Metaphors and the Cultural Context of organizing

Abstract

When the linguistic turn reached organization studies, it manifested itself in the first place by the interest in metaphors. The crucial role of these tropes for theory building was emphasized, and their place in the very process of organizing was highlighted. In this paper, I attempt to nuance these findings by showing more complex aspects of the use of metaphors in everyday organizing efforts. In the first place, metaphors do not only aid organizing, but also hamper it, as shown on the example of introduction of a rapid tram in the center of Rome. This mundane process of a traffic innovation has been flooded in metaphors by the massmedia who, however, were all along helped by the organizational actors. The result was an undue dramatization of the event, which made the operation of the tram unnecessarily problematic. The second point is, that such tendency to "metaphor abuse" and dramatization is a part of the cultural context of organizing, as illustrated by contrasting the way in which similar event in Stockholm was portrayed by the Swedish media. Italian rhetorical tradition contrasts visibly with the Scandinavian tendency to pragmatism and understatement. The case reported in the paper and its readings are meant to explore further ways of applying insights of language and literature theory to further understanding of the increasing complexity of organizing processes