PurposeThis paper aims to examine how metaphors mediate organizational change across space and time.Design/methodology/approachThe 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.FindingsThe 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/implicationsThe 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 implicationsMetaphors enable managers to communicate change across time and space. Textual metaphors are continuously available and interactive, enabling dialogue between managers and staff across space and time.Originality/valueThe paper furthers our knowledge of how metaphors mediate change across both space and time. Metaphors translate the organization across distance, fusing spatial and temporal horizons, effecting organizational change by changing language. The organization becomes a metaphor of itself, recontextualising across time and space.
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 case study 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.
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.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.