Example of a metaphor

Example of a metaphor

The ‘metaphor mania’ of the last thirty years has led to a lot of research that deals with the following processes: juxtaposition, comparison, and identification of the two scopes of metaphor (i.e., the tool of thinking that is used in shaping a specific discipline), and ironically, the result of the light that has been shed on the metaphorical process. Thus, metaphor is thought to be both a tool for creating several sciences and an outcome of the way that these sciences have developed.

Example of metaphor in marketing

Metaphors are especially useful in such creative domains as marketing. One can observe a wide use of metaphors in marketing literature.

These range from the marketing ‘mix’, the ‘globalization’ of markets, market ‘segmentation’ and ‘viral’ marketing, to ‘the consumer is King’, brand ‘DNA’, and the product ‘life cycle’. This is because analogical thinking and imaginative juxtapositions predicate creativity in marketing.

Metaphors conceal as much as they reveal. You can navigate through complex, interrelated ideas using metaphors and storytelling options. When narrated in the proper form, they bring coherence and delight. Stories are a serious tool for bringing complexity to life.

They make complex issues accessible and usable for the world. The world can benefit a lot from learning more. When applied as straightforward market management tools, metaphors can even damage brands, products, and company performance by creating underlying or overarching exchanges and relationships.

Metaphors are implicit or explicit statements about the product.

Marketing metaphors can have different linguistic, visual, or symbolic components.

1. Slogans such as “Budweiser, the king of beers,” “Chevrolet, the heartbeat of America,” and “Pioneer, the art of entertainment”.

2. Brand names such as Safari (a perfume), Tide (a laundry detergent), and Fiesta (a car)

3. Visual or symbolic metaphors such as the image of nude young females in advertisements for the “Obsession for Men” aftershave

Metaphors describe abstract phenomena in concrete terms. Similarly, in marketing, the use of metaphors involves the embodiment of abstract characteristics into products and services.

However, such figurative imputations are the need of the hour in marketing. It has to be accepted that marketing literature is a rich brew of eye-catching comparisons. However, the question often asked is whether this is good or bad.

Five decades ago, the use of metaphors in marketing literature was certainly unwelcome[1]. Strunk and White[2] were the primary protectors of proper literature in this case. They warned against extravagant use of language and exuberant metaphors[3].

They considered metaphors to be unnecessary, unseemly, and unfit for use. There was a prohibition on the use of mixed metaphors, too. They advocated the use of plain prose in a true academic style, aspiring to respectable scientific status[4].

Nowadays, both marketers and marketing scholars are very active in using metaphors to achieve their objectives. They use metaphors to gain consumer attention, evoke imagery, and provoke comparisons. They make use of metaphors to explain the similarity between a product and its concept. The use of metaphor to explain a complex or technical product and influence the customer’s beliefs is not new.

Developing metaphors requires time and money. Marketers do this to achieve their objectives. Thus, it would be safe to assume that marketers benefit from customer behavior toward metaphors. They know how consumers process and store metaphors in memory. They know the understanding of metaphors by consumers. They can judge consumer preferences.

Language, with its amazing complexity of structure and rich vocabulary, is naturally the main tool people use to express their thoughts and feelings. On the market, companies that gain an advantage are those that manage to create a network based on effective cooperation between the entities involved. Thus, the ability to establish and enhance relationships with the company’s environment is becoming more and more significant, and communication plays a special role in the process of establishing these relationships.

The fact that awareness of the communication process is essential in an organizational environment is indisputable. Knowledge of the notion of communication and the whole course of the process becomes the foundation for the process of creating messages in an organization.

Naturally, when analyzing factors determining the course of communication and its effects, it would be a mistake to omit the natural limitations of the process.

As it is possible to make different interpretations of the environment around us, there is no perfect message. This is particularly true in situations when the communication process is limited to such a specific form as the message within an organization.

