Following the recent return to text & talk as a valid research site for metaphor, this study is concerned with the situated and emergent use of metaphor in business decision making. To establish that metaphor indeed is a valuable resource in business decision making, the general objective of this study is to account for how metaphor use is employed in the context of business meetings in achieving the discoursive goals of the decision making process. Employing the Metaphor-Led Discourse Analytic approach developed by Cameron, this study examines linguistic metaphors in naturally occurring workplace discourse of a Hong Kong-based web development company. Given the specific context of the research site, and the 'linguistic', 'social' and 'cultural' aspects of metaphor which have hitherto been understudied, this study also addresses a number of secondary objectives.

First, by virtue of the authentic spoken data collected for the purposes of this study, a linguistic product analysis of metaphor is aimed at detailing how metaphor manifest itself linguistically in the context of web development decision making.

Second, while a lot of attention has been extended to the ideational utility of metaphor, the affective utility has not been analysed in the same leave of detail. This discrepancy thus prompted this study to report on the affective and interpersonal ends for which metaphor is employed during the decision making process.

Finally, as the discourse dynamics approach to metaphor also affords analysis of the import the 'socio-cultural' context has for the emergence of metaphor, this study questions what the relevance of systematic metaphor is for decision making, and how the idiosyncrasies of the discourse community affect the content, purpose and form of the business meetings. Further to those objective, the analysis of the discourse dynamics reveals the motivated and structural use of metaphor in activity types; expounds metaphor shifting as a key strategy for alterity management; and details the patterns in use of systematic metaphor as partly structuring the discoursive practices conducive to and constitutive of the decision making process.