Business Media on Mergers and Acquisitions: Metaphors of Evolutionary Struggle

Abstract

This second empirical part Is structured like the first one: after establishing basic lexical fields, a corpus of magazine and newspaper texts on mergers and acquisitions (M&A) is scanned for metaphoric occurrences of the units In previously established lexical fields. These comprise fighting, mating and feeding, and are combined to form an umbrella field of evolutionary struggle. The quantitative analysis again shows the fighting metaphor as having the highest number of items selected from the relevant field and to occur most frequently in the corpus, with mating and FEFWNG ranking second and third. Having thus ascertained absolute and relative frequencies, the analysis Is again broadened by a qualitative investigation into four sample texts, one from each publication in the corpus. This second part of the analysis reveals striking differences between metaphor frequencies in the overall corpus as opposed to individual sample articles. There is. furthermore, no uniform way of bracketing texts. However, the metaphoric scenario to emerge is similar in all four cases: companies are entitles in a hounded space that is subject to external pressure, forcing the companies to move in rela tion to each other to survive. Although empire-buiipinc and dancing could be alternatives to that scenario, the qualitative analysis shows that they in fact support the dominant cluster metaphors.

Penthesilea: Yes you, you and all the others. You are modern-day robber barons, whose proceedings in the world are certainly not p.c…. But when it’s about modern management, you deal with psychology and esoterics alright. You facilitate courses in … ‘Metaphors for Managers’… Only because men of your generation could not go wild in a war, you have to bumble about in the whole world.

(Johnson, 2001, pp. 31, 36)