Summary
Contents
Subject index
This book outlines a number of different tools for mapping strategic knowledge, and thus making knowledge more accessible. Anne Sigismund Huff and Mark Jenkins have brought leading academics together in this work: - to provide informed analysis and theory - to illustrate the contribution of knowledge mapping to central issues in strategy and organization theory - to consider the contribution of these studies to management practice - to address practical theoretic and methodological limitations of these tools, including several software tools now available to facilitate mapping. Each section of the book provides a table which charts the chapters' main contents, key findings and implications for knowledge management. An annotated bibliography is provided at the end of the book as a resource for readers who may wish to become more familiar with relevant and existing literature in this area. Mapping Strategic Knowledge is relevant to those interested in knowledge management, primarily academics and consultants in the area of strategic management, but also academics in the area of organization theory.
Enabling Strategic Metaphor in Conversation: A Technique of Cognitive Sculpting for Explicating Knowledge
Enabling Strategic Metaphor in Conversation: A Technique of Cognitive Sculpting for Explicating Knowledge
Abstract
The chapter describes our way of operationalizing the concept of metaphor for organizational intervention and research purposes. It describes cognitive sculpting, a technique we have developed to enable people to build physical metaphors for whatever they are trying to talk about (Sims and Doyle, 1995). The technique has turned out to be effective both for the expression of existing metaphor and for the production of new metaphor. We discuss possible reasons for this effectiveness and suggest some implications for surfacing and generating organizational knowledge. In particular, we are concerned with how attention seems to be differently directed when discussion centres on a cognitive sculpture, and how aspects of knowledge that are normally less honoured in a propositional, entirely verbal and more digital conversation may come into play when a sculpture is involved. We raise some of the questions that seem to us to be begged by our work so far, and conclude by considering the potential of facilitating strategic knowledge via sculpting.
We think in metaphors. This is true whether we are talking about thinking that is abstract and creative, or about thinking that might appear mundane and commonplace. At either of these extremes, and everywhere between, our knowledge is built on metaphor and analogy. For example, the idea that knowledge could be ‘built’ on something is metaphorical, though you may not have registered it as such when you read the previous sentence. It is noticeable how often metaphorical expression arises from primitive, concrete thinking using body-kinaesthetic and image schemas to represent what we take to be our knowledge of the world, both inner and outer.
The word metaphor is derived from the Greek ‘to carry’ or ‘transfer’. A colleague tells me that in Greece the word for ‘house removals’ derives from the same root. This image is reminiscent both of Monty Python (removal men with a highbrow interest in metaphor) and of homunculi in the head, for in the same way that household goods are carried from one place to another, in metaphor a set of symbolic relationships is ‘carried’ from one place (technically known as the vehicle or, in research on analogy, the source domain) to another (the topic, or the target domain when applied to analogy). On arrival, this set of symbolic relationships collects a meaning. (These terms are themselves a set of mixed metaphors: topics, vehicles, domains, sources, targets and arrival.)
Three Kinds of Metaphor
In this chapter it will be helpful to distinguish three kinds of metaphor. In the first, the metaphor consists of a main theme with elaborations. TIME IS MONEY is the main theme of a metaphor with which we are all familiar. But since people have found the metaphor useful, we have a collection of related metaphors around this same theme – these are the elaborations. Money can be spent, wasted, saved; so too can time. Here metaphor is much more than the metaphor heading (TIME IS MONEY); metaphor transfers many of the uses associated with the source domain to the target domain. We do not mean, by the isolation of a main theme, as distinct from elaborations of the theme, that the former necessarily pre-dates the latter in the evolution of a metaphor. Rather, we mean that the main theme acts as a kind of category heading for the elaborations, and thus allows the basis of the metaphor to be more explicitly seen in the language.
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