Jeff Waistell

Metaphorical mediation of organizational change across space and time

Purpose – This paper aims to examine how metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time.Design/methodology/approach – The data consist of 113 speeches by vice‐chancellors of a distance learning university, recorded in texts. Texts are apposite for this research as they transmit meaning across time and space. Hermeneutics is an appropriate methodology because it enables interpretation across temporal and spatial distance.Findings – The paper finds that textual metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time in five ways: transferring from familiarity to strangeness, providing coherence, “breaking distance” changing reality through changing language, and recontextualising.Research limitations/implications – The study focuses on formal organizational texts and excludes informal texts and conversation. Change outcomes are not studied; there should be further research on how metaphors affect change over time and space.Practical implications – Metaphors enable managers to communicat...

Metaphorical Perspectives of Organisational Values

This article explores Nietzsche’s philosophy of space, metaphor and values. It shows how metaphor generates perspectives of organisational values through both spatial content and processing. Metaphor reveals and expands horizons, creating space from one perspective and generating multiple three‐dimensional perspectives. It transports meaning across space and generates a tentative open space of understanding, a blended space that embraces diverse values. The Open University case study reveals a ‘multiversity’ that promotes multiperspectival thinking, supported by a hermeneutical space where different values can be acknowledged and respected.

Individualism and collectivism in business school pedagogy: a research agenda for internationalising the home management student

The argument presented in this paper is that todays workplaces and universities both require and promote individual and collective responsibility for work and that students need to be adequately prepared for this. UK national culture has been characterised as highly individualist. Therefore, internationalisation of home management students in the UK (and other individualist cultures) may require a rebalancing towards collectivity. Ultimately, however, the goal should be to achieve an appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism to prepare the home student to work in diverse national cultures that reflect these dimensions differently. The paper concludes with a research agenda to develop balanced curricula and pedagogy to prepare home management students for their future internationalised lives.

Can Environmental Aesthetics Promote Corporate Sustainability

Environmental aesthetics (EA) extends appreciation beyond art to the natural environment through an engagement with and sensory immersion in the natural world that privileges its aesthetic value. The purpose of this article is to ascertain the extent to which EA can promote corporate sustainability. As management scholars have only just begun to address this issue, the article reviews both management and wider aesthetics and sustainability literatures. The review concludes that EA can promote corporate sustainability but only when it is qualified by insights from ecology and ethics. There are recommendations for managers to facilitate EA and for researchers to undertake empirical studies in this field.

Incorporating mindfulness: questioning capitalism

Abstract This paper engages with Buddhist critiques of capitalism and consumerism; and it challenges the capitalist appropriations of Buddhist techniques. We show how Buddhist modernism and Marxism/socialism can align, and how Engaged Buddhism spawns communalism and socially revolutionary impulses for sustainability and ecological responsibility within the framework of Buddhist thought and mindfulness traditions. Our example of the Thai Asoke community exemplifies Buddhist communal mindfulness-in-action, explores successes and idiosyncrasies, and shows how communal principles can operate in such work-based communities.

The salience of silence: the silence of salience

Abstract This is a unique study of an almost silent and still film of the organization of silence. The film “Into Great Silence” (IGS) shows how Carthusian monks organize silence, punctuating and structuring it with recurring rituals and routines. Carthusian silence is discourse: it is their way of communicating, interacting, and sustaining their organization. The salience of Carthusian silence is that it is where they can discern divine presence. By studying IGS, the researcher overcame the challenges of access to the monastery, of studying silence, and of appraising the implicit salience of Carthusian silence. The film invites viewers to silent introspection through sound art, visual poetry, and a silent metaphorical discourse that relies on symbols. IGS utilizes reverse visual metaphor, with metaphorical images that move the audience from images to abstract territories. The researcher also reflects on his own personal experience during his stays at a Carthusian Charterhouse, when he was a novitiate candidate in the sole English Carthusian Monastery (St. Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster, near Horsham in West Sussex, England). Although he did not pursue this vocation, his two periods in the monastery left him with an indelible impression of a religious order that has not changed for nearly a millennium, and which imparted a deep awareness and appreciation of silence, solitude, and stillness. The paper draws out lessons for research and organizations.

Metaphors of mindfulness

ABSTRACT This critical comparison of Morgan’s ‘Images of Organization’ and Hanh’s ‘Work’ considers whether Hanh offers new insights and metaphors. Morgan’s legacy resides not in his images but in showing that the dynamism of organisational theorising requires the generation of new metaphors. His images transfer onto Hanh’s psychology but largely mediate different messages. This study extends Morgan’s imagery and his understanding of the role of metaphor. Morgan’s heterogeneous, archetypal metaphors proliferate epistemologies in order to theorise organisations and broaden possible actions, whilst Hanh’s more specific, vivid, prescriptive, humanistic, homogeneous and extended metaphors explicate mindfulness across epistemological, (inter)ontological and performative dimensions—mediating the message that mindfulness provides psychological insight to human interconnectedness and guides relationships at work. Hanh’s extended metaphors of mindfulness foster a deep psychological and practical understanding of organisational members as ontologically interpenetrated. His mindfulness and metaphors are complementary in that both coherently mediate and realise awareness of this.

Inter-(c)are: Höpfl and Hanh’s metaphorical mediation of intercorporeal ethicality

ABSTRACT We identify one of Höpfl’s key contributions; her metaphorical mediation of intercorporeal ethicality. Höpfl uses metaphor to communicate an ethics that is not based on cognitive, calculative and theorising rationality but is a state of being ethical that proceeds from the heart and a recognition of interconnected bodies. We direct the research question that emerges from Höpfl’s work towards that of Thich Nhat Hanh, an Engaged Buddhist leader: how does his metaphorical discourse communicate the relationship between mindfulness and intercorporeal ethicality? Our analysis reveals how Hanh employs metaphors to mediate how mindfulness provides insight to our physical interdependence and thereby promotes mutual care: realising our indivisible unity, we care for each other. Key contributions are new theories of embodied ethicality (an ethics based on interconnected bodies) and embodying metaphor (metaphors that communicate the unity, interconnectedness and interdependence of bodies that care for one other).