GOOGLE AND METAPHORS

Google and Metaphors

Google and Metaphors

Introduction

A corporation's organizational culture plays a fundamental role in its success. Google Inc. is a company that can certainly demonstrate this idea. By having such a swift and reliable search engine on the web, Google must be doing something right with their employees to accomplish such a feat. When it comes to maintaining employee satisfaction, Google seems to spare no expense. The organization supplies workers with multitude of benefits and provides them with “an extremely relaxed workplace that encourages creativity through fun activities” that involves teamwork. This emphasis on team achievements contributes to the overall success of the company and also forms a sense of family-bond in the workplace. Additionally, Google also provide workers with chef-prepared food, a gym with state-of-the-art equipment, haircuts, dry-cleaning, free on-site doctor and dentist, and free high-tech shuttle busses (Mintzberg, 2001, pp. 64-81).

Organization as a brain

Morgan makes two important distinctions. The first distinction is between two different notions of rationality, and the second involves two contrasting uses of the "brain" metaphor. Mechanistic or bureaucratic organizations rely on what Morgan calls "instrumental rationality", where people are valued for their ability to fit in and contribute to the efficient operation of a predetermined structure. Morgan contrasts this with "substantial rationality", where elements of organization are able to question the appropriateness of what they are doing and to modify their action to take account of new situations. Morgan states that the human brain possesses higher degrees of substantial rationality than any man-made system (Minsky, 1998, pp. 198-227).

Morgan also observes a common trend to use the term "brain" metaphorically to refer to a centralized planning or management function within an organization, the brain "of" the firm. Instead, Morgan wants to talk about brain-like capabilities distributed throughout the organization, the brain "as" the firm. Using the brain metaphor in this way leads to two important ideas. Firstly, that organizations are information processing systems, potentially capable of learning to learn. And secondly, that organizations may be holographic systems, in the sense that any part represents and can stand in for the whole (Merton, 2002, pp. 560-568).

Brian and culture

The first of these two ideas, organizations as information processing systems, goes back to the work of James March and Herbert Simon in the 1940s and 1950s. Simon's theory of decision-making leads us to understand organizations as kinds of institutionalized brains that fragment, routinize and bound the decision-making process in order to make it manageable.

According to this theory, the organization chart does not merely define a structure of work activity; it also creates a structure of attention, interpretation and decision-making. Later organization design theorists such as Jay Galbraith showed how this kind of decision-making structure coped with uncertainty and information overload, either by reducing the need for information or by increasing the capacity to process information (Drucker, 2000, pp. 45-53).

Two Metaphors

Nowadays, of course, much of this information processing capacity is provided by man-made systems. Writing in the mid 1980s, Morgan could already see the emergence of the virtual ...