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Introduction
Metaphors are powerful instruments of brain functioning. In their widely influential monograph Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson (1980) pointed out that humans think and frame reality in terms of metaphors, for example, “life is a journey.” Conceptual metaphors can be understood as mapping between a relatively abstract domain called the “target” (life) and a relatively concrete domain called the “source” (journey). Since the study of Lakoff and Johnson, metaphor, as a matter of thought, has reached far beyond the realm of linguistics and become an important rhetorical device in a wide range of multimodal communication situations, studies of management, organization, and society (Gannon, 2004).
Culture is a fuzzy concept, and several metaphors have been widely used to help users understand its complexity. One of the most popular metaphors, initially mentioned by Hall (1976) and later on developed by French and Bell (1995), is a floating “iceberg” with its tip visible above the water and most of its mass submerged under the water. It implies that cultural clashes happen because we could not see this hidden mass. The “onion” (Hofstede and Hofstede, 2005) is another popular metaphor which has three easy-to-change layers (symbols, heroes, and rituals) and the very stable core (values). Hofstede also emphasized the stability of values by proposing another metaphor, the “software of the mind.” It implies that culture is like a software, deeply installed in the national psyche, guiding actions and behaviors by a set of values. In international management, the metaphor of “cultural distance” introduced by Kogut and Singh (1988) has gained a broad acceptance. It measures the magnitude of differences in national culture with the assumption that these differences are stable, rational, and quantifiable.
Major cultural metaphors are limited to those listed above, and all of them belong to the static paradigm of culture. Literature of this paradigm has dominated the field of international and cross-cultural management (Fang, 2005-2006), with a strong focus on differences, with assumptions that culture is stable over time, using bipolar dimensions (e.g. collectivism vs individualism) and nation-state as a proxy independent variable to analyze national cultures which deem possible to compare using standardized measurements. As a result, cultural metaphors developed by scholars of this paradigm reflect the static characteristics of the...