INTERNATIONAL ISSUES
ROBERT E. MARKLAND, Feature Editor, College of Business Administration, University of South Carolina

Global Cooperation: Using Metaphors to Communicate and Avoid Corporate Culture Clashes

by Julie E. Kendall, School of Business, Rutgers University, USA

It happens everyday in every major city around the world, often as a result of two companies merging. To the corporations involved these changes represent wise economic decisions. To the individuals involved, it can translate into a bloody culture clash that wounds or even kills a corporate personality with which they have strongly identified.

In the United States, I have observed how bank mergers result in cultures clashing. One problem occurs when banks are forced to decide whether Bank A's or Bank B's information system will survive. Since the information systems were developed using a variety of metaphors, it is not surprising that the systems are not compatible with each other. A culture clash is inevitable.

What Is a Metaphor?

A metaphor is a readily accessible shorthand symbol of corporate cultures or subcultures. It is a powerful figure of speech that asserts that one object is another. Metaphors possess entailments, ideas that resonate when a metaphor is mentioned, and that guide and shape the attitudes and behaviors of whoever uses it. The metaphors in the following three slogans are clearly representative of three different bank cultures: A bank is a neighborhood of people helping people; a bank is your partner for the future; or a bank is a machine that works 24 hours a day to serve you (without the bother of leaving your home, or encountering another person).

It only seems natural to build on these findings and pose the questions: Do countries, organizations, and corporate cultures use and share metaphors? If so, can the understanding and sharing of metaphors assist us in accomplishing our common goals for the Decision Sciences Institute (i.e., international understanding, improving research into decision making in international businesses, and helping to promote the growth of global commerce?) As you ponder these questions, permit me to summarize some of the metaphors that I have found occurring in groups of information systems users.

Organizational Research and Metaphors

Over the last decade, much organizational research has echoed the impact of metaphors. Gareth Morgan, a seminal figure in the use of metaphor in organizational diagnostics and design wrote:

Our theories of organizational life are based on metaphors that lead us to see and understand organizations in distinctive yet partial ways.... By using different metaphors to understand the complex and paradoxical character of organizational life, we are able to manage and design organizations that we may have not thought possible before (1986, p. 12 & 13).

Is it possible that metaphors can enable us to see the world anew when we design new international systems, merge multinational businesses, or build internationally focused professional organizations?

Over the past 7 years, I was fortunate enough to travel around the world, in part while spending a year's sabbatical at the Judge Institute of Management Studies, at the Cambridge University in England. I was actively researching, publishing, and lecturing on the importance and meaning of metaphors in information systems development. This work (in which I have often been joined by my colleague and husband, Ken) has hit an unusually responsive chord with our international student, academic, and practitioner audiences. Now it is being taken up by other disciplines in the decision sciences; and business people working in organizations around the world acknowledge work on corporate metaphors as influential in their decision making process, especially when two or more corporate or national cultures are attempting to merge.

Identifying the Metaphors of Information Systems Users

We used multiple methods, both qualitative and quantitative, during a 3-year period to identify metaphors of North American and European information systems users in 16 different companies, including financial and health service organizations, banks, regional blood centers, hospitals, a state police organization, franchise grocery stores and manufacturing companies. Using interview transcripts and Q-sort data from information systems users, we confirmed six metaphors previously identified by Clancy (1989) as predominant business metaphors: game, journey, war, organism, machine and society. We found an additional three metaphors the family, the jungle, and the zoo and added them to our study for completeness' sake (for the full study, see Kendall and Kendall, 1993 & 1994).

Touring the World of Metaphors

My work has taken me to England, Scotland, Egypt, Greece, Belgium, France, Denmark, Sweden, Norway, Japan, Mexico, Poland, Thailand, Finland, Hong Kong, and Singapore. I did not know what the responses to our work with metaphors in information systems would be. Before our first international talk on metaphors, we experienced our own, global-sized apprehension: Would researchers from other countries understand our work? Would they be stimulated by it? Would it be too difficult to convey work on English metaphors to diverse people living all over the world? What I learned was surprising, revealing, and useful.

I found, much to my delight (and relief), that as I lectured and gave seminars, research into metaphors and information systems was something that students, professors, and business people almost intuitively understood. When possible, I asked questions of my audience, but just as often they volunteered metaphors in common use in their own department, organization, or society. Often they speculated on the meanings of these metaphors and their importance to the projects being undertaken. Many other times they reassured and encouraged me: they said that they had different metaphors that conveyed the same meaning.

Perhaps it is a sign of the nineties, but the metaphor that generated the most conversation was the zoo metaphor. One masters student from Southeast Asia told me that they did not have the metaphor of a zoo representing chaos, but used a fish market metaphor to denote chaos. Another student, this one from France, candidly volunteered that characterizing a situation as a brothel was a metaphorical comment on the situation's inherent chaos. A German student commented that employing a circus metaphor signified the most chaotic situation imaginable.

In Cairo, we presented our research to the Decision Support System Group of the Egyptian Cabinet. When we mentioned that generally in our work the family metaphor was successful in fostering only certain types of more traditional information systems, but that other metaphors were more appropriate for development of Executive Information Systems and other more flexible systems, many people in the DSS Group were taken aback. They explained to us how critical the family metaphor was to their society, and that it was important in commerce and management as well. Further, they said that the status of the family metaphor was not likely to change soon.

The students and their professors with whom I shared my metaphor's research have continued working on an entire spectrum of projects. Researchers in Krakow are working with us on a joint project comparing metaphors of English-speaking and Polish-speaking system users. A new information systems research center in England was named to reflect our call for an organic metaphor to aid in developing flexible information systems. A professor and his students in Mexico are collecting metaphors and extending our work into the Spanish language.

Metaphors and Global Cooperation

We can now return briefly to the questions posed earlier: Can the understanding and sharing of metaphors assist us in accomplishing our common goals for the Decision Sciences Institute? The answer is yes. Remember that individual Olympic athletes come together because they share personal metaphors of individual and team achievement, the value of global competition, the perfecting of precision, accuracy, speed, and dedication regardless of what their country's metaphor may be. The individuals and teams transcend their country's metaphor by creating and sharing their own metaphors that support successful interaction with a diversity of athletes and teams.

There is hope to be found in creating and sharing metaphors with our colleagues in all of our international arenas. As mentioned earlier in connection with the zoo metaphor and other metaphors used to depict chaos, different people from different countries employ a variety of metaphors to explain the same phenomenon. Corporate cultures need not clash. And we need not proscribe our international activities by making an impoverished choice among limited provincial metaphors. As Shakespeare's metaphor so aptly reminds us, ``All the world's a stage<|>.<|>.<|>.<|>.''

References

Clancy, J. J. (1989) The invisible powers; the language of business. Lexington, MA: Lexington Books.

Kendall, J. E. and Kendall, K. E. Metaphors and Methodologies: Living Beyond the Systems Machine, MIS Quarterly, (17:2), June 1993, pp. 149-171.

Kendall, J. E. and Kendall, K. E Metaphors and their Meaning for Information Systems Development, European Journal of Information Systems, (3:1) 1994, pp. 37-47.

Morgan, G. (1986) Images of organization. Beverly Hills: Sage Publications.