Applied Metaphors and translucent memes

There was a blog with lots of comments on performance reviews. A lot of the comments were similar to comments I have heard or made during my stint in the corporate world. What seemed to be missing (for me) from the dialogue was bringing to the foreground the implicitly applied metaphors and memes in the points and suggestions made. Here are what seem to me be a set of applied metaphors:

• Work is a race and hence the best deserve to win and get rewarded
• Value is a measurable entity
• Workers are widgets and can be categorized by value

Then there are memes that are not quite opaque but somewhat translucent:

• Uniformity is fair
• Evaluation is an industrial process
• The evaluation process can be made uniform and fair like an industrial process
• Uniformity in evaluation is good, as it is in the manufacture of widgets.

The meta meme here is the industrial revolution meme of uniform, repeatable, and directly controlled processes.

For one, there are many possible metaphors that may be applied to an organization and its human members. It can be viewed as a garden. You provide and fertile soil, add amendments, test the soil, observe for pests and other infestations. The measure of success is the harvest. There are both direct and indirect  analogs for these measurements in an organization.

For another, in performance reviews there is an associated vision-logic of the world as a set of competing groups. The competition is for resources of various kinds - economic, materials, human resources, etc. One can suggest a different  vision-logic for the purpose of human groups and human existence. That of a journey into the undiscovered country. In that journey all participants may have vital resources necessary for that journey. Then     the issue becomes not one  of competition but one of developing the available resources as one has very little notion of  what one is about to encounter in the undiscovered country.