Regarding the recent message from John Zavacki on the difficulty of using
the concept of metaphor in management education:
I just used Gareth Morgan's list of 8 metaphors for organization in the
introductory lectures of a course in Environmental Management (Master's
level) here at Lund University. It confused the hell out of the students,
most of whom have technical, science, and legal backgrounds. Saying that
we see organizations as fundamentally different "things" depending on our
points of reference, and that this plurality of images should be used
consciously by researchers and managers to avoid being trapped by what we
otherwise take for granted, resulted in a debate which became rather
hostile at times. Some charged that I was "wasting their time" with
"philosophy that is only relevant to academics." Some of the irritation
seemed to have something to do with the fact that I could easily relate
language which they used in the discussion to various metaphors (e.g.
"top-down," "chain of command,") - which was experienced as a kind of
verbal entrapment by a language they had never heard before but which was
somehow nasty because it was "only about language," while deeper down "we
all know what we're talking about" when we discuss thinmgs like
organizational structure.
The emergence of irritation and anger in practitioners when confronted by
the postmodern, interpretive paradigms is itself a very interesting
subject. It has been 17 years since Burrell & Morgan's seminal book -
what is going on?
Best Regards,
Ralph Meima
-- Ralph Meima <ralph.meima@fek.lu.se>Department of Business Administration School of Economics & Management Lund University Box 7080 220 07 Lund, SWEDEN
Tel. +46 46 222-9485 / alt. 222-0243 Fax. +46 46 104437 / alt. 222-0300