According to recent cognitive science, our perceptive senses help develop human cognition, and the process of organizing our inner representations of the world around us. As a result, conceptual metaphors are deemed to be essential to our understanding of abstract entities; how we perceive an organization depends for instance on what metaphor is used to describe it. Thus, conceptual metaphor theory has been given a lot of attention in the past thirty years. The Metasaga philosophy was established on the Shetland Islands in 2008. The idea is for participants to explore the environment and create reflective questions involving metaphors which can be used for reflective purposes in connection to work, school, businesses or other organizations. In this paper, linguistic metaphors involving organizations in 228 reflective questions were studied. The linguistic metaphors were sorted according to which organization conceptual metaphor they appeared to belong to. A broad category called Organization Is Physical Structure was set up, and the name was taken from Joseph Grady’s list of primary metaphors in Lakoff and Johnson (1999 pp. 50-55) Four sub-categories of organization metaphors were subsequently established: Organization Is An Artificial Structure, Organizational Help Is Support, Organization Is A Plant and Organization Is A Living Creature. Almost 55 % of the reflective questions involving organization shared the common theme of a description of an organization as some kind of artificial structure. Thus, it seems likely that we often think of organizational arrangement as some kind of concrete structure and also that we use different metaphors depending on how the organization is structured.
| Identifer | oai:union.ndltd.org:UPSALLA1/oai:DiVA.org:su-53410 |
| Date | January 2010 |
| Creators | Josefsson, Emil |
| Publisher | Stockholms universitet, Engelska institutionen |
| Source Sets | DiVA Archive at Upsalla University |
| Language | English |
| Detected Language | English |
| Type | Student thesis, info:eu-repo/semantics/bachelorThesis, text |
| Format | application/pdf |
| Rights | info:eu-repo/semantics/openAccess |
| Relation | Stockholm studies in English, 0346-6272 |
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