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Organization Studies
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Understanding Organizations through Embodied Metaphors

Loizos Heracleous

Warwick Business School, UK, loizos.heracleous{at}wbs.ac.uk

Claus D. Jacobs

Institute of Management, University of Stey Gallen, Switzerland, claus.jacobs{at}unisg.ch

We outline the dominant, positivist approach to conceptualizing and researching organizations through multi-level research that views levels as independently existing, hierarchically nested entities, and problematize this view by offering an alternative approach based on embodied realism. We operationalize this approach through a study of three organization development workshops where organizational actors constructed artifacts we label embodied metaphors. We propose that analysis of embodied metaphors can enable access to actors' first-order conceptions of organizational levels and related organizational dimensions and reveals alternative qualities and interrelations among them; can support a clinical approach to organizations; provides a window to organizational, divisional or task identities; and poses substantial challenges to established conceptions of ontology and method in organization theory.

Key Words: embodied metaphors • embodied realism • organizational levels

Organization Studies, Vol. 29, No. 1, 45-78 (2008)
DOI: 10.1177/0170840607086637
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