, gender and race, and power. This metaphor draws on stakeholder theories, control theories, resource dependency, uncertainty, and boundary management perspectives.
6. The psychic prisons metaphor highlights the unconscious, psychological states, anxiety, and defense mechanisms. It embraces psychodynamic views of organizing, Freudian theory, paradoxes and traps, and patriarchy.
7. The flux and transformation metaphor accents process, flows, logics of change, circular patterns, and self-production. It includes chaos and complexity theories, mutual causality, feedback loops, and dialectical theories.
8. The instrument of domination metaphor highlights exploitation, alienation, class systems, and organizational control, and it draws from Marxist and critical theories.

The appeal of Images resides not only in its philosophical foundations but also in its rich tapestry of examples, innovative images, and alignments of abstract and concrete explanations. Consistent with the interplay of perspectives, each chapter ends with a review of the strengths and limitations of that particular metaphor. Each one also emphasizes what that metaphor does in the process of theorizing and how it produces partial, conflicting, and distorted insights about organizations. In doing so, Morgan (2011) has cast both problem solving and theory construction as dialectical processes that make us uncomfortable with our taken-for-granted views and leads us to expand our horizons.

Uses and Critiques of Images of Organization

To this end, scholars and practitioners have used Morgan’s Images in a wide variety of ways, including analysis, reflective thinking, mapping th...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Publisher Note
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Brief Table of Contents
• Detailed Contents
• Foreword
• Preface
• About the Editors
• About the Contributors
• PART I Making Sense of Images of Organization
• 1 Introduction From Theory to Application of Metaphor in Organizational Analysis
• 2 Reflections on Images of Organization
• 3 Morgan’s Legacy in Theorizing and Understanding Organizations
• PART II Using Metaphors in Organizational Analysis
• 4 Approaches to Using Metaphors in organizational analysis Morgan’s Metaphors and Beyond
• 5 Viewing Organizations as Enablers of Happiness
• 6 Combining Metaphors to Understand New Organizational Phenomena
• 7 Exploring Metaphors of Leadership
• 8 Developing Metaphors in Light of the Visual and Digital Turns in Organizational Studies Toward a Methodological Framework
• Part III Reflections, Commentaries, and Constructive Critique
• 9 Imagination and the Political Use of Images
• 10 Organization as Affect Moving on Metaphorically
• 11 The “Metaphor” Metaphor Educating Practitioners for Reflective Judgment
• 12 Of Tropes, Totems, and Taboos Reflections on Morgan’s Images From a Cross-Cultural Perspective
• Glossary1
• Index