MORGAN METAPHORS OF ORGANISATION

Morgan Metaphors of Organisation

Morgan Metaphors of Organisation

Introduction

Nowadays, creativity and innovation are most required in organizational management. Leaders must stimulate ideas and potential solutions from every level of their organizations. Morgan proposed the diversified images of the organization through various metaphors which lead both theorists and managers to get deep insight and new intuitive in considering organizations. He suggested the following images of organization which are like: 1) Machine, 2) Organism, 3) Brain, 4) Culture, 5) Political system, 6) Psychic prison, 7) Flux and transformation, and 8) Instruments of domination. Morgan has explored and developed the arts of reading organizations out and offered us to comprehend the conflict and complexity of organization. His basic concepts of organization and explanation of organizational life relies on the foundation of metaphorical description. By different ways of thinking, we can thus see different natures of various organizations which have their own conflict, complexity and ambition of organizational life. Understanding organizations through Morgan's metaphors allow us to manage and design organizations in ways that we may not have thought they're possible before (Morgan, 1993,, 12).

Morgan Metaphors of Organisation

The importance of metaphor in the development of the discipline is to recognize how metaphor can open up new ways of thinking and seeing. Therefore, we should understand metaphor and through it to read and highlight the aspects of an organization. However, the problem is that metaphor is potentially incomplete, bias, and misleading. How do we use this inherently paradoxical metaphor to create powerful insight and become skillful to shape the situations that we want to organize and manage? What is the theoretical stance we deal with the pervasiveness and fundamental nature of metaphor? Whose theories have influenced our concepts of metaphors? How do we integrate the theory of metaphor? Morgan (2006) distinguishes eight kinds of metaphor for organizations: machine metaphor, organism metaphor, brain metaphor, culture metaphor, political metaphor, psychic prison metaphor, flux and transformation metaphor, as well as domination metaphor. Each metaphor highlights other aspects of organizational life. According to Morgan (2007), there are at least four strengths for the use of metaphors in the organizations: (Morgan, 1993,, 12).

(a) Directing attention to the symbolic significance of almost every aspect of organizational life; (Morgan, 1993,, 12).

(b) showing how organization ultimately rests in shared systems of meaning, in the actions and interpretive schemes that create and re-create that meaning;

(c) encouraging us to recognize that the relations between an organization and its environment are also socially constructed, and

(d) making the contribution to our understanding of organizational change. It all about how we use the creative insights to generate by metaphor and create new ways of understanding organization, the impact of metaphor on the way of thinking, language, systems of scientific and everyday knowledge.

Psychic Prisons

The image of 'organizations as psychic prisons' expressed the characteristic of organizations that is more abstract. In this metaphor, an organization is viewed as a place where its members fall down into their own 'traps' of thinking and ...