We all have our own assumptions about how organizations work, developed through a combination of experience and education. The use of metaphor is an important way in which we express these assumptions. Some people talk about organizations as if they were machines. This metaphor leads to talk of organizational structures, job design and process reengineering. Others describe organizations as political systems. They describe the organization as a seething web of political intrigue where coalitions are formed and power rules supreme. They talk about hidden agendas, opposing factions and political manoeuvring.

Gareth Morgan’s (1986) work on organizational metaphors is a good starting point for understanding the different beliefs and assumptions about change that exist. He says:

Metaphor gives us the opportunity to stretch our thinking and deepen our understanding, thereby allowing us to see things in new ways and act in new ways… Metaphor always creates distortions too… We have to accept that any theory or perspective that we bring to the study of organization and management, while capable of creating valuable insights, is also incomplete, biased, and potentially misleading.

Morgan identifies eight organizational metaphors:

We have selected four of Morgan’s organizational metaphors to explore the range of assumptions that exists about how organizational change works. These are the four that we see in use most often by managers, writers and consultants, and that appear to us to provide the most useful insights into the process of organizational change. These are:

• organizations as machines;

• organizations as political systems;

• organizations as organisms;

• organizations as flux and transformation.