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The purpose of this paper is to describe the theory and benefits of poetry, storytelling, and metaphor when applied to cross‐cultural leadership.

The methodology utilized is founded on preliminary research on metaphors, poetry and leadership with examples and connections based upon experience.

Explains how the use of poetry and metaphors can be utilized by a leader to build trust and demonstrate empathy; how to communicate more effectively; and, how to inspire.

Possible future research on the psychological and sociological aspects of the messages that most impel, mobilize, and inspire people to act on complex ideas.

Leaders can approach communications, empathy, and trust with a tool that will enable them to inspire action in complex cultural environments.

There has been little published on the connection between effective leadership and the use of poetry and metaphor. Leadership requires the ability to inspire the desire to follow, and to ignite the intellect and emotions of those who follow.

The more orthodox versions of our discipline as well as other social sciences are grounded in the common presupposition that science and philosophy be expounded by an especially true level of language characterized by precision and absence of ambiguity. For this reason, tropological linguistic forms such as metaphor are often held to be illicit, as unimportant or nonessential frills, deviant and parasitic on normal usage, for use by none but the poet. Argues that metaphor, far from being a mere stylistic device, is an indispensable, and indeed inseparable ingredient of all discourses whether literary, scientific, philosophical, or accounting. Draws heavily on Black’s (1962, 1978, 1993) interaction account of metaphor as a basis for explicating the poetic and rhetorical roles that metaphor may play in accounting discourse. Through presentation of three primary propositions with supporting metaphoric illustrations, suggests that metaphor is very much a part of the way in which accountants create and disseminate meaning about the world as both part of mundane accounting discourse and extensions of discursive practices.

Educational planning depends on the interaction between mental processes and social behaviour. The ongoing disparity between planning and implementation calls for a shift in attention from technical problems to the more conceptual. An alternative way of thinking about educational planning is discussed. The basic idea that a plan is a symbol means that someone ostensibly gives it meaning. Metaphorical images are one way of attaining insight into such meaning. By elaborating 11 groups of metaphorical images of planning, a bridge between expression and impression is offered. A conceptual frame relates the metaphorical analysis to approaches of educational policy. This might open up a whole new area of analysis essential to the understanding of educational planning as a social process of change.

To analyse common metaphors used in the intellectual capital (IC) and knowledge management literatures to conceptualise knowledge, in order to study the nature of the intellectual capital concept.

A textual analysis methodology is used to analyse texts from The Knowledge‐Creating Company by Nonaka and Takeuchi, Working Knowledge by Davenport and Prusak and “Brainpower” by Stewart, in order to identify underlying metaphors.

Over 95 per cent of the statements about knowledge identified are based on some kind of metaphor. The two dominant metaphors that form the basis for the concept of intellectual capital are “knowledge as a resource” and “knowledge as capital”.

Metaphors highlight certain characteristics and ignore others, so the IC community should ask itself what characteristics of knowledge the “knowledge as a resource” and “knowledge as capital” metaphors ignore.

Knowledge has no referent in the real world and requires metaphor to be defined, conceptualised, and acted upon. When using such metaphors we should become aware of their limitations as they steer us in certain directions and this may happen unconsciously. 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.

This paper is the first to highlight that intellectual capital is a metaphor and that the metaphorical nature of the concept has far reaching consequences.

The purpose of this paper is to describe how a phenomenological approach can help to understand embodied dimensions and compare different and shared qualities, functions and potential, as well as ambivalences and limitations of metaphors and stories in organisations.

Based on a phenomenological understanding and use of multiple discourses, the specific expressive and communicative nature, linkages to meaning, mediation and integration, as well as transformational, innovating and generating potentials of metaphors respectively, narratives are analysed conceptually and discussed. Accordingly similarities and differences, overlapping and conflicting patterns, thus correspondences and rapprochements of both metaphors and narratives are shown and illustrated.

The critical comparison of various, especially transformative functions, ambivalences and ambiguous uses of metaphorical and narrative sides and practices reveals their inherently dynamic inter‐relational nexus. The analysis shows how metaphors and stories/narratives can serve each other, as well as how they work together and contribute for transformation in organizations. In turn, this also offers new potential for understanding the practical opportunities and obstacles to the management of change.

The originality of this paper lies in that besides using multiple discourse, it follows an advanced Merleau‐Pontyian phenomenological approach and thus considers embodied dimensions of metaphors and stories/narratives and its implication for organizations critically. Working out the intriguing relationship between metaphor and narrative offers significant new insight and avenues for the research of organizational inertia and change.

Purpose – This chapter will discuss how the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, for example, being a sibling and losing a sibling. It explores the researcher’s emotional experience when working with children and their families, with a specific focus on the influence of the researcher presence and the sibling equilibrium.

