Creative Metaphor, Evaluation, and Emotion in Conversations about Work

Book excerpt: This book explores the roles played by creative and conventional metaphor in expressing positive and negative evaluation within a particular workplace, drawing on interviews with 31 current and former employees of the British Civil Service. Metaphor is often used to express evaluation but relatively few studies have investigated the ways in which metaphor is used to evaluate personal emotionally charged experiences. The volume explores how metaphor serves a predominantly evaluative function, with creatively used metaphors often more likely than conventional metaphors to perform an evaluative function, particularly when the evaluation is negative or ambiguous. The findings provide a deeper understanding of the relationship between evaluation, creativity, and metaphor. Examples, including military metaphors and family metaphors, show how creativity often comes through subverting the norms of use of a particular metaphor category, or altering the valence from its conventional use. The study elucidates the myriad ways in which people push at the boundaries of linguistic creativity in their efforts to describe the qualitative nature of their experiences. Demonstrating how metaphor can be a powerful tool for the nuanced expression of complex and ambiguous evaluation, this book will appeal to researchers interested in better understanding metaphor, creativity, evaluation, and workplace cultures.