Metaphor Research Opens New Vista on Education, Career, & Working Life

08/11/2017

Dr. Allison Creed is the lead researcher for the A-GRADES Project tasked with the goal of producing a psychometric measure of employability for university students and graduates. AGRADES—the Australian Graduate Employability Scale. Allison adopts a transdisciplinary research strategy to investigate metaphors in concepts and problems in vocational psychology (e.g., employability), healthcare (e.g., cancer), and agriculture (e.g., wine communication). Allison uses metaphor analysis developed in the discipline of cognitive linguistics. She is based at the University of Southern Queensland Toowoomba campus and is presently a Visiting Research Scholar at the University of Amsterdam Metaphor Lab Amsterdam where she studies the relationship between metaphor and employability.

Photo by Beata Ratuszniak on Unsplash

Did you know that metaphor is more than a rhetorical flourish or literary adornment? Are you aware that metaphor reaches beyond simile that describes something by making a simple comparison with something else? Do you understand the power of metaphor?

Metaphor is essential to understanding the world, the meaning of life, and communicating with other people. We humans use metaphor in our natural everyday talk with one another, in what we read and write, and in the way we gesture as we say something.

Yet, metaphorical language often goes unnoticed. For example, take the abstract concept time: “Time is money”, “Times are a changing”, “Times are tough”. Consider how often people use time in relation to a more concrete or physical experience, such as time in terms of space, distance, and movement: TIME AS AN OBJECT MOVING TOWARDS YOU i.e., “The meeting was brought forward to Monday.” This simple example should give an indication to just how much metaphor there is in every talk.

Career as Metaphor

The word ‘‘career’’ is a metaphor drawn from its origins of a course, a track, or a chariot. People often use expressions that career is a lifelong path towards a goal: CAREER IS A JOURNEY. It is difficult to talk about and think about career without using metaphors (e.g., career described as construction, as matching, or a story). These structural metaphors in an A is a B format are one way of describing a concept in terms of another. Orientational metaphors are used to organise a system of concepts by way of their relationship to each other. For instance, GOOD IS UP which underlies expressions such as climbing the career ladder and indicates an upward path to potential success. The latter can orientate positive as well as negative concepts and feelings. Now consider when these metaphors get mixed up in normal talk about career. “My career is way off track, and I’m feeling down in the dumps about it all, and have no idea how to pull myself back up and get back on track”. How many career counsellors have heard something like that? Plenty. The statement is awash with metaphors. Empathy in counselling requires an understanding of the client’s perspective and understanding metaphor is essential for comprehending the client’s perspective.

Metaphor can help, hide, and hinder career

People use metaphorical language frames to make concepts coherent and systematic as they are reliant on the person (i.e., the human body), the context (i.e., the physical environment), and the emotional and relational experience (i.e., our feelings). Metaphorical frames are a reflection of a personal world view involving deeply held attitudes and beliefs about self and others, and life experiences. Research shows how linguistic or symbolic priming with imagery using different metaphorical frames can affect the way people think, infer, or act. However, people are not usually aware of the metaphorical nature of their language that frames their perspectives. Career practitioners can assist clients to better understand their perspectives by making their language more clear and insightful (and note the metaphorical dimensions of clear and insightful).

It is important to remember that metaphor has the power to help, hide, and hinder communication. Therefore, attention to metaphorical language use is important because it can have a powerful effect on considerations, judgments, choices, and emotional responses. For example:

Landau et al (2014) used the journey metaphor to frame a possible academic identity for a sample of university students (i.e., an image of themselves as academically successful graduates). The researchers found students who were primed with the GOAL AS JOURNEY, in contrast to students primed with the GOAL AS CONTAINED ENTITY, showed increased effort for academic tasks and reported stronger academic intention.
Similarly, in the paper “Metaphor identification as a research method for the study of career” (Creed & McIlveen, 2017), conception of career and education as AN OBJECT was a dominant metaphor in students’ talk. This conceptualization gives the status of an entity (a thing) bounded by a concrete surface to a non-living object. As such, students talked about education by way of a physical action for a specific purpose as in being able to take (as in pick it up and take it away) what they had learned to apply to their future career.

The A-GRADES Project

Now under construction by the R&D team at ACCELL, A-GRADES (Australian Graduates Employability Scale) is designed for students and graduates, university personnel (e.g., career practitioners, work-integrated learning specialists), and researchers across academic fields. A-GRADES is intended to be used to ascertain personal qualities (i.e., other attributes) related to career management and employment.

Aside from competency based appraisals of a graduate’s knowledge and skills, research demonstrates factors such as self-efficacy, proactivity, and adaptability influence employability of graduates and their chance of securing decent work–and this is where ACCELL is focused on making a difference. These so-called characteristic adaptations that improve a person’s chances of working in a personally fulfilling job can be learned. For example, one of the most important factors is self-efficacy that is associated with well-defined job search strategies that target the “right job” not just “any job”. Professional career development practitioners know about these strategies and how to develop their clients’ self-efficacy. ACCELL’s R&D will sharpen the tools for improving their effectiveness and positive impact by producing a useful tool, AGRADES, for application with their clients.

The AGRADES project is funded by Graduate Careers Australia (GCA) in partnership with the Australian Collaboratory for Career, Employability, and Learning for Living (ACCELL), the National Association for Graduate Careers Advisory Services (NAGCAS), and the Career Services at the University of Southern Queensland and La Trobe University.