Root Metaphor Research Articles

Metaphor, morality and legitimacy: A critical discourse analysis of the media framing of the payday loan industry

This study examines the metaphors used in the British press to characterize the payday loan industry in order to develop our understanding of organizational delegitimation. Drawing on critical discourse analysis and theories of moral panic, we show how the metaphors used in the press framed the industry as a ‘moral problem’. The study identified four root metaphors that were used to undertake moral problematization: predators and parasites, orientation, warfare and pathology. We show how these metaphors played a key role in the construction of a moral panic through two framing functions: first by constructing images of the damage and danger caused by the firms and second by attributing agency in such a way that moral responsibility was assigned to the organizations. We also extend the discussion of our findings to explore the ideological dimensions of the moral panic. We develop a critical analysis that points to the potential scapegoating role of the discourse, which served as a convenient moral crusade for the government and other neo-liberal supporters to pursue, while detracting attention away from the underlying socio-economic context, including austerity policies, the decline in real wages and the deregulation of the finance sector. From this critical perspective, payday loan companies can be seen as a ‘folk devil’ through which society’s fears about finance capitalism are articulated, creating disproportionate exaggeration and alarm, while the system as a whole can remain intact.

GENESIS 2:24 AND THE NEW COVENANT: A PROFOUND MYSTERY

Ephesians 5:31–32 articulates the root metaphor of New Testament marital imagery. The profound mystery is that the “one flesh” marital affinity union of Genesis 2:24 is how the new covenant fulfills the Abrahamic promise and brings the elect of “all the nations” into union with Christ. Thus, a sensus plenior is read into Genesis 2:24 that foreshadows redemptive history.

‘By our metaphors you shall know us’: The ‘fix’ of geographical political economy

This paper traces the transformative travels of the metaphor of the ‘fix’ across the unbounded terrain of geographical political economy. It argues for taking the fix seriously as a root metaphor of the field, a signifier of its history and theory-cultures. Critically excavating the entwined genealogies of the metaphor and the field, it illuminates several historically successive and thematic moments of ‘fix thinking’, including: the spatial fix (1980s); institutional and spatio-temporal fixes of regulationist-theoretical approaches (1990s); and the scalar fix of state rescaling theory (2000s). It reviews these stages and their broader intellectual and political implications for critical geographical scholarship.

Asset, liability, possibility

PurposeThis analysis draws on interviews with 19 self-identified US diversity consultants and 94 diversity statements posted on corporate websites. The findings challenge existing literature that characterizes the business case for diversity as monolithic and wholly problematic for the way it constructs understandings of human difference. The authors accomplish this using metaphor analysis to demonstrate how business case arguments incorporate three metaphorical systems for thinking and speaking about human differences – as asset, as liability and as possibility. Given this diversity of metaphors, the business case does not construct human difference in a monolithic way, but in a variety of ways that both challenge and sustain problematic treatments of difference. The authors argue scholars and practitioners should attend to these nuanced difference within the discourse of the business case, and more carefully consider how these metaphorical systems both enable and constrain the design and execution of diversity work in organizations. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe analysis draws on two data sets: initial interviews with 19 self-identified US diversity consultants analyzed using metaphor analysis. To triangulate findings, the metaphorical framework was applied to 94 diversity statements posted on corporate websites.FindingsBusiness case arguments operate according to three root metaphors of human difference: human difference as asset, human difference as liability and human difference as possibility. This challenges existing literature that treats the business case as a monolithic discourse.Research limitations/implicationsThis analysis offers the three metaphorical system and highlights the “constrained capacity” of each. This framework offers an analytical and practical tool for scholars and practitioners, enabling them to more thoroughly understand and respond to their unique organizational and socio-historical context. It also provides a way to analyze how concepts of difference are mobilized across social and historical contexts.Practical implicationsThe findings offer the “constrained capacity” that is, the strategic limitations and possibilities for practitioners who use the business case in their diversity work. This enables more skilled and ethically informed diversity initiatives.Social implicationsThe findings offer insight into the subtle ways that hierarchies of human difference embedded in US history are subtly reinforced and made present through language. This enables social justice workers to better challenge problematic constructions of human difference and create new understandings when needed.Originality/valueThis piece makes two significant original contributions to existing literature. It offers more nuance to both critical and uncritical analyses of the business case by showing the diversity of business case assumptions about human difference as demonstrated in three different metaphorical systems and highlighting the constrained capacity of three different metaphorical systems. It offers unique analysis grounded in contemporary discourses, but correlated to historical systems of thought. This enables empirical identification of how certain types of thinking about human difference move across socio-historical contexts.

