Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

This sub-theme examines how boundaries between work and play have been historically constructed, challenged, and transformed within organizational life. While current debates focus on issues like gamification, work-life balance, and the playfulness of digital capitalism, we contend that these trends are rooted in deeper historical tensions that remain insufficiently explored. By contextualizing how people in organizations have understood, policed, celebrated, or worried about the relationship between work and play, we uncover the contingent assumptions that continue to influence modern organizations.

The sub-theme title invokes both folk wisdom (“all work and no play makes Jack a dull boy”) and historical ideologies that sought to eliminate playfulness from “serious” business. This deliberate ambiguity reflects our interest in the tensions, contradictions, and struggles that have characterized the work-play relationship across time. This sub-theme will address several core issues, including: How have organizations attempted to harness, regulate, or eliminate playful practices? What forms of resistance, creativity, and subversion have emerged through workplace play? And how have shifting conceptions of human nature, from Johan Huizinga’s homo ludens (the playful human) to the dominant model of homo economicus, influenced organizational forms and management practices over time? How did sectors focused on innovation or creative products engage with the paradoxical tensions between “work” and “play”? How have entrepreneurs in creative and cultural industries developed business models to monetize “play” to form a profit-making enterprise? Ultimately, the sub-theme will explore how historical analyses contribute to the business and organization of play.

A historical perspective complements the central conference theme by examining the deep genealogies of modern forms and interactions of work and play, and how they have evolved. As the colloquium call notes, play sits alongside our nature as creative beings and our instrumental tendencies; play is spontaneous but can also risk becoming unrestrained, and games influence social life while encouraging creativity, innovation, resistance, and subversion. These tensions are not new. By historicizing them, we can better understand how “the rules of the game” have become ingrained in organizations, the very institutions that shape contemporary economic activities (North, 1990; Suddaby et al., 2014), and how they have evolved, been written, rewritten, and contested over time.

Themes and Questions

We welcome submissions that address any aspect of the historical relationship between work, play, organizing, and business, including, but not limited to:

• How did industrialization, scientific management (Taylor, 1911), and Protestant work ethics reshape what counted as legitimate labor?

• When and how did contemporary “gamification” emerge as a reversal—or intensification—of these historical separations?

• What historical anxieties have surrounded leisure, workplace drinking cultures, and “time theft”? How do they relate to contemporary “quiet quitting”? How does organization theory consider people beyond the homo economicus model, as “homo ludens” (Huizinga, 1949)?

Creativity, creative industries, and entrepreneurship: the role of imagination

• How did professional management’s claims to scientific legitimacy and the delegitimization of “mere entertainment” industries create hierarchies between serious work and frivolous play? (Taylor, 1911)

• What assumptions about competition, rationality, and success are embedded in management simulations, board games, and role-playing exercises?

• Are all forms of imagination playful? How do we interpret “disciplined imagination” (Weick, 1989), or indeed the methodological “historical imagination” (Decker et al., 2025)?

Organized play at work: company culture through the ages

• How have training technologies like gamification evolved from analog to digital forms, and what do they reveal about changing ideas of work and play?

• How have organizations used ceremonial events, office parties, sports competitions, and social clubs to build culture, foster loyalty, or manage workers (Decker, 2014; Gillett & Tennent, 2025)?

• What can the history of corporate paternalism, welfare capitalism, and team-building exercises tell us about the politics of organized fun (Hassard, 2012)?

Resistance through play: shifting the boundary of acceptability

• How have workers used humor, pranks, informal games, and sabotage to resist managerial control? When does playfulness become transgressive or pose a threat to organizational order (Decker, 2014; McKinlay, 2002)?

• What can shop-floor culture, pageantry, and historic forms of “playing with the rules” teach us about the relationship between play, innovation, and power (Decker et al., 2025)?

Performance and Business of Play

• How have businesses historically presented themselves through spectacle, entertainment, and game-like displays (Gillett & Tennent, 2025; Tennent & Gillett, 2022)?

