Death metaphors and factory closure

Abstract

This article seeks to further our understanding of the role of death metaphors in the context of factory closure. A closure is an example of what has been called an organizational death. This refers to a literal ending, but there is also a metaphorical meaning. In this case study, three root-metaphors of different kinds of death explain the actors' accounts of the enactments of the closure, changing over time. Firstly, employees have mainly described managers as responsible and the decision as illegitimate and deliberate (murder). However, managers and others have described the decision as strategic and inevitable (sacrificial killing). The beginning of the closure process was mostly described by employees as irresponsible. Later on, accounts were better explained using a palliative death metaphor. The metaphor analysis offered a contextualized, process-oriented, and agentic understanding of the closure which is relevant to other contexts where the types of death metaphors may vary.

Keywords:

• downsizing
• factory closure
• layoffs
• metaphor analysis
• organizational death
• responsibility

Acknowledgements

This article was made possible by the financial support of the Swedish Research Council for Health, Working Life and Welfare (Forskningsrådet för hälsa, arbetsliv och välfärd). The author would like to thank the guest editors, the three anonymous reviewers, Professors Ola Bergström and Gideon Kunda, and the VPP post-doc group of the School of Business, Economics and Law at University of Gothenburg for their help in developing this paper.