Conceptual Metaphors: a review with implications for human understandings and systems practice

We provide an overview of metaphor theory and explore implications for systems practice by building on claims that metaphors are central to our ways of understanding. As stakeholders will have different understandings, each metaphor will reveal and conceal different aspects of their understandings. These differences need to be accommodated within systems practice. Our contribution in this paper is to show how metaphors can explain, appreciate and create different understandings. Further, new understandings can emerge from considering different metaphors

Metaphor and Theological Realism

In this paper, I argue that there are indispensable and irreducible metaphors in religious language and that this does not threaten a realist interpretation of religion. I first sketch a realist theory of religious language and argue that we cannot avoid addressing the problems metaphor poses to semantics. I then give a brief account of what it means for a metaphorical sentence to be true and how metaphors can refer to something even if what they mean is not expressible in literal terms. Finally, I discuss how this realist theory of metaphor influences our understanding of negative theology and gives a new perspective on religious pluralism

Metaphors of mindfulness

This critical comparison of Morgan’s (2006) ‘Images of Organization’ and Hanh’s (2013) ‘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

Teaching Metaphors: Supporting Professional Growth and Shaping Teacher Identity

A phenomenological study was conducted to further a better understanding, and inquire a new awareness, on how metaphors can support professional growth and shape teacher identity for early childhood education students. Examining teaching metaphors might be another strategy for teacher preparation programs to help early childhood education students in identifying their pre-existing values about teaching and learning. Teaching metaphors may guide students to reflect on values and beliefs that make an important impression on their individual teaching journey

Inheriting library cards to Babel and Alexandria: Contemporary metaphors for the digital library

Librarians have been consciously adopting metaphors to describe library concepts since the nineteenth century, helping us to structure our understanding of new technologies. We have drawn extensively on these figurative frameworks to explore issues surrounding the digital library, yet very little has been written to date which interrogates how these metaphors have developed over the years. Previous studies have explored library metaphors, using either textual analysis or ethnographic methods to investigate their usage. However, this is to our knowledge the first study to use bibliographic data, corpus analysis, qualitative sentiment weighting and close reading to study particular metaphors in detail. It draws on a corpus of over 450 articles to study the use of the metaphors of the Library of Alexandria and Babel, concluding that both have been extremely useful as framing metaphors for the digital library. However, their longstanding use has seen them become stretched as metaphors, meaning that the field’s figurative framework now fails to represent the changing technologies which underpin contemporary digital libraries

Metaphors in Cognitive Linguistics

The first part of the article offers an historical overview of metaphors, starting from Aristotle and the classical definition of metaphor. Chomsky's contribution to cognitive psychology is also mentioned together with Rosch’s and Kay and McDaniel’s research concerning categorization. The end of the first part contains new theories of metaphor, thus establishing the link to the second part, which presents the last three decades regarding metaphors in cognitive linguistics, trying to highlight the revival of studies on metaphor. The pervasiveness of metaphors cannot be overlooked in human understanding, and the classical debate is also mentioned (dead versus live metaphors). Our conclusion is that they offer an insight into our everyday experience and may help us in exploring the unknown

From metagenomics to the metagenome: Conceptual change and the rhetoric of translational genomic research

As the international genomic research community moves from the tool-making efforts of the Human Genome Project into biomedical applications of those tools, new metaphors are being suggested as useful to understanding how our genes work – and for understanding who we are as biological organisms. In this essay we focus on the Human Microbiome Project as one such translational initiative. The HMP is a new ‘metagenomic’ research effort to sequence the genomes of human microbiological flora, in order to pursue the interesting hypothesis that our ‘microbiome’ plays a vital and interactive role with our human genome in normal human physiology. Rather than describing the human genome as the ‘blueprint’ for human nature, the promoters of the HMP stress the ways in which our primate lineage DNA is interdependent with the genomes of our microbiological flora. They argue that the human body should be understood as an ecosystem with multiple ecological niches and habitats in which a variety of cellular species collaborate and compete, and that human beings should be understood as ‘superorganisms’ that incorporate multiple symbiotic cell species into a single individual with very blurry boundaries. These metaphors carry interesting philosophical messages, but their inspiration is not entirely ideological. Instead, part of their cachet within genome science stems from the ways in which they are rooted in genomic research techniques, in what philosophers of science have called a ‘tools-to-theory’ heuristic. Their emergence within genome science illustrates the complexity of conceptual change in translational research, by showing how it reflects both aspirational and methodological influences

Using root metaphors to analyze communication between nurses and patients: a qualitative study

Metaphors in communication can serve to convey individuals' backgrounds, contexts, experiences, and worldviews. Metaphors used in a health care setting can help achieve consensual communication in professional- patient relationships. Patients use metaphors to describe symptoms, or how disease affects them. Health professionals draw on shared understanding of such metaphors to better comprehend and meet patient needs, and to communicate information that patients can more easily integrate into their lives. This study incorporated a theoretical framework based on four worldviews,each with an underlying foundational metaphor (root metaphor). The use of these root metaphors (formism, mechanism, contextualism, and organicism) can have an explanatory function and serve to impart new meanings, as each type of metaphor can lead to a particular interpretation. The study aimed to extract and discuss the root metaphors, with a view to analyzing the communication between health professionals and patients

Through Their Own Words: Towards a New Understanding of Leadership Through Metaphors

This paper suggests that metaphors are essential to understanding leadership. Metaphors can serve as underlying, organizing structures of leadership thinking and experience, and they can be mobilized in order to accomplish interpersonal goals. The literature on leadership abounds with metaphors, such as leadership as game, sport, art, or machine. The multitude of leadership metaphors used by authors and leaders alike appears determined by a complex interplay of personal, situational, and cultural factors. However, analysis of leadership interviews indicates that these metaphors center on experientially significant nuclei of meaning. By examining the entailments of leadership metaphors on such dimensions as highlighted and hidden leadership aspects, or the suggested relationship between leader and follower, metaphor analysis allows the exploration of leadership conceptualizations on an experiential level. An exploratory grid presents possible entailments of selected metaphors on important dimensions of leadership. We propose that the study of leadership metaphors can provide valuable lessons to leaders. For example, effective leadership may require a rich and situationally attuned metaphorical vocabulary. Leadership metaphors carry implicit suggestions about values—what is good, what should be done, and how—and may also allow for new insights into the ethics of leadership

Creation's Persistent Voice: Critiquing the Secondary Status

Christianity struggles with the concept that nature/creation is truly revelatory of God, and not merely confirmatory of theological conclusions derived from special revelation or deduced from rational reflection. The result is a stilted and narrow conversation between theology and the natural sciences, with the contribution of creation to knowledge of God being limited to certain well-worn paths. If theology is willing to hold a full-fledged conversation with the natural sciences, it may just find that new metaphors and conceptions of God arise that illuminate our understanding of God in ways that scripture alone cannot. Such conversations must be characterized (on both sides) as serious and tentative, with conclusions never considered to be final, but always open to further conversation as new paradigms emerge