Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Contemporary work is increasingly animated by expectations of passion, freedom, creativity, and the ability to put personal resources “into play.” Across diverse sectors, workers are encouraged to mobilize affect, as well as their subjectivities and desires, as central components of their work. Drawing on the pioneering debates on play at work (Butler et al., 2011; Costea et al., 2005; Fleming, 2005; Sørensen & Spoelstra, 2012) and “free labor” (Beverungen et al., 2015; Terranova, 2012), this sub-theme invites a critical discussion about how workers are asked to perform creativity, play, and self-expression within labor regimes that constrain and often fail to compensate them. The term “free,” in this perspective, denotes both unpaid labor and the idealized freedom of autonomy and self-expression (Armano & Murgia, 2019). We see this duality as central to understanding emergent configurations of work in which enthusiasm and the playful-affective register become key mechanisms of value production while also intensifying uncertainty, control, and the blurring of boundaries between work and life.

In the fields of labor and organization studies, the debates on passion at work have shown that even the notion of “passion” does not refer to a single, clearly definable phenomenon, since it encompasses contradictory meanings, combining sensations of both pleasure and pain (Armano et al., 2022; Gherardi et al., 2007). On the one hand, many workers experience their labor as deeply tied to identity, belonging, and affective investment. On the other hand, these same engagements often entail unpaid or underpaid work, and an increasingly totalizing intrusion of labor into everyday life (Scharff, 2016). These dynamics are reshaping work into a configuration marked by creative aspiration and prolonged precariousness, where the pursuit of meaningful work is entwined with insecurity, self-discipline, and normalized forms of exploitation (Ross, 2009).

The entanglement of free labor done with passion with promises of creativity and freedom raises pressing questions about the politics and ethics of contemporary work where workers’ sense of self and self-expression are conveyed by putting life itself to work (Fleming, 2012; Morini & Fumagalli, 2010) as individuals are drawn into labor regimes that harness imaginative, emotional, and relational capacities that offer limited protection against insecurity and exclusion. To address these dynamics, media and cultural studies have introduced the concept of “playbour” (Kücklich, 2005), capturing how practices of self-expression, experimentation, and collaboration become embedded within institutional and technological infrastructures oriented toward capital accumulation. Such insights resonate strongly across creative industries and knowledge work (Steedman & Brydges, 2023), academic labor (Butler & Spoelstra, 2020), as well as emotional and caring occupations (Benschop et al., 2013), and a wide range of digitally mediated activities (Oechslen, 2025). The tensions between playful, voluntary, affective engagement and organizational appropriation of this engagement expose novel forms of inequality, exploitation, and dispossession, often inflected by intersectional hierarchies along lines of gender, class, caste, migrant background, and occupational status (Peticca-Harris et al., 2025).

Against this backdrop, it becomes essential to examine how workers exercise agency, collectively organize, and enact different forms of resistance within such ambivalent labor regimes. Studies of project-based creative work highlight how extreme deadlines, milestone pressures, and cultures of passion produce forms of neo-normative control that significantly constrain overt resistance, as workers strive to preserve employability and reputational capital across short project cycles (Peticca-Harris et al., 2015). Resistance may thus take subtle, indirect, or relational forms, taking forward a critique from positions not fully captured by the organizational norms and expectations (Norbäck, 2021). At the same time, research on playful resistance also reveals how creative and affective practices may unsettle managerial logics, widen spaces for critique, and generate alternative modes of relation and conviviality, especially when overt collective mobilization is difficult (Alexandersson & Kalonaityte, 2018; Crossa, 2013; Nagar, 2019). Tactics such as exchanging experiences between colleagues, comic appropriation, embodied performance, and prefigurative experimentation can disrupt dominant narratives and reconfigure individual and collective forms of agency in organizational contexts (Mezihorák & Murgia, 2025; Ølgaard, 2015). Bringing these research strands together allows for a richer theorization of how different forms of resistance emerge, circulate, and are constrained within organizational contexts where passion, creativity, and freedom are ideologically celebrated yet materially exploited.

We invite submissions that engage with questions such as:

• How do contemporary organizations mobilize play, passion, and affect in ways that naturalize unpaid or underpaid labor?

• How does the interplay of free labor and precariousness reshape the production of subjectivity and agency?

• How do institutional, technological, and/or economic infrastructures organize the extraction and valuation of creativity and passion?

• What forms of inequality emerge through labor regimes that rest on passion and voluntary engagement?

• What tensions arise as workers navigate gaps between self-expression and the organizational capture or the commodification of their playful-affective labor?

• How do labor regimes built on passion and voluntary engagement reproduce or contest intersectional inequalities within organizations, particularly along lines of gender, sexuality, race, class, caste, migrant background, and occupational status?