After retrotopia? The future of organizing and the thought of Zygmunt Bauman

The main body of work of Zygmunt Bauman concerns his home discipline of sociology, but his insights have been influential also in the field of organization studies. In this text, we provide an overview of the extent of this influence, providing some additional context for positioning the other contributions to this special section. Afterwards, we explore in more detail two notions central for Bauman’s late thought: that of liquidity and retrotopia. The former constitutes the root metaphor for theorizing the current global predicament. In this text, we analyse how two modes of interpreting it, using the assumptions behind Kurt Lewin’s CATS model and the alchemical tradition underpinning Carl Gustav Jung’s conception of archetypes respectively, can help us theorize the alternative modes of organizing and managing encountered in a study of contemporary alternative organizations.These insights form the starting point for our second goal: to explore Bauman’s notion of retrotopia as a potentially fruitful starting point for discussing both the deficiencies of current visions of our future society, and the possibilities and vicissitudes of developing new forms of organizing and managing. Such new forms, both as practice and as theoretical constructs, are urgently needed if we are to face the numerous, and potentially catastrophic global challenges facing our society today.

Stories of injustice: Towards a narrative victimology

Narrative has become a popular approach in a number of disciplines, including, recently, that of criminology. In this paper, we contend that the study of crime and harm would benefit from a complementary yet distinct perspective of narrative victimology. We discuss key characteristics that illuminate victimological experiences as inherently moral, and hence best addressed through a narrative approach. These include the attribution of intent, the experience of having harm done to oneself, and the narrative implications of being victimized, culminating in the root metaphor of victimization as a historical event. We argue why the narrative approach is particularly suited to the study victimization and its aftermath, including the interaction with justice processes and social surroundings. Suggestions for future research are included.

Crisis or Struggle? A Language of Natality as a Struggle for Education

Taking its point of departure in the connotations to war and violence inherent in what is here called the ‘language of crisis’ (Jantzen), the purpose of this article is to explore what it might mean to reassess the language of educational change and policy reform in the imagery of natality and birth (Arendt). If the task in a ‘crisis’ is to fi ght against the crisis, eff ectively and forcefully, the argument of the paper is that the root metaphors of natality and birth puts into play an imagery that makes possible a relational language for educational change and reform. If the language we use has performative consequences, the question explored is what a ‘language of natality’ can make possible as a language of struggle for education.

Framework negotiation and UX design

Framework negotiation is a mixed-methods research approach to help a UXD researchers uncover the relationship between cross-cultural identity and location. In this study, surveys initially located connections between conceptions of the self and symbolic pathways. Then, community-based research and usability testing verified root metaphors for website navigation. This mixed-methods research uncovered how Kenyans ported navigational strategies from other institutional settings. The article outlines the creation of the research instrument, describes how early data collection guided later data collection, and finally details how the methods uncovered user significance through metaphor.

The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Game ed. by Elisabeth Wesseling

