Social and Behavioral Sciences Commons^™

Corporate Warfare Or Corporate Kinship? The Effects Of Military & Familial Metaphors On Japanese & American Organizational Culture, Joan Flora

Masters Theses & Specialist Projects

This study was undertaken to determine the dominant cultural metaphors at work in American and Japanese organizational culture, to examine the ways in which each society interprets these metaphors, and to assess the importance of the metaphors relative to intercultural communication. Using a combination of qualitative content analysis, rhetorical criticism, contextual analysis, and non-participant observation, two of the most dominant metaphors in both cultures, business-as-war and business-as-family, were discovered and examined. The research data comes from a variety of books, scholarly and popular articles, pamphlets, unpublished papers, films, and miscellaneous documents. These materials cover many disciplines: communication, history, popular culture, …