Description

The introduction argues that we understand organizations through the mental images or assumptions we use to describe them. Morgan’s central idea is that no single theory can explain every organization. Different metaphors highlight different aspects of organizational life and can therefore provide different insights.

Main ideas

• Organizations are complex, so they cannot be fully understood from only one perspective.
• Managers and researchers often use metaphors to make sense of organizational situations.
• A metaphor can help us notice things that might otherwise be overlooked, but it can also distort our understanding if we treat the metaphor as the complete reality.