Transcending the switch metaphor (Part #1)

Paper prepared for the International Symposium 'How to Do Things with Metaphor', organized by the Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire (Brussels, March 1990); and for the meeting on Demography Issues and Sustainable Development (New Delhi, March 1990) organized by Development alternatives with the Society for International Development. Originally published in Transnational Associations, 43, 1991, 1, pp 37-46 [PDF version] and in Revue Belge de Philologie et d'Histoire, LXVIII,1990, 3, pp 531-547

1. Introduction
2. Sustainable development and the individual
3. The implicit 'switch' metaphor
4. Ambiguity
5. Imaginal deficiency
6. Governing metaphors
7. Transcending the switch metaphor
8. Paradoxical context

PART II (separate document)

9. Problems as metaphors

• Substance abuse
• Unemployment (including underemployment and absenteeism)
• Ignorance (including functional illiteracy)
• Homelessness
• Illness
• Hunger
• Wastage (including environmental degradation)
• Corruption (including crime)

10. Reframing problems: the case of 'overpopulation'

• Constraints
• Family planning and sexless euphemisms
• Sexual intercourse as a metaphor

11. Conclusion

References

[Parts: Next | Last | All ] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]

This paper is based on the assumption that it is useful to question whether the many existing approaches to social problems and global management, however successful, are sufficient to the challenge of the times. Individually they may indeed be necessary and adequate to particular challenges, but there is every possibility that they may collectively be insufficient to the larger challenge. It is possible to adopt an optimistic attitude in order to safeguard the personal and institutional investment in such approaches. There are however sufficient dissenting views to suggest that it is at least worth devoting some effort to the exploration of much more radical approaches.

For space reasons, the paper will not outline some of the major constraints on global management and innovative approaches to it (Judge, 1987). Conditions, such as the following, have been noted by many authors in different ways: complexity (whether for management or modelling); incommensurability of many policy concerns; limits to comprehensibility by the human mind (possibly even the comprehensibility of appropriateness); multiplicity of perspectives concerning any issue or response; information overload; urgency; policy time constraints in relation to electorates; incommunicability of complex insights to those who must vote on them; irresponsibility, in some measure, of most social agents; corruption and deceit of many social agents. For the purposes of the subsequent discussion these can all be usefully treated as design constraints.

Experience of past development decades indicates that implementation of desirable institutional innovations is likely to remain limited however much lip service is paid to them. Part of the difficulty would seem to lie in imaginal deficiency on the part of both the innovators and of those to whom the innovations must be made credible. There is merit therefore in exploring radical approaches to ways of configuring the conceptual elements which are the basis for any social innovation -- and relating them to the forms of imagery currently favoured (for good reason) by politicians.

Within this context the paper endeavours to envisage the next credible steps that might be taken to provide a more fruitful imaginal framework to sustain more appropriate personal and institutional responses to the challenges of the times. The core question is whether initiatives can be recontextualized or reframed -- using more powerful metaphors -- in such a way as to offer new insight and greater degrees of freedom.

With this objective in mind, the term 'metaphor' is used broadly to denote any conceptual device which facilitates transfer of meaning associated with a phenomenological pattern in one domain to that in another. The term is therefore used as though the range of such devices constituted a continuum, however they might be distinguished or grouped by different schools of thought. The emphasis in this paper is on the relevance of this approach to very practical challenges (e.g. unemployment, drug abuse, overpopulation, etc). A more analytical approach has been taken in earlier papers (Judge, 1987, 1988).

This paper is part of a long-term exploration of the significance of information collected on the networks of some 20,000 international bodies described in the Yearbook of International Organizations (UIA, 1989), and on the 10,000 'world problems' with which they claim to be concerned, as described in the Encyclopedia of World Problems and Human Potential (UIA, 1986). The latter includes a section on metaphors, with 80 examples.

[Parts: Next | Last | All ] [Links: To-K | From-K | From-Kx ]