The Internet in Undergraduate Management Education: A Concern for Neophytes Among Metaphors

AMERNIC, JOEL H.; CRAIG, RUSSELL J.

doi:10.1080/08109029908632121

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Prometheus

Volume 17, Issue 4

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The Internet in Undergraduate Management Education: A Concern for Neophytes Among Metaphors

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Author(s): JOEL H. AMERNIC , RUSSELL J. CRAIG

Publication date (Print): December 1999

Journal: Prometheus

Publisher: Pluto Journals

Keywords: Internet, management, education, metaphor, pedagogy, technology

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Abstract

This paper presents an alternative perspective of the pedagogical and other merits of the Internet in undergraduate management education. It highlights the importance of sensitising management students to the ideological character of the Internet and to the Internet's capacity for altering relationships, power structures and ways of ‘managing’ organisations. The need for there to be a critical appreciation of the effects of metonymy and metaphor when the Internet is being considered for use in undergraduate management education is emphasised. The notion that the Internet is an unparalleled conduit of pedagogically-related excellence is challenged and implications are analysed. Metaphors about the Internet and metaphors transported by the Internet are discussed in order to develop a better appreciation of the Internet's limitations as a technology ‘whose full advantage is [purportedly] to be realized’.

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Journal ID (publisher-id): cpro20

Journal ID (archive): CPRO

Title: Prometheus

Subtitle: Critical Studies in Innovation

Publisher: Pluto Journals

ISSN (Print): 0810-9028

ISSN (Electronic): 1470-1030

Publication date (Print): December 1999

Volume: 17

Issue: 4

Pages: 437-450

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Publisher ID: 8632121 Coden ID: Prometheus, Vol. 17, No. 4, 1999: pp. 437–450

DOI: 10.1080/08109029908632121

SO-VID: 71194dcd-f01f-45c4-aa1c-f2a547526f0c

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Figures: 0, Tables: 0, References: 94, Pages: 14

