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Diverse and often unacknowledged assumptions underlie the use of metaphors in the organizational change literature. This diversity is symptomatic of broader ontological and epistemological conflicts within organization theory. To gain a critical awareness of the assumptions underlying their use of metaphors, organizational analysts can use a reflexive approach. This approach entails addressing four issues: representation. enunciation, separation. and routinization. The organizational change literature is used to illustrate the implications of this approach for future research.
IAN PALMER
RICHARD DUNFORD
A developing area of organization theory is one in which researchers use metaphors to understand organizational situations and problems (Bolman & Deal, 1991; Frost, Moore, Louis, Lundberg, & Martin, 1991; Morgan, 1986, 1988; Quinn & Cameron, 1988).1 Machine and organism metaphors first dominated (Morgan, 1980), and they were followed by a proliferation of metaphors, including cultures, political systems, brains and psychic prisons (Morgan, 1986), jazz bands and missionaries (Akin & Schultheiss, 1990), clouds and songs (Gergen, 1992), soap bubbles (Tsoukas, 1993), and strategic termites and spider plants (Morgan, 1993).
Metaphors have been applied to the analysis of a variety of organizational practices including decision making (Connolly, 1988), leadership (Bensimon, 1989), organizational change (Lundberg, 1990), organization development (Akin & Schultheiss, 1990), human resource development (Marx & Hamilton, 1991), policy (Dobuzinskis, 1992), strategy (Peters, 1992), information technology (Kendall & Kendall, 1993), organizational culture (Brink, 1993), organization design (Tsoukas,1993), and production management (Garud & Kotha,1994). However, this spread of metaphorical analyses has not been accompanied by a consistent view on how metaphors should be used to analyze organizations. A range of competing positions exists about how metaphors should be applied. These positions, and the theoretical and methodological implications associated with them, often remain unacknowledged by organizational analysts.
To illustrate this situation, in the first section of this article, we take one of the above-mentioned organizational fields (organizational change) and examine different ways in which metaphors have been applied to it. This examination prepares the ground for our argument in the second section that these different approaches reflect deeper divisions within organization theory about the application of metaphors. In the third section, three existing strategies for dealing with these divisions are outlined and critiqued. In the fourth section, we argue in favor of adopting a reflexive position as a...