In chapter 19 the section regarding metaphors made a lot of sense to me. I have used metaphors to help my son understand what I am trying to explain to him and it works. I didn’t realize that ethnographer’s widely used metaphors as a starting place for assessing meaning in the corporate culture. It is easier for me to understand as well. Griffin (2009) describes a metaphor, “Clarifies what is unknown or confusing by equating it with an image that’s more familiar or vivid” (p. 253). It makes sense to use a metaphor to describe features of a corporate culture. Describing the corporate culture using metaphor’s, that those you are communicating with can relate too, can assist in the process of the intended message being sent and the receiver comprehending the message in the way it was meant to be interpreted. They will get the big picture.
3 comments:
Your thoughts on metaphors are great, I completely agree. When people try to grasp a concept and can relate it to a broader, all encompassing metaphor, their understanding will be much easier.
I like your idea of using metaphors to explain certain situations to your son, I'm sure I will do the same thing as my son gets older.
I totally agree with you on the fact that metaphors really do help people understand concepts a lot easier. I remember when I was about ten years old, I was watching an NFL game in which a referee called a penalty on a player that committed unnecessary roughness. I didn't understand why he had been called a penalty on, but my father later clarified that for me by comparing it to a flagrant or technical foul in the NBA in which a player acts inappropriately within the rules and regulations of the game. This definitely helped my understanding.
DJ Q posted about metaphors as well, and it's something I discuss when I teaching COMM 144, Organizational communication. While metaphors are useful, they also can hide as well as illuminate. For example, when we think of organizations as instruments of domination, then we only focus on the ways in which organizations dominate our lives, rather than the more positive aspects of organization. Similarly, the metaphors organization members use to describe their organizations suggest to researchers the aspects of organization members focus on and what they might be ignoring.
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