Notes and References

Journal of Management Education, 1998, pp. 444–5.
N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books, New York, 1993.
R. A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 227.
Postman, op. cit., p. 5.
Ibid, pp. 183–5.
Ibid, p. 198, italics added.
M. J. Reddy, ‘The conduit metaphor: a case of frame conflict in our language about language’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979/1993.
H. A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, The University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991; I. Angus, ‘The materiality of expression: Harold Innis’ communication theory and the discursive turn in the human sciences’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 23, 1998, pp. 9–29.
N. Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 174.
Ibid.
G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.
C. Lankshear, M. Peters and M. Knobel, ‘Critical pedagogy and cyberspace’, in H. A Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren and M. Peters (eds), Countemarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, p. 185.
Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universitieshttp://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf
Ibid, pp. 26–7.
Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Centuryhttp:// www.helsinki.fi/science/optek/1996/n2/gibson.txt
Postman, 1993, op. cit., p. 124.
J. L. Morrison, H.-S. Kim and C. T. Kydd, ‘Student preferences for cybersearch strategies: impact on critical evaluation of sources’, Journal of Education for Business, May/June, 1998, pp. 264–8.
Ibid, p. 264.
Ibid, p. 268.
Angus, op. cit., p. 15.
H. A. Innis, The Press: A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, London, 1949, p. 5.
Angus, op. cit., pp. 16–17.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 22.
Reddy, op. cit.
Angus, op. cit., p. 21.
Gibson, op. cit., p. 8.
H. Menzies, Whose Brave New World?: The Information Highway and the New Economy, Between the Lines, Toronto, 1996, p. 22.
Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicationshttp://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue2/lombard.html
Angus, op. cit., p. 26, underlining added.
R. W. Gibbs, Jr, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 320.
J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, Andre Deutsch, London, 1977, p. 394.
Gibbs, op. cit., p. 324.
Ibid.
Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit., p. 40.
Gibbs, op. cit.; R. A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. Synecdoche is a figure of speech ‘in which the part stands for the whole, and thus something else is understood within the thing mentioned. For example, in “give us this day our daily bread”, “bread” stands for the meals taken each day. … synecdoche is common in everyday speech. In “Chelsea won the match”, Chelsea stands for the Chelsea football team’ (Cuddon, op. cit., pp. 676–7).
J. Der Derian, ‘Simulation: the highest stage of capitalism?’, in D. Kellner (ed.), Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1994, pp. 189–207.
Ibid, p. 194.
Ibid, p. 196.
Ibid, p. 202.
HyperPostmodern Culturehttp://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/epstein.196.html
R. J. Swieringa and K. E. Weick, ‘Management accounting and action’, Accounting Organizations and Society, 12, 3, 1987, pp. 293–308.
K. E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage Publications, California, 1995.
G. B. Stewart, ‘EVA™: fact and fantasy’, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Summer, 1994, pp. 71–84.
C. Y. Baldwin and K. B. Clark, ‘Capital-budgeting systems and capabilities investments in U.S. companies after the Second World War’, Business History Review, 68, 1994, pp. 73–109.
B. G. Carruthers and W. N. Espeland, ‘Money, meaning, and morality’, American Behavioral Scientist, 41, 10, 1998, p. 1388.
Ibid.
Innis, op. cit.
Angus, op. cit.
Menzies, op. cit.
Gibson, op. cit.
U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (W. Weaver, trans.), Harcourt Brace, San Diego, 1986.
R. D. Hines, ‘Financial accounting: in communicating reality, we construct reality’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 13, 3, 1988, p. 257.
C. Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, 4, 1987, pp. 687–90.
Ibid, pp. 689–90, underlining added.
Ibid, underlining added.
Ibid, p. 690.
Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit.; G. Lakoff, ‘The contemporary theory of metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 202–51; G. Lakoff, Moral Politics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.
Summarized in Lakoff, 1993, op. cit.
S. Dunn, ‘Root metaphor in the old and new industrial relations’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 28, 1, 1990, p. 1.
Lakoff, 1993, op. cit., p. 203.
L. M. Walters-York, ‘Metaphor in accounting discourse’, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 9, 5, 1996, p. 45.
S. L. Winter, ‘Transcendental nonsense: metaphoric reasoning and the cognitive stakes for law’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 137, 4, 1989, pp. 1105–1237.
Lakoff, 1996, op. cit.
S. I. Miller and M. Fredericks, ‘Perceptions of the crisis in American public education: the relationship of metaphors to ideology’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 5, 2, 1990, pp. 67–81.
Postman, 1996, op. cit., p. 174.
A. Klamer and T. C. Leonard, ‘So what's an economic metaphor?’, in P. Mirowski (ed.), Natural Images in Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 20–51.
Ibid, p. 31.
Ibid.
Ibid, p. 33.
Ibid, p. 40.
Ibid.
D. A. Schon, ‘Generative metaphor: a perspective on problem-setting in social policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 254.
D. C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1995.
Ibid, pp. 261–2.
G. Soros, ‘The capitalist threat’, The Atlantic Monthly, 279, 2, 1997, p. 45.
D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Vintage Books, New York, 1997, p. 14.
Ibid, p. 35.
Schon, op. cit.
Reddy, op. cit.
Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit.
Lakoff, 1993, op. cit.
Korten, op. cit.
Goldhagen, op. cit.
A. Harrington, ‘Metaphoric connections: holistic science in the shadow of the Third Reich’, Social Research, 62, 2, 1995, p. 378.
B. Gates, The Road Ahead, Penguin, New York, 1996.
This, itself, is metaphorical. See J. G. Carrier, ‘Introduction’, in J. G. Carrier (ed.), Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, Berg, Oxford, 1997, pp. 1–67.
D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds), Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.
http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rohrer/iclcnf4.htm
T. J. Louwers, W. R. Pasewark and E. W. Typpo, ‘Silicon Valley meets Norwalk: tell your company's story online’, Journal of Accountancy, August 1998, p. 20.
Reddy, op. cit.
The literature to which students are referred comprises Reddy, op. cit.; C. Forceville, ‘IBM is a tuning fork: degrees of freedom in the interpretation of pictorial metaphors’, Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts, 23, 1995, pp. 189–218; Walters-York, op. cit.; and J. H. Amernic, ‘“Close readings” of Internet corporate financial reporting: towards a more critical pedagogy on the information highway’, The Internet and Higher Education, 1, 2, 1998, pp. 87–112.
See, for example, the special issue on ‘Virtual Organizations’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3, 4, 1998.
R. Barnett, ‘Linking teaching and research: a critical inquiry’, Journal of Higher Education, 63, 6, 1992, p. 634.

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[1] Journal of Management Education, 1998, pp. 444–5.

[2] N. Postman, Technopoly: The Surrender of Culture to Technology, Vintage Books, New York, 1993.

[3] R. A. Lanham, The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1993, p. 227.

[4] Postman, op. cit., p. 5.

[5] Ibid, pp. 183–5.

[6] Ibid, p. 198, italics added.

[7] M. J. Reddy, ‘The conduit metaphor: a case of frame conflict in our language about language’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1979/1993.

