Of tropes, totems and taboos: reflections on Morgan's images from a cross-cultural perspective

[Extract] There can be little doubt that Images of Organization (hereafter Images) is one of the most important and iconic contributions to organization theory in recent decades. Several generations of organization studies academics, students and practitioners owe a great debt to Gareth Morgan for the intellectual work presented in Images and it is entirely apposite to take this opportunity, some 30 years after the first edition (Morgan, 1986) to acknowledge and celebrate this volume. As scholars who favour social constructionist and interpretative approaches to the study of organization, we can testify personally to the impact that the emergence of Images had intellectually, pedagogically and practically. Here was a volume that, at once: •served to consolidate and summarize social scientific thinking about organizations; •gave due emphasis to the relativity of perspective; •offered new ways of seeing and interpreting organizational conduct through a series of highly suggestive metaphors; •enabled new forms of social and organizational critique; •served as an impressively comprehensive yet accessible and student-friendly teaching resource