• What role have trade fairs, department store theatrics, advertising contests, and industrial exhibitions played in making commerce entertaining (Wong & McGovern, 2023)?

• How have cultural entrepreneurs formed profit-seeking enterprises in the “play” sector through the manufacture and retail of cultural goods (Wong & McGovern, 2023)?

• How have entrepreneurial pursuits in the “toys” and “play-things” sector been reframed as profit-seeking (Giacomin & Lubinski, 2023)?

We invite submissions from scholars interested in both qualitative and quantitative research, including interviews, document-based studies, archival research, and oral histories. We especially welcome papers that engage with historical sources, such as company archives, worker diaries, management journals, photographs, and material artifacts, to situate their analyses within specific organizational contexts and time periods.

By introducing historical perspective to modern debates about gamification, workplace culture, the limits of acceptable organizational behavior, and the business of play, this sub-theme deepens understanding of how today’s organizational games developed, what alternatives were available, and what opportunities remain for reimagining the relationship between work and play.
 

• Cappellaro, G., Compagni, A., & Vaara, E. (2021). Maintaining strategic ambiguity for protection: Struggles over opacity, equivocality, and absurdity around the Sicilian mafia. Academy of Management Journal, 64(1), 1–37. https://doi.org/10.5465/AMJ.2017.1086
• Decker, S. (2014). Solid intentions: An archival ethnography of corporate architecture and organizational remembering. Organization, 21(4), 514–542. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508414527252
• Decker, S., Giovannoni, E., & Plakoyiannaki, E. (2025). A microhistory of architecture: Historical imagination and the Bauhaus. Management & Organizational History, 20(4), 453–477.
• Giacomin, V., & Lubinski, C. (2023). Entrepreneurship as emancipation: Ruth Handler and the entrepreneurial process “in time” and “over time,” 1930s–1980s. Business History, 65(7), 1159–1178.
• Gillett, A., & Tennent, K. D. (2025). Foundations of managing British Olympics: Institutions through time (Frontiers of Management History). Emerald. https://doi.org/10.1108/978-1-80262-095-5
• Hassard, J. S. (2012). Rethinking the Hawthorne Studies: The Western Electric research in its social, political and historical context. Human Relations, 65(11), 1431–1461. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726712452168
• Huizinga, J. (1949). Homo ludens: A study of the play-element in culture. Routledge & Kegan Paul.
• Huizinga, J. (2006). The nature and significance of play. In K. Salen & E. Zimmerman (Eds.), The game design reader: A rules of play anthology (pp. 96–120). The MIT Press.
• McKinlay, A. (2002). “Dead selves”: The birth of the modern career. Organization, 9(4), 595–614. https://doi.org/10.1177/135050840294005
• North, D. C. (1990). Institutions, institutional change and economic performance. In J. Alt & D. North (Eds.), Political economy of institutions and decisions. Cambridge University Press.
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• Suddaby, R., Foster, W. M., & Mills, A. J. (2014). Historical Institutionalism. In M. Bucheli & R. D. Wadhwani (Eds), Organizations in Time: History, Theory, Methods (pp. 100–123). Oxford University Press.
• Taylor, F. W. (1911). The principles of scientific management. Harper & Brothers.
• Tennent, K. D., & Gillett, A. G. (2025). Explicating archival ethnography: Helmut Käser’s business trip. Management & Organizational History, 20(4), 478–499. https://doi.org/10.1080/17449359.2024.2423092
• Tennent, K. D., & Gillett, A. (2022). A brief history of the FIFA World Cup as a business. In S. Chadwick, P. Widdopp, C. Anagnostopoulos, & D. Parnell (Eds.), The business of the FIFA World Cup (1st ed.). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003121794
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• Wong, N., & McGovern, T. (2023). Entrepreneurial strategies in a family business: Growth and capital conversions in historical perspective. Business History, 65(3), 454–478. https://doi.org/10.1080/00076791.2020.1807952