• Can the ambivalence of free labor generate openings for resistance, collective action, alternative organizational forms, or new solidarities?

• What conceptual or methodological approaches can illuminate the shifting boundaries between play, freedom, and coercion in work?

To support inclusivity, this sub-theme will be held in a hybrid format. Sessions will integrate online and onsite participation through structured dialogues, paired discussants, and interactive formats designed to cultivate collective reflection across geographical and institutional contexts.
 

• Alexandersson, A., & Kalonaityte, V. (2018). Playing to dissent: The aesthetics and politics of playful office design. Organization Studies, 39(2–3), 297–317.
• Armano, E., Morini, C., & Murgia, A. (2022). Conceptualising precariousness: A subject-oriented approach. In J. Choonara, R. M. do Carmo, & A. Murgia (Eds.), Faces of precarity: Critical perspectives on work, subjectivities and struggles (pp. 29–43). Bristol University Press. https://doi.org/10.51952/9781529220094.ch003
• Armano, E., & Murgia, A. (2019). Travail gratuit. Les zones grises des relations de travail et d’emploi: Un dictionnaire sociologique. Teseo.
• Benschop, Y., van den Brink, M., Doorewaard, H., & Leenders, J. (2013). Discourses of ambition, gender and part-time work. Human Relations, 66(5), 699–723.
• Beverungen, A., Böhm, S., & Land, C. (2015). Free labour, social media, management: Challenging Marxist organisation studies. Organization Studies, 36(4), 473–489.
• Butler, N., Olaison, L., Sliwa, M., & Spoelstra, S. (2011). Work, play and boredom. Ephemera: Theory & Politics in Organization, 11(4), 329–335.
• Butler, N., & Spoelstra, S. (2020). Academics at play: Why the “publication game” is more than a metaphor. Management Learning, 51(4), 414-430. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507620917257
• Costea, B., Crump, N., & Holm, J. (2005). Dionysus at work? The ethos of play and the ethos of management. Culture and Organization, 11(2), 139–151.
• Crossa, V. (2013). Play for protest, protest for play: Artisan and vendors’ resistance to displacement in Mexico City. Antipode, 45(4), 826–843.
• Fleming, P. (2012). “Some might call it work… but we don’t”: Exploitation and the emergence of passions. Ephemera, 12(3), 259–272.
• Fleming, P. (2005). Workers’ playtime? Boundaries and cynicism in a “culture of fun” program. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 41(3), 285–303.
• Gherardi, S., Nicolini, D., & Strati, A. (2007). The passion for knowing. Organization, 14(3), 315–329.
• Kücklich, J. (2005). Precarious playbour: Modders and the digital games industry. Fibreculture Journal, 5.
• Mezihorák, P., & Murgia, A. (2026). Representing and organising the solo self-employed in Europe: The emergence of a ‘relational representation’ from the combination of prefigurative and contentious politics. Organization, 33(3), 438-457. https://doi.org/10.1177/13505084241310282
• Morini, C., & Fumagalli, A. (2010). Life put to work: Towards a theory of life-value. Ephemera, 10(3–4), 234–252.
• Nagar, R. (2019). Hungry translations: Relearning the world through radical vulnerability. University of Illinois Press.
• Norbäck, M. (2021). Glimpses of resistance: Entrepreneurial subjectivity and freelance journalist work. Organization, 28(3), 426–448.
• Oechslen, A. (2025). ‘Freelancers must be able to put up with all types of clients’: Affective labour and precarious subjectivities in remote platform work. Organization, 32(7), 1020–1036.
• Ølgaard, D. M. (2015). Play, politics, & the practice of resistance. Journal of Resistance Studies, 1(1), 119–146.
• Peticca-Harris, A., Weststar, J., & McKenna, S. (2015). The perils of project-based work: Attempting resistance to extreme work practices in video game development. Organization, 22(4), 570–587.
• Peticca-Harris, A., Murgia, A., Alberti, G., & Ivancheva, M. (2025). Intersectionality and precarious subjectivities: Within and beyond labour and organisational perspectives. Organization, 32(7), 933–953.
• Ross, A. (2009). Nice work if you can get it: Life and labour in precarious times. NYU Press.
• Scharff, C. (2016). The psychic life of neoliberalism: Mapping the contours of entrepreneurial subjectivity. Theory, Culture & Society, 33(6), 107–122.
• Sørensen, B. M., & Spoelstra, S. (2012). Play at work: Continuation, intervention and usurpation. Organization, 19(1), 81–97.
• Steedman, R., & Brydges, T. (2023). Hustling in the creative industries: Narratives and work practices of female filmmakers and fashion designers. Gender, Work & Organization, 30(3), 793–809.
• Terranova, T. (2012). Free labor. In T. Scholz (Ed.), Digital labor: The internet as playground and factory (pp. 33–57). Routledge.