ABSTRACT
Until the 1980s, coupling professional management and metaphor would seem to risk drawing Dr Johnson's indictment of metaphysical poetry as “the most heterogeneous ideas … yoked by violence together”. But an interest in metaphor has become evident in management and organization theory, if not amongst managers themselves. Of particular importance has been the work of Gareth Morgan (1980, 1983, 1986) culminating in Images of Organization. Morgan's work not only opened up a different way of looking at organization, but also drew attention to the ever-present working of metaphor in our thinking. While he has been criticized for a relativism that ignores relations of domination in the workplace, threatening to turn organization theory into a “supermarket of metaphors” ( Reed, 1990), it is clear that being alert to metaphors not only allows us to see essential features of existing organizations, but also to explore different possibilities. Thus Kenneth Gergen (1992: 207) can ask: “Why do we find it so congenial to speak of organizations as structures but not as clouds, systems but not songs, weak or strong but not tender or passionate?”
