An ethnography of metaphor usage in IS projects : from description to domination

This study presents the story of a three-year ethnographical field study, from December2000 to December 2003, conducted at a North West based Management Consultancy.Throughout this period the organisation experienced accelerated growth from two siteswith a workforce of twenty, to six sites with a workforce of forty-five. There were twomajor IS implementation projects conducted in that period resulting in pervasiveorganisational change for this growing workforce. A controlling mechanism by theorganisation's domineering Managing Director was the strategic 'planting' of twohegemonic metaphors, in the guise of 'Tigger' and 'Eeyore', two characters from thechildren's storybook Winnie the Pooh. This was done to pre-empt and avert resistancebehaviour. An objective of this study was to explore this use of metaphors to coercecertain users into compliance with management aims in IS projects. Existing studies tendnot to report upon management's explicit use of metaphor to control workforce behaviourin this manner. It could also be argued that this explicit use may have only been observeddue to the rich insight of this longitudinal ethnographical study. Key features of themechanism of metaphors 'working' in this case was the observation of a complexnetwork of other underlying dominant metaphors in use in the organisation, enabling thesubmissive, unwavering, acceptance of the two hegemonic metaphors. A centralcontribution of this study is to highlight the power of mutually reinforcing metaphorswhen applied in a suitable context, so extending and reinforcing existing metaphorresearch within the IS field.X