Reviewed by: The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Gameed. by Elisabeth Wesseling Elizabeth Dillenburg The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Games. Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling. Ashgate Studies in Childhood, 1700-Present. Surrey, Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2016. 258 pp. Paper $54.95, Cloth $149.95. The Child Savage, 1890–2010: From Comics to Gamesseeks to understand how the child-savage trope "turned into a foundational schema of Western cultural repositories of childhood" by exploring how images of childhood circulate, transform, and persist across space, media, and time (12). Edited by Elisabeth Wesseling, this collection of thirteen chapters includes work by scholars from a variety of disciplines, including film, educational leadership and policy, cultural studies, creative arts, children's literature, media, and gender and diversity. The subjects within the volume—which range from novels and broadsheets to films and video games—reflect this disciplinary breadth. Through its in-depth analysis of the child-savage trope, the book deepens understandings of "the contradictory meanings that inhabit the construction of 'the child'" (15). The book is divided into three sections, organized chronologically. The first, and largest, section—"The Child-Savage in (Neo-)Colonial Discourse"—focuses on the circulation of the trope during the "heyday of imperialism." These chapters consider how the trope was employed to support European colonial projects and assert racial hierarchies, as in Vanessa Rutherford's chapter on how Irish educational discourse sought to highlight European superiority and Luke Springman's study of African Kulturfilmand its promise of redemption for Germans following World War I. The chapters also examine, however, how the child-savage trope could subvert colonial and racial rhetoric, a theme explored in Pascal Lefèvre's chapter on more positive representations of black people in broadsheets and silent films that sometimes even inverted the roles of black and white people, Helma van Lierop-Debrauwer's examination of how Dutch children's magazines portrayed cruelties committed by Western colonizers, Ruth Murphy's analysis of the negotiation between the unstable ideology of the child and evolutionary progression in Kipling's Just So Stories, and Bettina [End Page 263]Kümmerling-Meibauer's study of the ways Negritude literature transgressed ethnocentric, Eurocentric views. The second section—"Domestic Savages"—explores how the child-savage trope was transformed during the interwar and postwar periods, focusing on children's media in Britain and the United States. This section, like the previous one, highlights the instability of the idea and how it both idealized and demonized children. While chapters in the first section focused on its racial implications, this section examines its class dimensions in more detail. Wesseling's chapter on the orphan figure in Oliver Twistand the comic strip Little Orphan Annieand Vanessa Joosen's analysis of the figure of the child killer in novels and tabloids demonstrate how the child-savage metaphor traveled across media and time. The other two chapters in this section reflect on the possibilities—but also the discomfort—created by and reflected in new media forms. Kate Lacey's chapter on the BBC's Children's Hourand Joshua Garrison's study of exploitation films in the 1930s and 1940s show how these productions reinforced notions that young people needed to be controlled and surveilled. Like the second section, the third part—"Postcolonial Playgrounds"—examines how the signifier of the child-savage has been imported into new media forms, in this case during the digital and electronic age. Johnathan Bignell's analysis of nostalgia and constructions of masculinity in Action Man toys, Lincoln Geraghty's chapter on commodification and fan culture surrounding the Transformers, and Isabel Hoving's study of the iterations of feral children figures in children's literature and video games demonstrate the persistence of colonial techniques of domination into the present day and also draw attention to the gendered implications of the child-savage metaphor. Chapters in this section continue to analyze themes that emerge throughout the book, including the subversive potential and inherent contradictions of the child-savage trope. Each of the chapters is insightful and interesting, and together they enrich understandings about this "root metaphor" of the child-savage as well as the construction of "the...

Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept by Joseph Lam

Reviewed by: Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept by Joseph Lam Lesley DiFransico joseph lam, Patterns of Sin in the Hebrew Bible: Metaphor, Culture, and the Making of a Religious Concept (New York: Oxford University Press, 2016). Pp. xix + 308. $74. Lam explores the ancient Israelite concept of sin through a study of four "pervasive" metaphors for sin in the Hebrew Bible. Drawing on recent theoretical work on metaphor, L. endeavors to supplement previous scholarship focused on sin terminology or theological approaches to sin in the Hebrew Bible by presenting a metaphor analysis that engages the cultural implications of sin. The root metaphors utilize a variety of terms or phrases and include sin as a "burden," as an "account" of deeds, as a "path," and as a "stain" or "impurity." In chap. 1, L. provides an introduction to sin and metaphor in the Hebrew Bible, addressing some of the difficulties of Hebrew Bible scholarship on sin. Beyond an emphasis on terminology and etymology—which often obscures cultural significance and function—scholarship often concentrates on theological interpretation or tends to emphasize key texts for contemporary theology to the neglect of others. This tendency results in a loss [End Page 123] of insight into the concept sin in the Hebrew Bible. L. argues for the need to consider cultural context when analyzing these sin metaphors. He also provides a summary of theory that is not bogged down in an excessive history of scholarship but is well grounded in the relevant research (see his thorough endnotes). A reader looking for a comprehensive review of scholarship on metaphor in the Hebrew Bible might look elsewhere. L. notes the need to consider a metaphor in its context to best determine function, the need to understand the literal meaning of a phrase in order to interpret its metaphorical significance, and the distinction between "live" and "dead/dying" metaphors. L. also addresses the systematicity of metaphor and the deeper cognitive basis for the linguistic expression of metaphor, pointing to Metaphors We Live By, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (Chicago: Universitiy of Chicago Press, 1980). In chap. 2, L. approaches the metaphor of sin as "burden." While the metaphor of sin as a "burden" or "weight" has been addressed in Gary A. Anderson's Sin: A History (New Haven: Yale University Press, 2009), L. presents a detailed analysis that draws on and refines Anderson's analysis. L. addresses the term ("to lift up") in addition to other words and phrases. L.'s analysis is thorough and detailed, noting distribution, trends/patterns, function, and lexicalization. The term outside of the Priestly material, Ezekiel, and Isaiah 53 is lexicalized with a meaning of "forgive." In the Priestly material and Ezekiel, has the lexicalized meaning of "bearing" sin; here L. also addresses "physical enactments of the bearing of sin" in Leviticus 16 and Ezekiel 4. The chapter also includes a section with other passages containing the burden metaphor and passages that include other depictions of sin as a (physical) object in space. In chap. 3, L. addresses the metaphor of "accounting" sin and suggests that the force of the metaphor goes beyond the idea of debt to the lasting effects of sin; to "reckon" or "account" for something in writing (often in a divine "ledger of deeds") implies permanence. L. explores metaphors that convey the writing/inscribing and erasing or wiping (māḥāh) of sin and other relevant inscriptions outside the Hebrew Bible. Here, the metaphors elucidate the connection between writing and memory; what is written can be passed down and remembered. L. also explores metaphors for the repayment (of a balance due) or requital of sin; however, the dominant use involves God "paying back" the sinner, rather than the sinner "paying back" God. L. also explores the use of the term pāqad ("to take care of," "call to account"). Among "deviations" from the pattern, L. notes the "paying off" of one's metaphorical debt (the root rṣy); the literal making restitution for the effects of sin (restitution for theft or loss; atonement offerings); and ransoming from sin. L. argues that this pattern of metaphors depends on Yhwh...

NAMING THE HUMAN ANIMAL: GENESIS 1–3 AND OTHER ANIMALS IN HUMAN BECOMING

AbstractRecently the paleoanthropologist Pat Shipman has proposed what she calls the animal connection as the human trait that connects all other traits. Theologians and biblical scholars have proposed many relational, functional, and ontological interpretations of the image of God in humans and human nature, but have generally not included a connection with animals. Genesis 1–3, however, weaves human and animal creation in a variety of ways, and Adam's naming of other species implies they are understood as family or kin. Thus Genesis 1–3 understands a relationship with other animals as integral to human becoming and uses family or kinship as a root metaphor for human–animal relations.

Using root metaphors to analyze communication between nurses and patients: a qualitative study

