Conclusion: Governance through metaphor

Innovative Global Management through Metaphor (Part #6)

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Policies and issues move into and out of fashion according to the vagaries of the political process and the priorities of the moment. This is true even within the international community, as noted by Johan Galtung. There is a "flavour-of-the-month" quality to policy-making, however serious the long-term issues may appear to be. Governance suffers in consequence through lack of any conceptual continuity.

Past policy flavours within the international community, according to Galtung, include basic needs, self-reliance, new international economic order, appropriate technology, health for all, community participation, primary health care and common heritage of mankind. The current flavour is sustainable development. It is useful to ask how sustainable is the concept of sustainable development, and what dimensions does it fail to take into account.

Metaphor is widely used to communicate policy options. However it is used simplistically and in a rhetorical manner divorced from the actual written articulation of policy. The metaphors currently favoured do not reflect the exigencies of sustainable development or the dynamics between the advocates of competing policy alternatives. Resources can be usefully devoted to identifying, selecting, designing disseminating and employing more appropriate metaphors in policy contexts. Such a shift in focus should open up new ways of reflecting collectively on the more complex, cyclic and incommensurable perspectives currently lost in the savage interactions between factions. It is such complex perspectives which constitute the real policy challenge.

This suggests that a desirable policy forum design would focus attention on the emergence and movement of policy-relevant metaphors, their relationship (as comprehensible meaning complexes) to more conventional forms of information, and their reflection in organizational form. Such stewardship in the governance of a forum opens up new possibilities in the governance of society as a whole:

"The merit of this vision of governance is that it does not call for a radical transformation of institutions -- which is unlikely in the absence of any major catastrophe. Rather it calls for a change in the way of thinking about what is circulated through society's information systems as the triggering force for any action. At present governance in the international community is haunted by a form of collective schizophrenia -- a left-brain preoccupation with "serious" academic models and administrative programmes versus a right-brain preoccupation with the proclivities of public opinion avid for "meaningful" action (even if "sensational"). This schizophrenic battle between models and metaphors could be reframed by legitimating the metaphoric dimensions, already so vital to any motivation of public opinion, as providing vehicles for models. However, there needs to be a two-way flow from model-to-metaphor and from metaphor-to-model, as in any interesting learning process." (Judge, 1987b)

In response to the challenge of sustainable development, this perspective has been used to redefine the challenge, both in conceptual and policy terms, as being one of designing metaphors to give form to a sustainable ecology of development policies. In relation to the issues raised by Srivastva and Barrett (1988) and Barrett and Cooperrider (1989 ?), it could be appropriate to use richer metaphors to integrate, and render comprehensible as sets, the individual metaphors which govern groups over time, or which govern opposing factions during the same period.

In the light of the challenge of sustainable development, the question might well be asked as to how many metaphors people need to ensure their survival -- and especially their psychological survival ? Is there a problem of metaphor impoverishment and deprivation associated with both ineffectual policies and individual alienation ? Is it possible that a metaphoric measure is necessary as a complement to the questionable value of current social indicators and the questionable educational role played by the exclusive use of the IQ measure of intelligence ? To the extent that we ourselves are metaphors (**), do we need to develop richer metaphors through which to experience and express our self-image ?

If individual learning is governed by metaphors (as a number of studies indicate), how is it that metaphors governing societal learning and development have not been studied ? In the light of Andreas Fuglesang's severe criticism of western assumptions concerning communication in developing countries, would it not be more useful to conceive of different cultures as operating within different root metaphors ? Is it possible that social transformation is essentially a question of offering people (and empowering them to discover from their own traditions) richer and more meaningful metaphors through which to live, act and empower themselves?

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