Table 2 Morgan’s metaphors and key concepts

1. Machines

Mechanistic organization, scientific management, bureaucratic organizations, goals and objectives, rationality, efficiency, clarity, order, programs, inputs and outputs, standardization, production, measurement and control

2. Organisms

Organizational needs, open systems, living systems, environment, adaptation, life cycles, recycling, needs, open systems, evolution, survival of the fittest, organizational health and development, contingency theory (adapting organization to the environment)

3. Brains

Learning, parallel information processing, distributed control, cybernetics, holographic brains, intelligence, feedback, requisite variety, knowledge

4. Cultures

Values, beliefs, rules, rituals, diversity, traditions, history, shared vision and mission, enactment of shared realities

5. Political systems

Systems of government, interests, power, hidden agendas, authority, alliances, party-line, censorship, gatekeepers, leaders, conflict management

6. Psychic prisons

Conscious and unconscious processes, repressed sexuality, anxiety, projection, coping & defence mechanisms, pain and pleasure principle, dysfunction, the unconscious

7. Flux and transformation

Autopoiesis, constant change, dynamic equilibrium, flow, systemic wisdom, attractors, chaos and complexity, dialectics, paradoxes

8. Instruments of domination

Exploitation of employees, class, control, work hazards, workaholism, alienation, repression, imposing values, maintenance of power, force, divide and rule, discrimination, multinationals as world power