Morgan's Use Of Metaphors In The Film Norma Rae

The movie Norma Rae is about the struggle of a union employee and a factory worker, whom the movie is named after, to bring fair treatment to a factory that had been taking advantage of its workers. A factory on the brink of unionization and the conflict brought about from the struggle for a job that treated the workers like people and not just disposable parts is what drives this movie. The organization in this movie, the textile factory, shows us an insight into the different metaphors in which an organization can be described. So through these three different lenses, viewing organizations as machines, organisms and as a political system, we can analyze the workings of this fictional factory and understand its inner workings.
Morgan (1997) breaks down the analysis of organizations into three basic metaphors, the first of these is viewing an organization as if it were a machine. The machine metaphor is business as usual for the textile factory the organization that is the main focus of this movie. The biggest sign of the machine model being prevalent that any viewer would notice about the factory is the focus on efficiency. The workers are treated like part of the factory itself, not as working, living and breathing human beings. This is due the deskilling found in the workers stations in this movie. It didn 't matter what skills they had, their jobs were simple jobs anyone can do. Pull a leaver, push a part, threading an automated machine, all the jobs were designed so anyone could do it. This way if …show more content…
By seeing how this fictional factory looks like as a machine, an organism and even a political system not only can we understand this specific factory, but perhaps truly understand what a factory must have been like in that time period and even what modern organizations can be like under these lenses as