Jeff Waistell

This critical comparison of Morgan’s ‘Images of Organization’ and Hanh’s ‘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.

This is a unique study of an almost silent and still film of the organization of silence. The film “Into Great Silence” (IGS) shows how Carthusian monks organize silence, punctuating and structuring it with recurring rituals and routines. Carthusian silence is discourse: it is their way of communicating, interacting, and sustaining their organization. The salience of Carthusian silence is that it is where they can discern divine presence. By studying IGS, the researcher overcame the challenges of access to the monastery, of studying silence, and of appraising the implicit salience of Carthusian silence. The film invites viewers to silent introspection through sound art, visual poetry, and a silent metaphorical discourse that relies on symbols. IGS utilizes reverse visual metaphor, with metaphorical images that move the audience from images to abstract territories. The researcher also reflects on his own personal experience during his stays at a Carthusian Charterhouse, when he was a novitiate candidate in the sole English Carthusian Monastery (St. Hugh’s Charterhouse, Parkminster, near Horsham in West Sussex, England). Although he did not pursue this vocation, his two periods in the monastery left him with an indelible impression of a religious order that has not changed for nearly a millennium, and which imparted a deep awareness and appreciation of silence, solitude, and stillness. The paper draws out lessons for research and organizations.

This paper engages with Buddhist critiques of capitalism and consumerism; and it challenges the capitalist appropriations of Buddhist techniques. We show how Buddhist modernism and Marxism/socialism can align, and how Engaged Buddhism spawns communalism and socially revolutionary impulses for sustainability and ecological responsibility within the framework of Buddhist thought and mindfulness traditions. Our example of the Thai Asoke community exemplifies Buddhist communal mindfulness-in-action, explores successes and idiosyncrasies, and shows how communal principles can operate in such work-based communities.

We identify one of Höpfl’s key contributions; her metaphorical mediation of intercorporeal ethicality. Höpfl uses metaphor to communicate an ethics that is not based on cognitive, calculative and theorising rationality but is a state of being ethical that proceeds from the heart and a recognition of interconnected bodies. We direct the research question that emerges from Höpfl’s work towards that of Thich Nhat Hanh, an Engaged Buddhist leader: how does his metaphorical discourse communicate the relationship between mindfulness and intercorporeal ethicality? Our analysis reveals how Hanh employs metaphors to mediate how mindfulness provides insight to our physical interdependence and thereby promotes mutual care: realising our indivisible unity, we care for each other. Key contributions are new theories of embodied ethicality (an ethics based on interconnected bodies) and embodying metaphor (metaphors that communicate the unity, interconnectedness and interdependence of bodies that care for one other).

Environmental aesthetics (EA) extends appreciation beyond art to the natural environment through an engagement with and sensory immersion in the natural world that privileges its aesthetic value. The purpose of this article is to ascertain the extent to which EA can promote corporate sustainability. As management scholars have only just begun to address this issue, the article reviews both management and wider aesthetics and sustainability literatures. The review concludes that EA can promote corporate sustainability but only when it is qualified by insights from ecology and ethics. There are recommendations for managers to facilitate EA and for researchers to undertake empirical studies in this field.

This study investigates how business leaders dynamically narrate their aspirational ethical leadership identities. In doing so, it furthers understanding of ethical leadership as a process situated in time and place. The analysis focuses on the discursive strategies used to narrate identity and ethics by ethnic Chinese business leaders in Indonesia after their conversion to Pentecostal–charismatic Christianity. By exploring the use of metaphor, our study shows how these business leaders discursively deconstruct their ‘old’ identities and construct their ‘new’ aspirational identities as ethical leaders. This leads to the following contributions. First, we show that ethical leadership is constructed in identity talk as the business leaders actively narrate aspirational identities. Second, the identity narratives of the business leaders suggest that ethical leadership is a context-bound and situated claim vis-à-vis unethical practice. Third, we propose a conceptual template, identifying processes of realisation and inspiration followed by significant shifts in understanding, for the study of aspirational ethical leadership.

 A range of stakeholders are interested in organisational values, with demands from consumers, tradeunions and pressure groups. Organisations face the challenge of integrating employees from severalcultures and overcoming value differences. Coupled with this emphasis on organisational values thereis increasing interest in the role of discourse in constituting meaning. This research shows how textsconstitute organisational values. Hermeneutics is used to analyse the texts of the Open University andUK FTSE4good companies. The research shows that organisational values are constituted throughthree hermeneutic circles – fragmentation/integration, conceptuality/contextuality and temporality –that provide an integrated medium for interpreting values. The three hermeneutic circles are mediatedby a fourth: the tropological circle, where metaphor and homonymy fuse horizons, and synecdoche andmetonymy relate parts and whole. Both texts and tropes mediate the transvaluation of organisationalvalues across time. In recontextualising its values the organisation becomes a metaphor of itself.

The argument presented in this paper is that today's workplaces and universities both require and promote individual and collective responsibility for work and that students need to be adequately prepared for this. UK national culture has been characterised as highly individualist. Therefore, internationalisation of home management students in the UK (and other individualist cultures) may require a rebalancing towards collectivity. Ultimately, however, the goal should be to achieve an appropriate balance between individualism and collectivism to prepare the home student to work in diverse national cultures that reflect these dimensions differently. The paper concludes with a research agenda to develop balanced curricula and pedagogy to prepare home management students for their future internationalised lives.

The purpose of this article is to identify pedagogical processes that will support critical management education. It examines the underlying dialectical nature of metaphor that can be harnessed in order to encourage critical thinking in management students. The paper makes particular reference to Paul Ricoeur’s philosophy of dialectics. Gadamer argued that understanding and language have a dialogical structure; this paper contributes to the field by examining how this dialogical process is enacted through metaphor and by drawing out the implications for critical management pedagogy. The originality of the paper is its location of the debate on critical management education in the context of dialectics and metaphor. Its practical value is the identification of dialectical teaching processes that encourage criticality.

This is the second in a series of two papers by the same author on organisational values. The first paper, in the previous issue of Philosophy of Management,1 showed how senior managers interpret texts to constitute organisational values. The research showed that organisational values are constituted through three hermeneutic circles – fragmentation/integration, conceptuality/contextuality and temporality – that provide an integrated medium for interpreting values. The three hermeneutic circles are mediated by a fourth: the tropological circle, where metaphor and homonymy fuse horizons, and synecdoche and metonymy relate parts and whole. Both texts and tropes mediate the transvaluation of organisational values across time. The first paper reported the findings and built a theoretical framework, while this second paper builds on the theoretical and empirical work to consider the implications for management practice

This article explores Nietzsche’s philosophy of space, metaphor and values. It shows how metaphor generates perspectives of organisational values through both spatial content and processing. Metaphor reveals and expands horizons, creating space from one perspective and generating multiple three‐dimensional perspectives. It transports meaning across space and generates a tentative open space of understanding, a blended space that embraces diverse values. The Open University case study reveals a ‘multiversity’ that promotes multiperspectival thinking, supported by a hermeneutical space where different values can be acknowledged and respected.

This article explores Nietzsche’s philosophy of space, metaphor and values. It shows how metaphor generates perspectives of organisational values through both spatial content and processing. Metaphor reveals and expands horizons, creating space from one perspective and generating multiple three‐dimensional perspectives. It transports meaning across space and generates a tentative open space of understanding, a blended space that embraces diverse values. The Open University case study reveals a ‘multiversity’ that promotes multiperspectival thinking, supported by a hermeneutical space where different values can be acknowledged and respected.