Making Sense of Subjective Experiences with Metaphors

Abstract

In this paper, we seek to understand how metaphors facilitate sensemaking by providing a focused, detailed, and comprehensive account of how they help practitioners surface and convey subjective experiences. Our study, inspired by a phenomenological perspective, draws on 32 interviews with film workers narrating their work experience. We show how film workers used and combined different types of metaphors in a dynamic way to communicate their experiences in four steps––naming (using dead body metaphors), specifying (using conventional body metaphors), singularizing (using novel body metaphors), and fictionalizing (using a novel professional metaphor). With our study we extend prior sensemaking research by theorizing the various roles that metaphors play, above and beyond their ability to facilitate understanding. Specifically, we offer three novel insights on metaphors: we explain how some types of metaphors help sensemaking by redistributing agency; we theorize the retroactive power of metaphors––i.e., how the use of metaphors affects the utterer in return by highlighting some of their qualities. Finally, we explain how, by fostering imagination, metaphors allow people to transcend subjectivities.