# Images of Organization

*Morgan · Culture & Context, Ecological, Complexity & Systems · Sage · 2006 · Paywalled*

The book rests on what Gareth Morgan calls a very simple premise: that all theories of organisation and management are based on implicit images or metaphors that lead us to see, understand and manage organisations in distinctive yet partial ways. Metaphor, more than embellishment, implies a way of thinking and seeing: in highlighting some interpretations it tends to force others into the background, and it always creates distortions, so a way of seeing becomes a way of not seeing. The organisation as a machine may show how it is structured to achieve predetermined results, but it ignores the human aspects, elevates the rational and structural, and misleads, since an organisation can never really be designed, structured and controlled as a set of inanimate parts. Every theory, as Morgan puts it, illuminates and hides.

As Morgan's first chapter summarises them, the middle chapters read organisations as machines; as organisms with needs, environments and life cycles; as brains, yielding principles for learning organisations; as cultures; as political systems of interests, conflict and power; as self-made psychic prisons; as flux and transformation, through four logics of change, among them the attractor patterns of chaos and complexity; and as instruments of domination. Chapter 11 reads an organisation called Multicom through each metaphor, and the Postscript draws four ideas for managing in turbulent times: be in touch with the assumptions and theories guiding practice, since practice is never theory free; gain comfort with diverse perspectives, which Morgan ties to the law of requisite variety; remember that reading a situation always implies a degree of authorship; and recognise organisation as a creative process of imaginization.

Reviewing the 1986 first edition, Douglas Austrom called it important and very provocative, found the reading of Multicom successful but the guidance on managing and designing with metaphors less powerful, a relatively minor shortcoming, and warned that metaphor is double-edged, able to clarify and to confuse. This entry is built from the 2006 edition's first and last chapters, a page of the eleventh and Austrom's review; the chapters between were not read.

The bridge to psychological safety is ours. If every theory illuminates and hides, so does every way of reading a team, and the machine image names what our ecological articles argue against, engineering outcomes rather than shaping the conditions they emerge from. Our History of PS says we use ecological thinking not as metaphor but as analytical lens, a stance in tension with Morgan's premise that all theory is metaphor.

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## Neighbours (6)

- [An Introduction to Cybernetics](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/ashby-1956.md) (paper)
- [History of PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/the-history-of-psychological-safety.md)
- [Rewetting Organisations](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/rewetting-organisations.md)
- [Five Ecological Concepts](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/five-ecological-concepts-for-working-in-organisational-change.md)
- [Digital Transformation & PS](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/digital-transformation-and-psychological-safety.md)
- [Ecological Metaphors in Organizational Science: An Interdisciplinary Critique](https://explore.psychsafety.com/n/mars-bronstein-2023.md) (paper)