Aristotle considered the ability to think metaphorically, i.e., by illustrating, virtuosity. He believed that people who can see similarities between two completely different spheres and connect them must possess a remarkable gift. If two similar things are indistinguishable in one aspect, they can differ in others.

When thinking figuratively, we mostly move the area of reference, which refreshes the perspective on a given issue in an organization, and we also organize the space between the issue in question and a different field, which can lead to innovative conclusions.

Numerous studies have been conducted[5] to identify the usefulness of allegory in team activities. For example, Nambu and Harada[6] examined the relationship between the usefulness of allegory and the nature of communication channels. For this purpose, the critical aspects of selected allegories were examined. An analysis of messages that were riddles to the researcher was used[7].

According to the results, the use of analogy encouraged harmonious communication and critical thinking about individual messages of members of a given organization.

They believe that analogies aimed at describing the riddle as a whole were used to build a certain mental foundation at an early stage of critical thinking, whereas analogies describing individual elements of the imagined whole were used to describe places of particular interest at the following stages of the process of specifying the problem.

At the moment, the turn towards metaphors rooted in acts of cooperation is becoming more frequent. One can see that the managerial staff has withdrawn from the imperative of “gaining an advantage by force” and turned towards the imperative of “a helpful point of reference”.

Example of metaphor in marketing literature and Bibliography

[1] Ortony A., Metaphor, Language, and Thought, [In] Ortony A. (Ed.), Metaphor and Thought, 2nd ed., Cambridge University Press, Cambridge 1993.

[2] Strunk W., White E.B., The Elements of Style, Longman, New York, 1959.

[3] Orwell G., Politics and the English Language, [In] Inside the Whale and Other Essays, Penguin, London 1962, pp. 143–157.

[4] Ford and Carnegie reports; Brown S., Postmodern Marketing, Routledge, London, 1995.

[5] Nambu M., Harada T., Cognitive artifacts and conversation in referential communication tasks, „Cognitive Studies”, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1998, pp. 39–50; Kuriyama N., Funakoshi K., Tokunaga T., Kusumi T., Kyodomondaikaiketsuniokeru Metaphornoyakuwari (The role of metaphors in collaborative problem solving), Hituzi Shobo Publishing Ltd., Tokyo 2007.

[6] Nambu M., Harada T., Cognitive artifacts and conversation in referential communication tasks, „Cognitive Studies”, Vol. 5, No. 1, 1998, pp. 39–50.

[7] Kuriyama N., Funakoshi K., Tokunaga T., Kusumi T., Kyodomondaikaiketsuniokeru Metaphornoyakuwari (The role of metaphors in collaborative problem solving), Hituzi Shobo Publishing Ltd., Tokyo 2007.

Example of a metaphor in economics

Classic and modern economics use metaphors constantly. In economic discourse, metaphor is very common[1]. Many economic expressions, such as expansion, depression, and inflation, are metaphorical.

Nevertheless, it was only in 1982 that W. Henderson began the conversation of metaphor in economics, stressing that metaphorical analysis was scarce in economics despite its deliberate and wide use in economic texts. The 1980s then saw metaphors dragged out of the closet by Johnson and Lakoff[2], pioneers in this field. They proved that metaphorical reasoning was prevalent and stressed that metaphors were essential for humanity’s understanding. In the 25 years since Waterman and Peters’ triumph, the use of metaphors has grown stronger. Every academic that you can think of now uses metaphors[3]. This has become most prevalent in the management and business fields.

In fact, all great economists used some metaphors to explain the essence of certain processes or social phenomena.

Naturally, one of the most common metaphors in economic analysis was proposed by Adam Smith. It is the metaphor of the “invisible hand”, referring to the spontaneous order of the market economy. Another example of such an economist is J.M. Keynes, who often referred to the metaphor of the “animal instinct” when describing the activities of entrepreneurs and profiteers on the market[4].