BackgroundMetaphors in communication can serve to convey individuals’ backgrounds, contexts, experiences, and worldviews. Metaphors used in a health care setting can help achieve consensual communication in professional–patient relationships. Patients use metaphors to describe symptoms, or how disease affects them. Health professionals draw on shared understanding of such metaphors to better comprehend and meet patient needs, and to communicate information that patients can more easily integrate into their lives.This study incorporated a theoretical framework based on four worldviews, each with an underlying foundational metaphor (root metaphor). The use of these root metaphors (formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism) can have an explanatory function and serve to impart new meanings, as each type of metaphor can lead to a particular interpretation. The study aimed to extract and discuss the root metaphors, with a view to analyzing the communication between health professionals and patients.MethodsIn a case study in Spain over a six-month period, we analyzed the content of recorded, transcribed interviews conducted by one nurse with 32 patients who had chronic illnesses. We inductively extracted five categories that emerged from the interviews: blood sugar, cholesterol, exercise, blood pressure, and diet. We then examined these categories from the standpoint of each of the four root metaphors using two approaches: A series (deductive) and an emergent (inductive) approach.ResultsThe results show that the nurse tended to primarily use two worldviews: mechanism and formism. In contrast, patients tended to favor mechanism when discussing cholesterol, blood pressure, and blood sugar levels, whereas contextualism was predominant when the category was diet or exercise.ConclusionsThis study adds to the existing literature on health professionals and patients’ communication. It shows how the use of Pepper’s root metaphors help to analyze the communication between the nurse and patients. Furthermore, it shows they are both using different root metaphors when they are talking about illness and treatments especially regarding blood sugar, cholesterol, exercise, blood pressure, and diet. Further qualitative and quantitative studies are needed to solidly these findings.

Images of Entrepreneurship: Exploring Root Metaphors and Expanding Upon Them

Despite increasing recognition of the importance of metaphors to theory development, metaphors’ influence on entrepreneurship theorizing has been largely unexplored. This is problematic because a field’s metaphors shape its underlying assumptions. This study takes stock of the entrepreneurship field through its metaphors by analyzing a corpus of highly cited entrepreneurship articles. We identify and explain eight root metaphors for entrepreneurship—parenthood, mutagen, conduit of knowledge, method, mindset, networking, exploration, and politics—underpinning the mainstream of the field. We then extend and combine the metaphors to develop a research agenda for building on the metaphors and moving beyond them.

Imagining the Alpha male of the tourism tribe

This paper analyses how the “alpha male” of the tourism academy tribe is imagined in celebratory contexts. The tradition is interesting from a gender perspective, in that the majority of celebratory portraits found in tourism research journals are those of male scholars. Whether this is regarded as a coincidence or a consequence of the resilience of a glass ceiling, it is interesting to investigate how these “alpha males” and their academic lifeworks are described, characterized, and presented. The paper contains a quantitative description and qualitative analysis of the portraits published in Anatolia. In particular, we apply philosopher Stephen Pepper’s root metaphors of formism, organicism, mechanism, contextualism to examine how tourism research work in the world is imagined.

Turning the world to glass: poetic sensibility and the decolonization of imagination

ABSTRACTThe rupture between event and meaning has shown itself to be a key issue plaguing collective psychology. This rupture requires as remedy a poetic sensibility that can imagine the central images or root metaphors which make experience qualitatively intelligible, an imaginal literacy that reads images while also making new images from that which is presented. Bachelard’s [(1988).Air and dreams: An essay on the imagination of movement] notion of images as liberatory, disentangling one from superficial impressions by transmuting surface to depth, and Hillman’s [(1975).Re-visioning psychology] move of ‘seeing through’ the archetypal images expressed in events will serve as foundational ideas for the author’s description of poetic sensibility as the capacity to read and make images through ‘deform[ing] what we perceive’ (p. 1). The author will highlight the central function of poetic sensibility as an essential engagement of imagination required by any movement resisting the neocolonial policies and ‘inverted totalitarianism’ [Wolin, S. (2003). Inverted totalitarianism: How the Bush regime is effecting the transformation to a fascist-like state] of the corporate and political state.

Metaphor, Paradigm, and Education

Metaphor is a critical tool for thought. Lying at the heart of every systematic body of knowledge are three root metaphors — mechanism, organism, and mind. Historically, schools of philosophy — realism, naturalism, and idealism — have grown up around these metaphors. The root metaphors and their corresponding philosophies provide the paradigms underlying different exemplars of education. To illustrate how metaphors, paradigms, and exemplars all shape educational thought, the works of three educators — Hunter, Piaget, and Bruner — have been selected.

