Keep Your Head in the Clouds and Your Feet on the Ground
145As shown in the examples above, financial management normally
involves a series of financial procedures of control whose task is to guide
operations and lay out how an organization uses its resources. These
mechanisms include controls on expenditure – specifying who can spend
what and with whose authority, controls on financial assets – for example,
who records bills received and who banks them, exercising budgetary
control – who can spend how much and on what, and what expenditure
needs special permission, controls on human resources – who can recruit
and for what roles and what permissions are needed, controls on physical
assets – for example, who can authorize the sale and lease of buildings or
equipment.
Conclusions
The conceptual metaphors discussed here seem to show that an intellectual
activity known as financial management can be perceived as a multi-level
and interdisciplinary triadic collection of specialist knowledge-practice-
language whose smaller components are deeply entrenched in the physical
experience of manipulating physical objects. Moreover, seemingly highly
abstract and logically advanced tasks of a financial manager such as
creating a strategy, planning future events and controlling financial
operations reflect the way a human body handles simple things such as
relocation of stones or shells. In fact, very complex and uncertain abstract
processes must be reduced to physical objects if they are to be counted,
measured, manipulated and managed. The act of measurement provides
security; if we know enough about something to measure it we almost
certainly have some control over it (Martin 2010). In other words,
financial managers must keep their feet firmly on the ground and their
heads in the clouds while building business constructions.
The use of conceptual metaphors in the language of financial
management indicates that by basing our reasoning on solid financial data,
fair accounts of past events and objective appraisal of the present situation,
we are able to arrive at reliable extrapolations in business, forecasting
future occurrences, making profit and avoiding risks. From this
perspective, it becomes obvious that financial management involves
creativity and imagination, but these cognitively-based, intellectual,
decision making processes emerge as a result of careful planning of
budgets, rigorous analysis of financial statements, strict control over
business operations. All of these activities are shaped and conditioned by
the limitations of the human body and our interactions with the
environment such as picking up objects, counting things, keeping them in