The metaphor of an organism compares an organization to a structure characterized by a certain cycle or nature, which is born, develops, and dies. Hence, health, illness, and the human body are common source domain names in conceptual metaphors. Notably, drawing a parallel between the body and the market is old in economics. Francois Quesnay (1694–1774), an 18th-century French doctor and economist, was the first to examine the financial markets as a biological system. He associated the circulation of capital with the blood flow in the body between the organs, which symbolize the different sectors of the market. In his perspective, the stomach, which creates the blood and sends it to the heart, is represented by the agricultural laborers. Industrial workers are the lungs that keep the metabolism going and provide the body with oxygen. The landowner can be portrayed as the heart that sends out the blood, i.e., the capital of the entire organism[5].

Metaphorically, the parts or aspects of the market are comprehended as organs of the body, which can additionally separately become sick and can then change the entire body.

So long as the organs function well, the market functions well; hence, in economic terms, the general well-being of an economy is comprehended as its economic ‘health’. Nevertheless, occasionally difficulties or ailments can appear both in the function of the market as well as in the human body. In the former, medical aid is essential to healing the sick body. Likewise, there are also some dangers to economic health. The market can also suffer injuries or fall ill, and then a market can also get medical treatment—an ‘injection’ or a ‘cure’. In other words, economic measures are taken to prevent it from falling. The market, just like a patient, will recover. And if not, then the market will fail.

Now let’s see what facets and components of the body can function as source domains in the cognitive evaluation of subjective expressions used in the language of economics, finance, and business. All of these are as follows: the healthy condition of a human body; illnesses; physical, mental, and psychosomatic ailments and their concomitant effects (i.e., the symptoms of sicknesses—pain, headaches, spasms, etc.); the treatments of sicknesses (e.g., pills, medication, injections, surgery, etc.); and the healing or passing of patients. As far as the goal domains are involved, we can discuss the proper and inappropriate state of an economy, the signals of issues and issues in an economy, measures taken to solve economic issues, and the healing or failure of an economy.

The metaphor that economy is an organism shows the importance underlying the cognitive model for conceptualization of the economy as a whole.

The extension of higher-level metaphors has also been found in several lower-level metaphors. The most visible was the conceptualization of the economy as a patient with several metaphorical expressions: recovery, healthy, qualms, flu, limping or hobbling along, sweating, and depressed, among others. Charteris-Black argues that the underlying notion of conceptualizing the economy as a patient shows that the economy is a passive entity whose condition is determined by good decisions; this perception allows the economist to be a doctor or surgeon that can play a role in influencing the economy to heal (Charteris-Black).

Authors such as Adam Smith, David Ricardo, and Karl Marx used biological metaphors to explain or form economic theories[6]. Hirshleifer[7] says that the relationship between biology and economics cannot be straightforward, even though Alfred Marshall said that economics is a branch of biology, or, as Ghiseling[8] pointed out, that biology is natural economics. The French physician Francois Quesnay related economics to biological references by pointing out that in history, the natural states of the economy can be described as situations where the flow of income between economic sectors and the social ‘organs’ maximizes the net product, just as blood circulates in the human body[9].

Biology is a particularly inspiring source of metaphors and analogies in general. Naturally, such analogies are also used by business and economics, especially the current of evolutionary economics, which has been developing rapidly over the last decades. An almost classic example is a comparison of company or product development to a biological life cycle. The basic metaphor used by evolutionary economics is the biological concept of natural selection. One of the most interesting metaphors in evolutionary economics is the one proposed by A.A. Alchian, looking for ways to substitute the neoclassical concept of maximization with the biological concept of natural selection. The application of the idea of “natural selection” in the company model was first discussed by Alchian[10]. As Alchian argued, competition between companies is not determined by the motif of profit maximization but by “an adaptive, imitative, and based on trial and error search for a possibility of increasing one’s profit”[11]. This is why, in the spirit of Darwinism, “those who achieve profit survive, while those who lose are eliminated from the market”[12]. Alchian suggestively presents an analysis of companies’ behavior in a competitive environment. He states that “economic counterparts of genetic transmission, mutation, and natural selection are imitation, innovation, and profit”[13].