[8] H. A. Innis, The Bias of Communication, The University of Toronto Press, Toronto, 1991; I. Angus, ‘The materiality of expression: Harold Innis’ communication theory and the discursive turn in the human sciences’, Canadian Journal of Communication, 23, 1998, pp. 9–29.

[9] N. Postman, The End of Education: Redefining the Value of School, Vintage Books, New York, 1996, p. 174.

[10] Ibid.

[11] G. Lakoff and M. Johnson, Metaphors We Live By, The University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1980.

[12] C. Lankshear, M. Peters and M. Knobel, ‘Critical pedagogy and cyberspace’, in H. A Giroux, C. Lankshear, P. McLaren and M. Peters (eds), Countemarratives: Cultural Studies and Critical Pedagogies in Postmodern Spaces, Routledge, New York and London, 1996, p. 185.

[13] Reinventing Undergraduate Education: A Blueprint for America's Research Universitieshttp://notes.cc.sunysb.edu/Pres/boyer.nsf

[14] Ibid, pp. 26–7.

[15] Interpersonal Computing and Technology: An Electronic Journal for the 21st Centuryhttp:// www.helsinki.fi/science/optek/1996/n2/gibson.txt

[16] Postman, 1993, op. cit., p. 124.

[17] J. L. Morrison, H.-S. Kim and C. T. Kydd, ‘Student preferences for cybersearch strategies: impact on critical evaluation of sources’, Journal of Education for Business, May/June, 1998, pp. 264–8.

[18] Ibid, p. 264.

[19] Ibid, p. 268.

[20] Angus, op. cit., p. 15.

[21] H. A. Innis, The Press: A Neglected Factor in the Economic History of the Twentieth Century, Oxford University Press, London, 1949, p. 5.

[22] Angus, op. cit., pp. 16–17.

[23] Ibid.

[24] Ibid, p. 22.

[25] Reddy, op. cit.

[26] Angus, op. cit., p. 21.

[27] Gibson, op. cit., p. 8.

[28] H. Menzies, Whose Brave New World?: The Information Highway and the New Economy, Between the Lines, Toronto, 1996, p. 22.

[29] Journal of Computer-Mediated Communicationshttp://www.ascusc.org/jcmc/vol3/issue2/lombard.html

[30] Angus, op. cit., p. 26, underlining added.

[31] R. W. Gibbs, Jr, The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, p. 320.

[32] J. A. Cuddon, A Dictionary of Literary Terms, Andre Deutsch, London, 1977, p. 394.

[33] Gibbs, op. cit., p. 324.

[34] Ibid.

[35] Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit., p. 40.

[36] Gibbs, op. cit.; R. A. Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, University of California Press, Berkeley, 1991. Synecdoche is a figure of speech ‘in which the part stands for the whole, and thus something else is understood within the thing mentioned. For example, in “give us this day our daily bread”, “bread” stands for the meals taken each day. … synecdoche is common in everyday speech. In “Chelsea won the match”, Chelsea stands for the Chelsea football team’ (Cuddon, op. cit., pp. 676–7).

[37] J. Der Derian, ‘Simulation: the highest stage of capitalism?’, in D. Kellner (ed.), Baudrillard: A Critical Reader, Blackwell, Cambridge, MA, 1994, pp. 189–207.

[38] Ibid, p. 194.

[39] Ibid, p. 196.

[40] Ibid, p. 202.

[41] HyperPostmodern Culturehttp://jefferson.village.virginia.edu/pmc/issue.196/epstein.196.html

[42] R. J. Swieringa and K. E. Weick, ‘Management accounting and action’, Accounting Organizations and Society, 12, 3, 1987, pp. 293–308.

[43] K. E. Weick, Sensemaking in Organizations, Sage Publications, California, 1995.

[44] G. B. Stewart, ‘EVA™: fact and fantasy’, Journal of Applied Corporate Finance, Summer, 1994, pp. 71–84.

[45] C. Y. Baldwin and K. B. Clark, ‘Capital-budgeting systems and capabilities investments in U.S. companies after the Second World War’, Business History Review, 68, 1994, pp. 73–109.

[46] B. G. Carruthers and W. N. Espeland, ‘Money, meaning, and morality’, American Behavioral Scientist, 41, 10, 1998, p. 1388.

[47] Ibid.

[48] Innis, op. cit.

[49] Angus, op. cit.

[50] Menzies, op. cit.

[51] Gibson, op. cit.

[52] U. Eco, Travels in Hyperreality (W. Weaver, trans.), Harcourt Brace, San Diego, 1986.

