Call for Papers

Call for short paper (pdf)

The metaphor of a game and game playing in the human and social sciences is often associated with the later work of Wittgenstein (1953), whose key concept of a language game refers to a way of using words that is tied to a specific activity or form of life. Different practical forms of life—such as formal organizing, party politics, or judicial decision-making—entail different language games, each with its own distinctive, nonreducible rules. Indeed, forms of life provide the practical, lived contexts in which language games and their associated rule-governed behavior emerge and make sense. There is no single essence of language; rather, language is a collection of many such games, each governed by socially learned norms and practices that are contextually situated. For Wittgenstein, there are no language games without rule-governed behavior.
In this sub-theme, we seek to explore formal organization as a language game, a form of life, and a rule-governed activity. We seek to assess what happens to formal organization when this language game is approached via a cluster of concerns indicative of other, different, and potentially incompatible language games. For the later Wittgenstein, such a move carries inherent dangers, as “nonsense” can arise from a failure to use an expression in a way that has a point or purpose within a given context of use. So, let us proceed with care.

Minimally put, formal organization refers to the system of consciously coordinated activities, including a structure of positions, roles, principles, and communication necessary to realize any purpose that calls for the combined action of a number of persons (Barnard, 1938/1968; Brown, 1970). Given that purposes differ, we should expect that the nature of formal organization designed to fulfill them will likewise differ. In that sense, formal elements are not reducible to a set of elementary mechanisms but rather constitute an assemblage united by family resemblances in the Wittgenstein sense, as partially overlapping grammars oriented toward particular purposes. Since all games require rules to work, despite not sharing the exact same rules, a plurality of purposes implies a plurality of forms of formal organization rather than a single uniform model. It also suggests that formal organization calls for inventiveness and experimentation in both the design and ongoing reconfiguration of the organizational system, so that it remains suited to the fulfillment of any given purpose.

This may seem an uncontroversial statement, and yet it has become a source of considerable contestation within organization studies (see, e.g., Casler, 2020; du Gay, 2020; du Gay & Lopdrup-Hjorth, 2016; du Gay & Vikkelsø, 2017; Monteiro, 2017; Vikkelsø, 2015). As Stinchcombe (2001) argued, formality has frequently been viewed negatively in the social sciences, with many positioning themselves on the side of “substance” in opposition to “the formal.” For its critics, formality and formal organization are often represented as oppressive of liberty, autonomy, creativity, innovation, and so forth. This representation has been a key feature of popular management discourse for much of the past 40 years (Hamel & Zanini, 2020; Peters, 1992, 1994).

A questioning of formal organization can also be detected in more recent debates about “the end of the corporation” or the “uberization” of the economy (Davis, 2016; Davis & Sinha, 2021), on the one hand, and the engagement with “alternative organization,” on the other (Dahlman et al., 2022; Parker et al., 2014). In the former, formal organization is deemed anachronistic in light of advances in technology-enabled marketization; in the latter, it is viewed as antithetical to the realization of freedom and to the purposes of progressive politics beyond market managerialism. Buoyed by such representations, public and private organizations have, through successive waves of reform, sought to downplay formal elements in favor of deregulation, delayering, and informality. Similarly, notions of co-creation, networks, and ecosystems have gained widespread support across the political spectrum, while planning, hierarchy, and authority are often negatively coded.

It is not clear, however, that organizing for “innovative” or “progressive” purposes eliminates the need for formal organization. On the contrary, such aims may be seriously undermined by what Freeman (1970/2013), in the context of social movements, termed “the tyranny of structurelessness.” Indeed, there are recent signs that efforts to downgrade or otherwise erode formalization may have reached their limits. Faced with multiple crises—pandemics, climate change, war, financial bubbles, and wealth opacity—governments, as well as “progressives,” no longer seem fully convinced that formal organization can be dispensed with without adverse effects. How can increasingly complex and distributed activities be effectively coordinated without shared standards? How can opportunity and responsibility be balanced without formal boundaries, safeguards, and systems of accountability? Similar reconsiderations are unfolding globally.

While Western economies have tended to limit state intervention in favor of market-driven, network-based models, China has adopted a hybrid approach, combining top-down steering and formal planning with bottom-up market dynamics. Might it be that coordinated, formal organization is not the enemy of, but the central means of pursuing societal missions? Recalling Wittgenstein, can we meaningfully play organizational games at all—whether conservative, progressive, or alternative—without formal rules and elements?

