Afterword: Analogy all the Way Down

Abstract

Abstract This chapter argues the following. First, analogical thinking drives both thinking and organizing. Second, categorizing through analogy enables practitioners and scholars alike to extrapolate hitherto accumulated knowledge to new situations and, thus, to draw inferences. Third, demonstrating and teasing out the implications of the use of metaphorical language in both organizational life and organizational research is an important line of research. Fourth, suggestive, inspiring, and action-inducing as new metaphorical insights may be, they will yield explanatory benefits only insofar as they are further developed analytically—both metaphorical insights and theoretical abstraction matter. Thus, inspired by metaphorical descriptions, organizational researchers need to raise abstraction in order to work out in detail the core (as opposed to contingent) features of the phenomenon at hand.