‘Our iceberg is melting’: Story, metaphor and the management of organisational change

Abstract

This article offers two contrasting readings of the business novel Our iceberg is melting: Changing and succeeding under any conditions (J. Kotter and H. Rathgeber. 2005. Basingstoke: Pan Macmillan), which was written to advocate Kotter's approach to organisational change management. The orthodox reading draws on the modernist paradigm which assumes that organisational change can be actively managed. This reading analyses how the structure, themes, tropes and metaphoric representations employed in the book reinforce its underlying message. It assumes that readers will accept this message and adopt the advocated change management approach. The alternative reading is more critical. It questions the idealistic representations of characters' roles and behaviours, and demonstrates how organisational actors may subvert the book's story and metaphoric representations to resist change. This article demonstrates through the two readings that story and metaphor as tools to facilitate organisational change open up space for differing interpretations, which may not match the authors' intent. It concludes that story and metaphor can reinforce a book's underlying message, but that their ambiguity and interpretative flexibility always allow for unintended, dissenting and potentially subversive interpretations.

Death metaphors and factory closure

“…Firstly, although previous studies have shown that analysing metaphors is a way of exploring the multiple, contested, and pluralistic meanings of organizational life (Cazal and Inns 1998;Reissner, Pagan, and Smith 2011;Spicer and Alvesson 2011), little attention has been paid to how metaphors can be used to make sense of multiple meanings in the context of organizational death. This article provides a systematic attempt to analyse the metaphorical underpinnings of organizational members' enactments of the closure of a factory, thus contributing to our understanding of the multiple and contested meanings organizational members' create in the context of organizational death.…”

“…The domains-interaction model is a particular perspective on metaphors that emphasizes this type of blending and projecting of two domains of meaning. It is through the interaction of domains within metaphors, between similarities and differences such as death and organization, that the construction of meaning becomes creative and emergent (Cazal and Inns 1998;Cornelissen 2005;Cornelissen et al 2008;Reissner, Pagan, and Smith 2011;Spicer and Alvesson, 2011). In this way, metaphors are also used in particular in organizational life to make sense of complexities and multiple meanings (see e.g.…”

Transported: New Zealand non-profit organizations, digital platforms and the limitations of metaphor

“…Like Inns (2002) and Chia (1996), I recognize the elusive as well as the allusive power of metaphor. Metaphors are certainly political and interested, but they are also multivalent, presenting an interpretative flexibility that may escape their producers’ control (Reissner et al, 2011). While readers (or organizational employees) may ‘unpack’ a text in multiple ways, this article aims to illuminate the ways in which metaphors may shape the understanding and limit the expectations of even the deployers of a given metaphor.…”

Nikos Kazantzakis’s phenomenology and its relevance to the study of organizations

“…A conceptualization of metaphors needs to account for entitative but also process-like qualities (Weick 1979;Weick and Sutcliffe 2001;Weick 2003). However, such an investigation needs to account for greater nuances behind the flow of human experiences (Reissner, Pagan, and Smith 2011), which can explain the interpretation of tensions that develop from the human accommodation of content and process properties.…”