Don’t throw rocks from the side-lines

PurposeSocial media such as blogs are being widely used in organizations in order to undertake internal communication and share knowledge, rendering them important boundary objects. A root metaphor of the boundary object domain is the notion of relatively static and inert objects spanning similarly static boundaries. A strong sociomaterial perspective allows the immisciblity of object and boundary to be challenged, since a key tenet of this perspective is the ongoing and mutually constituted performance of the material and social. The paper aims to discuss these issues.Design/methodology/approachThe aim of the research is to draw upon sociomateriality to explore the operation of social media platforms as intra-organizational boundary objects. Given the novel perspective of this study and its social constructivist ontology, the authors adopt an exploratory, interpretivist research design. This is operationalized as a case study of the use of an organizational blog by a major UK Government department over an extended period. A novel aspect of the study is the use of data released under a Freedom of Information request.FindingsThe authors present three exemplar instances of how the blog and organizational boundaries were performed in the situated practice of the case study organization. The authors draw on the literature on boundary objects, blogs and sociomateriality in order to provide a theoretical explication of the mutually constituted performance of the blog and organizational boundaries. The authors also invoke the notion of “extended chains of intra-action” to theorize changes in the wider organization.Originality/valueAdoption of a sociomaterial lens provides a highly novel perspective of boundary objects and organizational boundaries. The study highlights the indeterminate and dynamic nature of boundary objects and boundaries, with both being in an intra-active state of becoming challenging conventional conceptions. The study demonstrates that specific material-discursive practices arising from the situated practice of the blog at the respective boundaries were performative, reconfiguring the blog and boundaries and being generative of further changes in the organization.

Metatheories and Metaphors of Organizational Identity: Integrating Social Constructionist, Social Identity, and Social Actor Perspectives within a Social Interactionist Model

AbstractThis review examines three dominant metatheories of organizational identity that are grounded in social constructionist, social identity, and social actor theorizing. It focuses on root metaphors of framing, categorization and personification that are associated with each metatheory and outlines differences in their assumptions, key constructs, and forms of analysis. The review shows how the emphasis of each root metaphor serves to direct research along a particular path in ways that often lead to a siloing of research knowledge. However, while laying bare the foundations of each metatheory and discussing the nature of the empirical projects by which they are supported, we also seek to draw them more closely together. In particular, we do this by elaborating an integrative social interactionist model in which organizational identity is understood to be the product of recursive interaction between bottom‐up and top‐down processes of identity consensualization and contestation.

Body and Mind in Early China and Greece

This article surveys several early Chinese and Greek representations of the self, with particular interest in relations between body and mind. I begin with Edward Slingerland’s application of recent research in conceptual metaphor analysis to early Chinese texts, his arguments on early Chinese root metaphors for self and an important study of mind-body dualism in early China. Next I introduce metaphors of mind and body in texts from technical expertise traditions that Slingerland’s survey does not cover. The last section introduces three apparently comparable sets of early Chinese and Greek metaphors: (1) analogies between mind and body and ruler and subordinates; (2) metaphors of the body as a container in which the mind is somehow contained; and (3) the notion that a person is a set of balances between constituent elements.

Jallikattu: Post-Humanistic Coefficients and Coloniality in South Asia’s Ergic Sport.

Jallikattu, a bull taming sport held during the Tamil harvest festival of Pongal, claimed national headlines at the start of this year. Mass protests erupted all over the state of Tamil Nadu against the decision of the Supreme Court of India confirming the two-year-old ban on the sport. This article unpacks stake-holder attitudes imbricated in Jallikattu through Victor Turner’s framework for processual analysis of ‘social drama.’ By following Turner’s stages for understanding significant “irregular” changes in society the article explores the potency of Jallikattu as a root metaphor for larger socio-political-juridical tensions. A possible source of these tensions lies is in what Ánibal Quijano terms ‘coloniality’ and Robert JC Young refers to as ‘deep colonialism.’ The regional location of the sport in South India resonates with Walter Mignolo’s understanding of the Global South-an entity where emancipatory and decolonial forces do not acquiesce with global designs.