Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Organizations can be imagined as vibrant areas of human interplay, shaped and sustained through language and often constituted by communicative acts. Whether in the carefully choreographed rituals of performance reviews or the improvised exchanges of team meetings, in the strategic bluffing of competitive rivalry or the exuberant hype surrounding new industries and technologies, organizational life is animated by communicative games whose stakes are anything but trivial. Erving Goffman (1969) described actors’ moves and countermoves and their motives in everyday interactions as expression games; Clifford Geertz (1972) used the Balinese cockfight, a particularly cruel sort of game, to ponder the broader symbolism and social dynamics specific to a culture; and Michel Foucault (1987) probed into the ensemble of rules that justify valid knowledge in games of truth. Studies of workplace games (e.g., Burawoy, 1982), organizational gamification (e.g., Butler & Spoelstra, 2024), or “fun management” (Fleming & Sturdy, 2009) reveal the importance of games in forming community, elevating status, promoting social cohesion and cooperation for some, while for others, they provide an opportunity for subversion and resistance, as well as for reinforcing exclusion and competition (Cameron, 2022; Ybema & Horvers, 2017).

Central to organizational and institutional lives is what Wittgenstein (1953) calls language games (Sprachspiele). Here language is an active medium through which social realities are constituted, contested, and transformed, instead of a mere neutral tool that represents internal thoughts or external facts. Embedded in “forms of life,” language consists of contextual practices governed by explicitly or tacitly shared, though always potentially changing, rules. Language games describe how the meaning of words arises from their use within particular social activities bounded by conventions, expectations, and interpretive repertoires. In fact, modern organizations are constellations of interlocking language games played by diverse, human and nonhuman, actors. Using a language may thus involve performing speech acts (Austin, 1962), constructing sociality (Burke, 1966), and constituting organizational realities through situated communicative practice (Schoeneborn et al., 2019).

From this perspective, it becomes crucial to understand the specific habits, routines, scripts, rituals, and rhythms that govern organizational communication, to recognize them as rules, and to be aware of the status of the players in relation to them. Different professional groups, organizational units, and hierarchies play their respective and collective games with their own terminologies, grammars, and evaluative standards (Maguire & Hardy, 2009; Phillips & Oswick, 2012). Analyzing discourse, rhetorical tropes, narratives, and frames can reveal how linguistic play constrains and enables agency and social action (Green & Li, 2011). Linguistic forms and styles enable firms to manage identity threats (Wang et al., 2016), initiate change (Li, 2024), influence competitive dynamics (Guo et al., 2020), and adapt organizational culture (Srivastava et al., 2018). The unobtrusive language games also “play” us by shaping premises (Green et al., 2009; Harmon, 2019; Li, 2023) and operating as mythical truth (Li, 2017), thus fixing our “performance” and furnishing intended and unintended consequences as natural organizational and institutional realities. Semiotics is a particularly foundational approach for uncovering how signs, symbols, and multimodal artifacts operate as vehicles of institutional meaning (Li, 2017; Zhao, 2017), revealing the often-invisible rules that govern organizational language games.

When considering communicational rules, the dialogic turn in Management and Organization Studies (MOS) could be seen as providing a rulebook for organizational scholars by emphasizing the presence of plural voices that reciprocally navigate fluid organizational landscapes (Izak et al., 2024). The dynamic interlocutions among active human sense-makers allow the dialogic game to be meaningfully played, impacting organizational community-building, employee participation, and other dialogue-dependent phenomena. Yet, within this paradigm, certain “moves” prove more challenging. The habitual reproduction of formal scripts and taken-for-granted assumptions, such as those subject to (neo)normative control, often calls for an alternative rule set. These rules tend to revolve around monologic mechanisms that enable unilateral predefinition and solidification of meaning (Izak et al., 2022). Beyond explicit speech, silence, ambiguity, and nonverbal cues constitute their own communicative games, particularly in contexts of normative control. Awareness of these rules is a precondition for being a proficient player, or for participating meaningfully at all. What monologic and dialogic communicational games, or any combination of these, do people play in today’s workplace?

The games of language and communication are evolving with new and complex forms of hidden rules as digital platforms and algorithmic systems transmit, reformat, rank, and generate messages. McLuhan’s (1964) insight that the form of a medium influences the meaning and effect of a message is ever more relevant. Multimodal communication, where verbal, visual, aural, and spatial texts jointly shape what is perceived as legitimate and desirable, is growing in importance (Biscaro et al., 2025; Meyer et al., 2018). The role of generative artificial intelligence in management education (Izak et al., 2025) and organizational change (Oswick, 2024) warrants renewed interest in ontological and epistemological questions related to human-AI interactions, theoretical reflections on authorship, authenticity, and agency, and methodological experimentations on a range of analytical approaches to study texts, from qualitative analysis to computational linguistics and machine learning tools.

This sub-theme aims to foreground the plurality of communicative forms (dialogic, monologic, scripted, improvised) and the performativity and formative power of language in shaping organizing, power relations, and symbolic meaning making. We are particularly interested in how language games are played, resisted, or reconfigured within organizational contexts shaped by hierarchy, technological mediation, cultural diversity, and epistemic inequality. Likewise, examining the roles of the players or proposing innovative approaches to identifying the rules of these language games is of interest.

We especially welcome internationally and culturally diverse conceptual, empirical, and methodological contributions that engage with (but are not limited to) the following themes:

• Dialogic language games: conflict and collaboration, control and resistance

• Monologic language games: bureaucratic, autocratic, and (neo)normative settings

• The politics of communicative competence: who gets to play, who sets the rules?

• Theoretical, methodological, and/or empirical elaborations of language games

• Silence, ambiguity, and nonverbal cues in workplace culture and normative control

• AI and algorithmic agents as participants in organizational and institutional language games

• Language games in organizational change and learning, among others, driven by digitalization and AI

• Resistance, subversion, and counter-language games by marginalized groups  

• Differences in the rules of language games among markets, industries, and institutional arenas

• Formal versus informal language games in organizations and institutions

• Multimodal semiotic processes that underlie the rules of language games

• Materiality, spatiality, and temporality of language games

 
We are deeply grateful to Cliff Oswick, Peter Case, and Sierk Ybema for their generous guidance and invaluable input in developing this proposal.

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