Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

We inhabit a planet reduced to ecological, political, and social debris by organized violence.

This organized violence oscillates, through the games we play, between visibility-invisibility, sensitivity-insensitivity, absent-presence, or present-absence. As allegories, games express conventions of power, domination, social structures and relations, and historical conjunctures of life worlds (Benjamin, 1928/2003; Stallabrass, 1996).  Reflecting on the game of Shatranj (chess), Indian poet Javed Akhtar asks:

This game
Why does it have such a rule
That no matter what happens
To any of the pieces
The one that is king
Must be protected from harm at all times?
Why does it have such a rule
That once a pawn leaves home
It can never return?

In this sub-theme, we attend to the games that (re)write contemporary organizational life-worlds permeated by violence, and the generous, subversive possibilities these games may perhaps offer.

Theoretical Foundations of Violence in Organization Studies

Management and organization studies increasingly examine violence in and around organizations, revealing its embeddedness in everyday practices, infrastructures, institutional logics, and inequalities (Alamgir & Cairns, 2015; Chowdhury et al., n.d.; Habiburahman & Alamgir, 2024; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016; Vijay & Saiyed, 2025). Organizations are crucial vehicles that propel violence with an “inherent coerciveness” (Malešević, 2017) that enables violence to appear, recede, or disappear. Here, organizational violence may be understood as a paradox of modernity oscillating between Weberian “absent-presence” and Foucauldian “present-absence” (Costas & Grey, 2018).

This expanding field demands deeper engagement with how organizations (re)produce and normalize violence—symbolic, structural, insensitive, or physical. Violence has distinct temporalities. While episodic or spectacle-generating instances gather immediate media attention, slow violence produces harm through an incremental, deliberative temporality, institutionalized through mundane routines that depend on “forms of delay, deferral, attrition, and accumulation” (Ahmann, 2018, p. 144). Violence also has distinct spatialities, distributed in ways that produce differential geographies of harm including enclosure, capture, ghettos, camps, occupation, and genocide (Srinivas et al., 2025). Cyberspace enables the mutability, multiplication, and anonymity of identities, alongside the possibilities of building communities—creating flexible spaces of honesty, transparency, or enhanced communicative connection, as well as dishonesty, exaggeration, polarization, or cyberbullying.

Games of Violence

Organizational practices disguise or perpetuate political, economic, and institutional violence under the banner of competitive or coercive games for innovation, efficiency, or progress. In his classic work, Manufacturing Consent, Burawoy (1979) uses “playing games” and “making out” to describe how management organized production through rules, scores, rewards, and punishment so workers experienced this labor process as a game to which they consented, rather than as exploitation. Such games mask increasing workplace suffering—alienation, tedium, anxiety, frustration, and fear—while functioning as diversion tactics (Fleming & Sturdy, 2011) that obscure institutionalized forms of bullying and exclusion.

Organizational games are rarely neutral: they reward competition, obedience, and forms of exclusion, creating strategic interdependencies (Varoufakis, 2008) that (re)produce hierarchies, strategic ambiguities, and inequalities. Performance metrics, managerial control, and market rivalry become rule systems that naturalize domination (Žižek, 2008). From extractive industries to militarized economies and digital labor platforms, such games inflict violence on marginalized communities and reinforce structural inequalities for the benefit of corporations (Banerjee, 2008; Zulfiqar, 2023). Marginalized others are constructed as abject boundary objects through violence (Kenny, 2016). Normative and legal violence illuminate how power combined with the law subjugates and derealizes immigrants, people of color, refugees, and LGBTQ+ individuals (Menjívar & Abrego, 2012; Varman & Al-Amoudi, 2016). Nevertheless, those subjugated articulate their oppression and alienation at different scales—whether in sharply identifying the “financial games” that employers trick them with, or the imperial games that slice up continents, polarize communities, create warring ethnic factions, and partition borders.

Finally, these dynamics are concretized in the institutionalized worlds of commercialized sports—the Olympics, football, basketball, cricket—which can morph into arenas of racialized, gendered, and class violence, materializing spaces fixated on competition, elitism, and the commodification of play. Corporations exploit seen and unseen labor in the global commodity chain comprising artists, software developers, and factory and logistics workers who scaffold the gaming industry (Did, 2024; Woodcock, 2019).
Understanding these dynamics requires examining how states, corporations, organizations, and transnational entities design and enforce violent rules of play that become institutionalized across organizational arenas. This sub-theme, therefore, brings together scholars interested in theorizing the Games of Violence and the Violence of Games across diverse theoretical, methodological, empirical, and pedagogical contexts.

Potential questions include:

• How, and under what conditions, does violence manifest through game-like tactics, and in what ways can play itself constitute a veiled form of violence?

• How do games and violence intersect to normalize harm in organizational contexts?

• How do organizational games shape inclusion, exclusion, bullying, and the distribution of violence across groups and geographies?

• How do forms of control—normative, bureaucratic, neo-normative—relate to violent games?

• How does organized violence manifest as a game in political, economic, and corporate settings, particularly in the Global South, where historical legacies of colonialism and extractivism continue to define the stakes and players?

• How do powerful actors write and enforce violent rules of play?

• How is violence temporally and structurally maintained and perpetuated processually in organizations?

• How do state and nonstate actors collaborate to reinforce organizational violence?

• How do marginalized groups subvert or refuse violent games, and what alternative organizing practices emerge?

• How do platform companies employ work games to organize the labor process?

• What methodological and ethical challenges arise when studying the Games of Violence and Violence of Games?

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