This paper introduces the Icehotel, the world's first and largest hotel to be constructed entirely of ice and snow, as a unique and generative organizational trope. As a trope, it both supplements and complements Morgan's seminal book "The Images of Organization" and generates unique insights with regard to surprise, unifinality, purity, eco-coreness, and rebirth. The Icehotel also serves as a lens for examining organizations through each master trope, i.e., metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Evidence of metonymy in language describing the Icehotel is presented. The case for synecdoche is made by arguing that the Icehotel is a species of two genera, i.e., temporary organizations and paradoxical organizations. Also, the Icehotel not only is paradoxical (e.g., that is, a form of irony), but also generates four other paradoxes, namely, the ways that organizations are evolutionary yet revolutionary, negative as well as positive, different yet similar, and unsustainably sustainable. The Icehotel also exemplifies serious play (Beech et al., 2004;Gergen, 1992), a particular approach for managing paradoxes. Finally, the paper discusses implications for research and practice.Key words : Icehotel, organizational trope, metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, irony, paradox, serious play. A metaphor is a figure of speech that takes one thing (referred to as the source domain) and equates or overlaps it with another thing(the target domain) for rhetorical effect, thus highlighting the similarities between the two (Alvesson, 1994;Ramsay, 2004). It is one of the four main rhetorical tools identified by the ancient Greeks, the other three being logic, facts, and narrative (Ramsay, 2004). It is generally agreed that it is impossible to avoid using metaphor in organization studies (Oswick et al., 2004;Ramsay, 2004), and consequently the field, possibly more than any other scientific discipline, abounds with metaphors (Doving, 1996). Of all the works in this burgeoning research stream arguably the most seminal and influential has been Morgan's Images of Organization (1986). Metaphor, however, is closely related to the other three master tropes, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony (i.e., figures of speech that use words in nonliteral ways; Manning, 1979). In fact, recent work that uses metaphor to generate organizational theory incorporates features of multiple tropes (Cornelissen, 2008;Oswick et al., 2004). This paper follows suit by examining an off-spring or intermediate organizational metaphor, the Icehotel, as it exemplifies multiple tropes. It thus responds both to Morgan's (2011: 466) call "to explore the possibilities of finding new (metaphors)" and the call in this Special Issue "to extend the images used in current organization theory." All Morgan's (1986) metaphors are root or deep metaphors, which determine centrallyimportant features of the idea or object being examined (Schon, 1993;Sternberg et al., 1993).However, Oswick and Grant (1996: 217) make the case for intermediate metaphors which "have more than...