For instance, the flower garden is a great metaphor for looking at economic growth and income distribution. A flower’s growth depends on the individual characteristics of the flower and the seedlings. It also depends on common factors shared by other flowers in the garden (local climate, pests, the skills and diligence of the gardener, etc.), as well as particular factors and advantages that are relative to the flower. These might provide better sunlight, soil, and water in one part of the garden than in other parts. However, although there might be some interdependence, the rapid growth of a sunflower at the end of the garden largely comes at the expense of a struggling tulip. The sunflower has advantages that the tulip does not have, but the fast-growing sunflower is not in any way taking growth from the slow-growing tulip.

In the metaphor of a stock market as a bubble, bubble’ connotes the situation where the prices sometimes become higher than their actual value. It is so common in English-language business and economic articles that it can be seen as a conventional metaphor. The conceptualization of the economy as a ship, which is based on a solid systematic structure and the captain as the president of the central bank, also has the crew as the clerical assistants and the sea as the socio-economic environment of the country. Obstacles to the ship (reefs, storms) are critical situations that require the use of nautical instruments (anchors, compasses, maps) that are the bank’s various guidelines and directives. These assume that a central bank knows exactly where the ship should be heading, how the ship is working, and the effect of the crew’s actions on its course. However, it can be argued that they are working in a world where nothing is certain. When we look at recent socio-economic events, environmental consequences have brought about the downfall of many corporations.

Many times, people also draw comparisons between business and war. We see how the mappings occur in the metaphor ‘Business is War’. War carries images of battles, battlefields, military forces, headquarters, soldiers, weapons, strategies, and the outcome of the war. In cognitive terms, these are the source domains. Business negotiations, markets, business partners, strategies in business, and outcomes in business comprise the target domain. One can easily establish connections between the two domains. For instance, when you compare business negotiations with battles fought on battlefields, you draw a comparison between business representatives, bankers, and marketers with soldiers. Strategies are required in both fields. War strategies include images of military operations, formation of battlefronts, minefields, attacks, counterattacks, defense, ceasefires, etc. Similarly, in business negotiations, you can find comparisons in the representatives of different groups attacking each other and defending their positions and interests. You can draw parallels in the way they take risks and ‘redraw the battle lines’. The outcome of a war is either a victory over the enemy or a defeat. You can also come to a ceasefire agreement and reach a compromise. Similarly, business deals also end in agreements, deals, and compromises.

Example of a metaphor in economic literature

[1] McCloskey D.N., Metaphors economists live by, "Social Research", Vol. 62(2), 1995, pp. 215–238.

[2] Lakoff G., Johnson M., Metaphors we live by, Chicago University Press, Chicago, 1980.

[3] Knowles M., Moon R., Introducing Metaphor, Routledge, Abingdon 2006.

[4] Keynes J.M., Ogólna teoria zatrudnienia, procentu i pienidza, PWN, Warszawa 1985, chapter 12.

[5] Cf. Nyir S.J., Zalai E., and Nagy közgazdászok. Az ókortól napjainkig, Kossuth Kiadó, Budapest 1997, pp. 21–23; Mátyás A., Korai közgazdaságtan története, Aula Kiadó, Budapest 1992, pp. 36–37.

[6] Wyatt S., Danger! Metaphors at Work in Economics, Geophysiology, and the Internet, „Science, Technology, & Human Values”, No. 29(2), 2004, pp. 246.

[7] Hirshleifer J., Natural Economy versus Political Economy, „Journal of Social Biological Structures”, No. 1, 1978, pp. 319–337.

[8] Ghiselin M.T., The Economy of the Body, „American Economic Review, Papers and Proceedings”, No. 68, 2, 1978, pp. 233-237.

[9] Spencer B.H., Productive Nature and the Net Product: Quesnay’s Economies Animal and Political, „History of Political Economy”, No. 32(3), 2000, pp. 517–551.

