Can love conquer all in business media discourse?

An assessment of gender-specific metaphorical use

Abstract

There has been increasing interest in the use of metaphor in business media discourse, both in the nature of the metaphorical expressions and their connection with ideology. However, there has been growing recognition that the impact of gender on the production of metaphorical expressions of WAR and LOVE, two key markers of group identity in business and economics, has not been fully investigated. To explore that issue in more depth, this paper extends existing perspectives on gender-related use of metaphors by integrating a multivariate analysis that allows for a better assessment of the individual impact of the author’s sex on metaphor selection and its relation to other factors.