[53] R. D. Hines, ‘Financial accounting: in communicating reality, we construct reality’, Accounting, Organizations and Society, 13, 3, 1988, p. 257.

[54] C. Cohn, ‘Sex and death in the rational world of defense intellectuals’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 12, 4, 1987, pp. 687–90.

[55] Ibid, pp. 689–90, underlining added.

[56] Ibid, underlining added.

[57] Ibid, p. 690.

[58] Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit.; G. Lakoff, ‘The contemporary theory of metaphor’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, pp. 202–51; G. Lakoff, Moral Politics, University of Chicago Press, Chicago, 1996.

[59] Summarized in Lakoff, 1993, op. cit.

[60] S. Dunn, ‘Root metaphor in the old and new industrial relations’, British Journal of Industrial Relations, 28, 1, 1990, p. 1.

[61] Lakoff, 1993, op. cit., p. 203.

[62] L. M. Walters-York, ‘Metaphor in accounting discourse’, Accounting, Auditing and Accountability Journal, 9, 5, 1996, p. 45.

[63] S. L. Winter, ‘Transcendental nonsense: metaphoric reasoning and the cognitive stakes for law’, University of Pennsylvania Law Review, 137, 4, 1989, pp. 1105–1237.

[64] Lakoff, 1996, op. cit.

[65] S. I. Miller and M. Fredericks, ‘Perceptions of the crisis in American public education: the relationship of metaphors to ideology’, Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, 5, 2, 1990, pp. 67–81.

[66] Postman, 1996, op. cit., p. 174.

[67] A. Klamer and T. C. Leonard, ‘So what's an economic metaphor?’, in P. Mirowski (ed.), Natural Images in Economic Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1994, pp. 20–51.

[68] Ibid, p. 31.

[69] Ibid.

[70] Ibid, p. 33.

[71] Ibid, p. 40.

[72] Ibid.

[73] D. A. Schon, ‘Generative metaphor: a perspective on problem-setting in social policy’, in A. Ortony (ed.), Metaphor and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1993, p. 254.

[74] D. C. Korten, When Corporations Rule the World, Kumarian Press and Berrett-Koehler Publishers, San Francisco, 1995.

[75] Ibid, pp. 261–2.

[76] G. Soros, ‘The capitalist threat’, The Atlantic Monthly, 279, 2, 1997, p. 45.

[77] D. J. Goldhagen, Hitler's Willing Executioners: Ordinary Germans and the Holocaust, Vintage Books, New York, 1997, p. 14.

[78] Ibid, p. 35.

[79] Schon, op. cit.

[80] Reddy, op. cit.

[81] Lakoff and Johnson, op. cit.

[82] Lakoff, 1993, op. cit.

[83] Korten, op. cit.

[84] Goldhagen, op. cit.

[85] A. Harrington, ‘Metaphoric connections: holistic science in the shadow of the Third Reich’, Social Research, 62, 2, 1995, p. 378.

[86] B. Gates, The Road Ahead, Penguin, New York, 1996.

[87] This, itself, is metaphorical. See J. G. Carrier, ‘Introduction’, in J. G. Carrier (ed.), Meanings of the Market: The Free Market in Western Culture, Berg, Oxford, 1997, pp. 1–67.

[88] D. Holland and N. Quinn (eds), Cultural Models in Language and Thought, Cambridge University Press, Cambridge, 1987.

[89] http://darkwing.uoregon.edu/~rohrer/iclcnf4.htm

[90] T. J. Louwers, W. R. Pasewark and E. W. Typpo, ‘Silicon Valley meets Norwalk: tell your company's story online’, Journal of Accountancy, August 1998, p. 20.

[91] Reddy, op. cit.

[92] The literature to which students are referred comprises Reddy, op. cit.; C. Forceville, ‘IBM is a tuning fork: degrees of freedom in the interpretation of pictorial metaphors’, Poetics: Journal of Empirical Research on Literature, the Media and the Arts, 23, 1995, pp. 189–218; Walters-York, op. cit.; and J. H. Amernic, ‘“Close readings” of Internet corporate financial reporting: towards a more critical pedagogy on the information highway’, The Internet and Higher Education, 1, 2, 1998, pp. 87–112.

[93] See, for example, the special issue on ‘Virtual Organizations’, Journal of Computer-Mediated Communication, 3, 4, 1998.

[94] R. Barnett, ‘Linking teaching and research: a critical inquiry’, Journal of Higher Education, 63, 6, 1992, p. 634.

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