Careful study of new organizational forms increasingly suggests that they are not as free from formalization and bureaucracy as is often assumed and indeed celebrated (Mungenast, 2025), echoing prior work on “post-bureaucracy,” which reached similar conclusions (Thompson & Alvesson, 2005). Self-organizing teams, for instance, rely on new formalization mechanisms, such as task prioritization and time frames. While traditional titles may be removed and an egalitarian culture professed, formal authority relations can be transmuted into new centers of informal, unaccountable power. In some cases, classic formal principles are substituted with new ones through alternative modes of formalization. In others, the obscuring of formal authority enables the proliferation of less observable power relations, rendering informality a smokescreen for unquestioned hegemony. Similarly, the oft-repeated claim that digital technologies render hierarchical and formal coordination obsolete is increasingly met with concern that such technologies may simply reconfigure power, shifting it from formal institutional structures to opaque, black-boxed algorithms.

In this sub-theme, we invite submissions exploring, for example:

• The role of formal organization in addressing contemporary challenges: organizational, institutional, or societal

• Empirical cases, as well as historical or theoretical studies of formal organization, including work that addresses issues pertinent to public, private, or civil society organizations

• The types, processes, dynamics, or consequences of formal organization, as well as the effects of limited or absent formalization

• The formal dimensions of new or alternative organizational forms, including the challenges faced by hybrid organizations characterized by clashing or ambiguous formalizations

• The rules that make organizational games possible

• Barnard, C. (1968). The functions of the executive. Harvard University Press. (Original work published 1938)
• Brown, W. (1970). Organization. Heinemann.
• Casler, C. (2020). Reconstruction in strategy and organization: For a pragmatic stance (PhD Series No. 14.2020). Copenhagen Business School. https://research-api.cbs.dk/ws/portalfiles/portal/60912679/catherine_casler_phd_series_14_2020.pdf
• Dahlman, S., Mygind du Plessis, E., Husted, E., & Just, S. N. (2022). Alternativity as freedom: Exploring tactics of emergence in alternative forms of organizing. Human Relations, 75(10), 1961–1985. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267221080124
• Davis, G. F. (2016). The vanishing American corporation: Navigating the hazards of a new economy. Berrett-Koehler.
• Davis, G. F., & Sinha, A. (2021). Varieties of Uberization: How technology and institutions change the organization(s) of late capitalism. Organization Theory, 2(1), 1–17. https://doi.org/10.1177/2631787721995198
• du Gay, P. (2020). Disappearing formal organization? How organization studies dissolved its ‘core object’, and what follows from this. Current Sociology, 68(4), 459–479. https://doi.org/10.1177/0011392120907644
• du Gay, P., & Lopdrup-Hjorth, T. (2016). Fear of the formal. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 3(1), 6–40. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1160658
• du Gay, P., & Vikkelsø, S. (2017). For formal organization: The past in the present and future of organization theory. Oxford University Press.
• Freeman, J. (2013). The tyranny of structurelessness. Women’s Studies Quarterly, 41(3/4), 231–246. (Original work published 1970)
• Hamel, G., & Zanini, M. (2020). Humanocracy: Creating Organizations as Amazing as the People Inside Them. Harvard Business Review Press.
• Monteiro, P. D. N. (2017). Heavier than air: The enabling role of bureaucracy in cross-expertise collaboration [Doctoral dissertation, University of Warwick].
• Mungenast, C. (2025). The rational practices of “doing order”: A Weberian practice theory of bureaucracy [Doctoral thesis, Royal Holloway, University of London]. Royal Holloway Research Portal. https://pure.royalholloway.ac.uk/ws/files/67661229/Thesis_Clemens_Mungenast_Library_Rhul_June_2025_vf.pdf
• Parker, M., Cheney, G., Fournier, V., & Land, C. (Eds.). (2014). The Routledge handbook of alternative organization. Routledge.
• Peters, T. (1992). Liberation management: Necessary disorganization for the nanosecond nineties. Macmillan.
• Peters, T. (1994). The Tom Peters seminar: Crazy times call for crazy organizations. Vintage Books.
• Stinchcombe, A. (2001). When formality works: Authority and abstraction in law and organizations. University of Chicago Press.
• Thompson, P., & Alvesson, M. (2005). Bureaucracy at work: Misunderstandings and mixed blessings. In P. du Gay (Ed.), The values of bureaucracy (pp. 89–113). Oxford University Press.
• Vikkelsø, S. (2015). Core task and organizational reality. Journal of Cultural Economy, 8(4), 418–438. https://doi.org/10.1080/17530350.2014.954596
• Wittgenstein, L. (1953). Philosophical investigations. Blackwell.