‘All beautiful poetry is an act of resistance’: Introducing Metaphor

Abstract

This is the first of the three chapters that explore the relevance of metaphor and metaphorical thinking to managing diversity in organisations. In this chapter I describe the theoretical framework that underpins my proposition and in the two subsequent chapters I go on to look at how these can be developed in practice. My starting assumption is that the nature of organisations, and of the functions and activities within them, can be fruitfully explored by trying to understand the way in which people use language to interpret their experiences of organisational life. To answer Gergan, I am assuming that if we prefer to speak of organisations as structures, this is because we perceive a correspondence between our idea of a structure and our experience of organisations. However, our interpretations can only ever be partial, they cannot encompass the totality of possible meanings. If we were to re-imagine our organisations as clouds, we might discover other correspondences that might help us to understand our experiences in new ways.