Valve Rhetorical Analysis

2.5 The Political Metaphor
The political metaphor defines an organization as a group of people with different motivations and interests, who only come together to achieve a common goal or outcome. When there are divergent views in an organization, politicization can occur, as politics are an inevitable part of corporate life. Valve aims to structure its organization around being a democracy, where everyone has a say in what happens in the company. One can however also describe Valve as a technocracy, in which power or stance is linked to technological skill and competency. This is usually characteristic of a flexible firm. This metaphor describes a phenomena called coalitions, which is similar to Valve’s “cabals”, that see different types people
People are quick to resist change in an organization due to rigid mindsets and unconscious forces. Employees can become imprisoned by idealistic and favoured ways of thinking, and development can be halted through a certain way of “seeing” things actually leading to “not seeing”. Dominant visions of what a firm’s future goals are can lead to blind spots in regard to current events. Valve is a typical victim of “Group Think”, in which people tend to follow group perceptions without question, as these perceptions usually have self-sealing qualities that make them difficult to break away
A company like Valve aims to “produce” itself – in terms of its organizational structure and identity. This is referred to by Morgan as organizational autopoiesis. This can however lead to the company becoming egocentric in trying to sustain an unrealistic ideal identity, or trying to produce an identity that ultimately destroys some other important aspects of the context that they are a part of. Egocentric organizations see success as hinging on the preservation of their own narrowly defined identities, rather than evolving into a more fluid and open system. A sufficiently complex system, like Valve’s, biggest resource for change lies in the instability and diversity that comes with this complexity, and they usually get caught between many different attractors. Attractors are opportunities or plans of action that change a company’s mental attention. Chaos theorists note that such complex systems usually tend to fall under the influence of many different types of attractors and pulls in the environment, and get pulled into a state of eventual equilibrium as a result of negative feedback. When a company is pulled far away from equilibrium, usually because of disruptions in the organization, it is faced with several bifurcation points, which are forks in the road that lead to different futures for the company. Valve is currently at such a point, as it is pushed far from its equilibrium towards the