Methodology/Approach – The chapter draws on the dramaturgical social interactions encountered in qualitative research which explored the experiences of siblings living in the context of cystic fibrosis. The study uses narrative inquiry and creative participatory methods to elicit sibling stories and provides insight into their worlds.

Findings – The chapter reflects on specific situations encountered on entering, engaging in and leaving the field, which had a significant emotional impact. Two sibling vignettes will be presented along with a discussion of how reflective metaphorical expression can be applied as a method of processing and coping with the research context.

Originality/Value – The chapter argues that the positional self and prior experiences can influence the emotional self within the research journey, and that reflective metaphorical expression can be used as a strategy to process thoughts and gain greater understanding of a situation as well as to provide an emotional release for the researcher. It also suggests that conducting research over a longer time period, as opposed to one visit, can be beneficial in terms of participant and researcher emotional transition.

This study used a visual research approach to investigate how small business (SB) entrepreneurs in Nigeria, a low-income country, perceive digital transformation (DT). The study aims to improve and broaden the understanding of DT by uncovering its metaphors. Making metaphorical sense of DT will increase its knowledge among populations who are unfamiliar with digital technology concepts, as well as communicating and collaborating with them to develop future research and strategies on the subject of DT. This study is significant because scholars have paid little attention to social imaginations of DT depicted through metaphors, more so when considered from a worldview of SBs in low-income countries.

The uniqueness of the research objective motivated the use of social theory to frame the research approach, and picture-elicitation techniques to drive data collection through in-depth interviews with 17 SB entrepreneurs and business owners in Nigeria. Data were analyzed using a content analysis procedure known as metaphor analysis.

The study revealed three metaphors of DT: a drama, a war and a pregnant elephant. A triangulation of the metaphors with English lexicon, extant literature and interview excerpts supported the war and drama perceptions of DT but opposed “DT as a pregnant elephant.”

It argued that the social perception of DT can improve the sustainable, purposeful and successful execution of DT strategies for SB DT. As a result, this study pushes the boundaries of DT, particularly for SB entrepreneurs in low-income countries.

Metaphors pervade our daily lives, not only in our language and communications, but also in how we think and act; as such, they can play an important role in understanding and implementing DT, a concept that has received little attention in the SB settings.

This is one of the first empirical studies to figuratively explain DT and its implications for literature and practice in SB entrepreneurship and information systems domains.

Investigating technical terms of vehicle spare parts used in the mechanics' jargon in Saudi Arabic (SA) and Yemeni Arabic (YA) has received scant attention. The current study, therefore, is an attempt to shed some light on the topic. The aim is to identify the strategies used for creating equivalents in vehicle spare parts vocabulary and to pinpoint the most salient variations between the two dialects in this jargon.

More than 250 terms of vehicle spare parts were collected and analyzed qualitatively. Each list contains nearly 125 items. They were gathered from two main resources: semi-structured interviews with vehicle mechanics, and written lists from spare parts dealers in both countries.

Three main strategies are found at work: lexical borrowing (from English and French), metaphor and loan translation. Direct borrowing is the most influential strategy where loanwords represent nearly one-third of the data, the majority of which is from English. Metaphorical extensions and literal translations also have an important role to play in the process of spare part naming. While the two dialects share common practices in terms of literal translation, they are characterized by many differences with regard to lexical borrowing and metaphors.

The study approaches an under-researched topic that is related to the mechanic's jargon in Arabic and leaves the door open for further research. The findings of this study may be used as guidelines for Arabic academies and those who are concerned with translating and studying technical terms in the field of mechanical engineering.

Metaphor is an important concept for clean language interviewers. This chapter describes what metaphor is and overviews the experimental research showing the potential for metaphor to influence interviewees. It expands on the brief introduction to metaphor in Chapter 1 and describes the role clean language can play by enabling interviewees' metaphors to be elicited, explored and modelled without the influence of the interviewer's metaphors. It justifies the value of a heightened awareness of the ubiquity and variety of metaphors and their involvement in the different phases of qualitative research; and builds an argument for how a clean language interviewing approach to metaphor can enrich the research process.

While the theme of death in the popular music subgenre of black metal has been written about descriptively, it is less frequent to find conceptual philosophical or theological analyses of death. In this piece, I aim to show how black metal's presentation of death lies in line with death as negation, instilled with strong links to Christianity's mystical apophatic theology. I will argue that this view on death shows it cannot be properly expressed in terms of affirmative language. Even where death is treated as a physical death, rather than metaphorical, it is a celebrated expression of negation. However, unlike the Christian apophatic tradition, black metal's death is not a renunciation of the physical; rather it is a complement to it. In a complex sense, even negating negations, black metal's expression of death is disturbing precisely because of its dual acceptance of death as metaphor and as physically fully realised.