Metaphors are at the basis of our understanding of reality. Using the theory of metaphor developed by Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) this paper analyses common metaphors used in the intellectual capital and knowledge management literatures. An analysis of key works by Davenport & Prusak (2000), Nonaka & Takeuchi (1995), and Stewart (1991) suggests that at least 95 percent of all statements about either knowledge or intellectual capital are based on metaphors. The paper analyses the two metaphors that form the basis for the concept of intellectual capital: ‘Knowledge as a Resource’ and ‘Knowledge as Capital’, both of which derive their foundations from the industrial age. The paper goes into some of the implications of these findings for the theory and practice of intellectual capital. Common metaphors used in conceptualising abstract phenomena in traditional management practices unconsciously reinforce the established social order. The paper concludes by asking whether we need new metaphors to better understand the mechanisms of the knowledge economy, hence allowing us to potentially change some of the more negative structural features of contemporary society.
Metaphor is one of the important discursive themes in organizational literature (Grant et al.,2001). Metaphors play an important role in the discourse within organizations as well as in theorizing about organizations. This empirical paper focuses on the latter by analysing the role of metaphor in the development of theoretical concepts – in particular the concept of social capital – through the means of quantitative content analysis. Some authors argue that metaphors should be avoided in organizational theory (Bourgeois and Pinder, 1983; Tinker, 1986). Others see metaphors as valuable creative tools for developing new theories and insights (Weick, 1989). Morgan (1997) has shown that many theories about organizations can be ‘reordered’ (Keenoy et al., 2003) into a particular metaphorical view of organizations, showing the metaphorical bases of organizational theorizing. Lakoff and Johnson (1980, 1999) go even further, presenting compelling evidence from cognitive science indicating that metaphors are inescapable because they are the basis for our abstract reasoning. There is a debate about the way metaphor works (Black, 1993; Cornelissen, 2005; Heracleous, 2003; Keenoy et al., 2003; Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003; Oswick et al. 2002, 2003; Tsoukas, 1991;) especially about whether metaphor is simply a matter of comparison highlighting the analogies in the source and target domain, or whether a metaphor does more then that. In the paper we take the latter position and adopt Lakoff and Johnson’s (1999) model of cross-domain mapping. This model states that not only similarities and features are transferred from the source to the target domain but that the target domain often gets its structure from the source domain. The metaphorical mapping from the source to the target domain can be rich and complex because metaphors have many ‘entailments’. Entailments are the connotations of the metaphor that transport meaning from the source to the target domain. Furthermore, the application of conceptual metaphor often happens out-of-awareness (Lakoff and Johnson, 1999; Marshak, 2003). It is part of the unconscious mental operations concerned with conceptual systems, meaning, inference, and language. We can recognize the unconscious use of metaphor in organizational theorizing by looking at the literal meaning of organizational concepts and statements (Andriessen, 2006).
