Special issue on Work and play

Citation

(2007), "Special issue on Work and play", Journal of Organizational Change Management, Vol. 20 No. 4. https://doi.org/10.1108/jocm.2007.02320daa.002

Special issue on Work and play

Special issue on Work and play

Since, Huizinga's (1955) seminal Homo Ludens we were aware of the centrality of play to our humanity as manifested in everyday life, work including. Play, in the form of gaming was responsible for some of the largest and most complex organizational feats of antiquity: the Greek Olympic Games, and bloody Roman circus shows for the masses. But with the progress of the machinery of the industrial revolution, work has been split apart from play (and vice versa) in an ever increasing march of efficiency and rationalization (Zuboff, 1988).

Recently, a number of strands have come together to break the ''traditional'' divide between work and non-work. The flexing of workplace boundaries (with the impact of new technology and telephony – the boundaryless organization (Ashkenas et al., 2002), has created virtual offices, virtual teams and even virtual organizations. The rise of protean (Hall, 1976) and boundaryless (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996) careers; and the corresponding demand for maximizing flexibility have affected the traditional binary divide between work and extra-work domains. The work- family balance debate (and the EU legislation on working hours and related initiatives, such as the 35-hours week in France), has forced a re-examination of time and space at home and at work, with workspaces incorporating leisure elements (such as cafeteria and gyms), while the ``home office'' is rapidly becoming an integral part of the post-modern habitat, with pertinent health and safety regulations extending to cover eventualities such as accidents.

The ever expanding consumer society (having fun as a divine right) and the search for authentic experiences (living a real life as an ideal) – all combine to put forward the relationships between work and play (in line with the American colloquial: we work hard and we also play hard) as a critical aspect of contemporary working lives. Companies such as Google and Du Pont encourage employees to freely use up to 20 per cent of their formal working time to ``play'' with ideas (Mainemelis and Ronson, 2006) – a practice which has been around for a long time (3M, for example, used to pride itself as a hotbed of experimental ideas) but not as an institutionalised procedure. On the other hand, the use of play as subversion to organized work has long been noted (Roy, 1959; Fremontii, 1971), and indeed its anti-structural essence (Turner, 1974); as are its seductive qualities, so fundamental to our consumer culture (Altman, 1998). The role of play in superior ``peak'' performance and as a personality variant is central to the flow phenomenon characterized by Csikzentmihalyi (1990) and so it is to developing and maintaining creativity at work (Mainemelis and Ronson, 2006). Play as an element of mindfulness is only starting to make inroads into management practice, with the emergence of ``positive organizational scholarship'' (Cameron et al., 2005).

We concur with Mainemelis and Ronson (2006, p. 82) that ''play as a topic of inquiry is among the least studied and least understood organizational behaviours''. This special issue of JOCM wishes to address this lack by providing the scope and space to scholars in the fields of management, organization, and the social sciences in general, to comment and enlighten us on this rapidly resurging central aspect of working lives – play in its various manifestations; and in so doing, help define the field as a scholarly enterprise as well as a managerial concern. Here are some suggested topics we want to cover:

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  play and its relevance to creativity in work;

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  the sacred, spiritual, ritual aspects of play behaviour at work;

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  affect and emotions in play and their role in organizational behaviour;

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  institutionalized play: the organization of space, time and boundaries of work;

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  playfulness in organizational behaviour – the role of humour, joking behaviour, relations between the sexes;

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  play as a gendered phenomenon at work;

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  play as subversive behaviour: seductive, undermining authority;

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  the work-place (Christmas) party: role, process, implications;

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  the ethics of engaging play at the service of work;

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  organizational aesthetics as a play phenomenon;

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  play and (organizational) history; and

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  play and work as documented in the arts and literature.

Guest Editors

Dr Yochanan Altman, Research Professor, London Metropolitan University, E-mail: y.altman@londonmet.ac.uk

Professor Babis Mainemelis, Professor of Organisational Behaviour at London Business School,E-mail: bmainemelis@london.edu

Please send your abstracts to the Guest Editors (work-play@hotmail.co.uk) before October 1, 2007. If accepted, you will be notified and asked to submit the complete paper for blind review before December 30, 2007. The ''Work and play'' special issue of JOCM will appear as issue No. 4, 2008.