The metaphor as instrument and as trap: the use of figurative models in the sociological analysis of institutions: el uso de modelos figurativos en el análisis sociológico de las instituciones

Abstract

Sociological thought has examined institutions through metaphors, and the images of the machine and the organism organized much of twentieth-century organization theory. This theoretical article assumes that metaphor is not an ornament of analysis but a constitutive component of social knowledge, and that its use must therefore be subject to standards of rigor. It distinguishes productive uses of metaphor, those that treat it as an explicit, generative and plural hypothesis, from uses that distort, when it is literalized, becomes decorative, or smuggles in normative assumptions that naturalize what is in fact socially produced. The argument is developed in relation to the three images that have organized the sociological study of institutions, the machine, the organism and, in a borrowing from cultural anthropology, the octopus, with attention to what each reveals and conceals. The examination is then extended to the digital figures that currently organize public administration discourse, the network, the ecosystem, the platform and the algorithm, and a matrix of heuristic questions is proposed for auditing the governing metaphor of a piece of research. It argues that the choice of a metaphor is a theoretical act, and that images of adaptation and survival can conceal what another figure, such as the organization understood as an instrument of domination, would expose. The aim is to draw a methodological lesson useful for institutional analysis and, in particular, for the study of the State.