Review of: Örtenblad, Anders (Ed.) (2024). The Oxford Handbook of Metaphor in Organization Studies. Oxford: Oxford University Press. ISBN 9780192895707

Abstract

This review examines The Oxford Handbook of Metaphor in Organization Studies, by A. Örtenblad (Ed.), an expansive and theoretically ambitious collection that repositions metaphor as central to organizational knowledge, communication, and practice. Across six parts, the volume advances metaphor not as a rhetorical ornament but as epistemic infrastructure shaping how organizations are theorized, studied, and governed. Contributions span philosophical, methodological, and applied domains, extending metaphor analysis into multimodal, embodied, visual, and sociomaterial contexts while foregrounding reflexivity, ethics, and power. Overall, the volume offers a timely, generative intervention for organizational studies, organizational communication, and critical management scholarship, inviting researchers to interrogate the metaphors used in and by organizations and individuals, including researchers themselves, and the organizational realities and (im)possibilities those metaphors help produce.