[10] Alchian A., Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, „Journal of Political Economy”, No. 58, 1950, pp. 211–221.

[11] Alchian A., Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, „Journal of Political Economy”, No. 58, 1950, pp. 212.

[12] Alchian A., Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, „Journal of Political Economy”, No. 58, 1950, pp. 211-213.

[13] Alchian A., Uncertainty, Evolution, and Economic Theory, „Journal of Political Economy”, No. 58, 1950, p. 220.

Example of a metaphor in management

The development of the cultural trend in management entailed more metaphors describing organizational culture. As a result, there appeared to be clear differences between representatives of different paradigms who perceive culture in different ways.

The functionalist paradigm is dominated by metaphors of organizational culture, understood as a method for integrating members or elements of an organization.

In metaphors characteristic of this current, key values of culture, philosophy of management, and directions of organizational development are combined.

Interpreted in functionalist terms, organizational culture can be thus compared to “social glue”, “clan”, “resource”, or “compass”[1]. In the literature, the ideal is a cohesive, strong, and integrated organizational culture, which bonds the whole organization like “glue”.

In this context, it can be a source of the employee’s identification with the organization, which can increase their loyalty and create a coherent and positive internal image and unity related to the set goals and values.

Functionalists believe that culture yields control and management, depending on the needs of the organization and its managers. Thus, it is a management tool that allows for higher work effectiveness and increases employee involvement.

As organizational culture can determine the direction of the organization’s development, it can be understood as a kind of a “compass”.

In the case of non-functionalist paradigms, the metaphors of organizational culture and organization are the same. If one assumes a root metaphor, according to which an organization “is a culture and does not have culture”[2], then comparing any object to an organization entails comparing it to organizational culture.

The most common metaphors of an organization and, in consequence, of organizational culture include comparisons to a temple, theater, text, language, a work of art, acting and drama, flow, autopoiesis, and the brain. In interpretivism, metaphors focus on comparing culture to complex social processes or beings.

In the cognitive sense, metaphors within the functionalist paradigm can be accused of lacking faith in the possibility of interpreting and explaining reality. This results from the fact that these metaphors explain management processes that are difficult to interpret with the use of equally complex phenomena, such as language or the brain. On the other hand, interpretative metaphors focus on indicating complex social processes.

In the CMS current, there are many cultural and organizational metaphors connected with oppressiveness and inequality, perceived from a critical perspective.

The most popular metaphors within this paradigm include comparing an organization to a political system, ideology and totalitarianism, war and battle, psychological prison, and a tool of domination and repression[3].

It is worth noting that describing culture as “a tool of domination and repression” is commonly and often literally quoted within the critical current to describe negative aspects of control in organizations. The metaphors of the critical current are rather one-sided, and they focus on the repressiveness and control in organizations.

In the postmodern understanding, organization, and management are mostly metaphorical. In postmodernism, ideas and theories are figurative rather than literal. This is related to the fact that postmodernism refers to the “language game” and “linguistic turn” proposed by Wittgenstein.

Postmodern metaphors are mostly exploited for their literary and not cognitive meaning. Postmodernists representing radical humanism believe that literature often has a more positive influence on our understanding of the world than the strict scientific method.

As one can see, metaphors can be attributed to different paradigms. This means that the way metaphors are interpreted highlights the assumptions made and brings to mind associations and images rooted in different cognitive perspectives.

Example of a metaphor in management bibliography and literature

[1] Alvesson M., Understanding Organizational Culture, Sage, London, 2002, pp. 16–41.

[2] Smircich L., Koncepcje kultury a analiza organizacyjna, transl. Gciarz J., [In] Marcinkowski J., Sobczak J.B. (ed.), Wybrane zagadnienia socjologii organizacji. Cz II: Perspektywa kulturowa w badaniach organizacji, UJ, Kraków 1989, p. 41.

[3] Alvesson M., The Play of Metaphors, [In] Hassard J., Parker M. (eds.), Postmodernism and Organizations, Sage, London, 1993.