Understanding Organizations through Embodied Metaphors

Organization Studies · 2008 · Volume 29 · Issue 1

Abstract

We outline the dominant, positivist approach to conceptualizing and researching organizations through multi-level research that views levels as independently existing, hierarchically nested entities, and problematize this view by offering an alternative approach based on embodied realism. We operationalize this approach through a study of three organization development workshops where organizational actors constructed artifacts we label embodied metaphors. We propose that analysis of embodied metaphors can enable access to actors' first-order conceptions of organizational levels and related organizational dimensions and reveals alternative qualities and interrelations among them; can support a clinical approach to organizations; provides a window to organizational, divisional or task identities; and poses substantial challenges to established conceptions of ontology and method in organization theory.

Keywords

embodied metaphors, embodied realism, organizational levels

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