From Virtual Organization to E-Business: Transformational Structuration

Virtual Organization Structures

After Lakoff and Johnson (1980) established the academic foundation of metaphors, scholars have used them in business literature. As discussed in his latest publication, Lackoff (2001) declared that even mathematics originated from metaphors of our consciousness. As we accepted theorems and axioms in geometry as a given without any reservations (Reichenbach, 1958), our languages in academic world fundamentally started from our concepts and these concepts are produced, reproduced, and transformed (Giddens, 1984) by our scholarly processes from insight, analogy, isomorphism, and finally to scientific model (Beer, 1984). The problem lies in how we use the metaphors to analyze and interpret the phenomenon a researcher wants to investigate. In organizational studies, metaphors have been used continuously (Palmer, 1996; Gibson et al., 2001; Pentland, 1995; Gioia et al., 1984; Garud et al., 1993; Lennie, 1999) after Morgan (2006) ignited the modern use of metaphors. There have been arguments on how to use metaphors in organization study and some even claimed the inappropriate use of metaphors in the field (Tinker, 1986; Bourgeois et al., 1983).