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Sub-theme 76: Serious Play as Resonant Organizing: Atmospheres, Attunement, and Intercorporeality

Convenors:
Wendelin M. Küpers
Corvinus University of Hungary, Hungary
Matt Statler
NYU Stern School of Business, US
Rita Tóth
Corvinus University of Budapest, Hungary

Call for Papers

Call for short papers (pdf)

Across contemporary organizations, serious play is increasingly invoked as a means for fostering creativity, collaborative sense-making, and adaptive learning (Beech et al., 2004; Celestine & Yeo, 2021; Scharp et al., 2023; Statler et al., 2009, 2011). In line with the EGOS Colloquium 2027 theme, this sub-theme examines serious play as a transformative mode of organizing, one that enables or generates embodied attunement, caring and resonant co-presence, and creative atmospheres, allowing people to relate, sense, and act differently. We especially welcome contributions that challenge reductionist accounts of play, experiment with alternative “rules of engagement,” and offer relational, creative, or re-embodied perspectives on organizing in playful serious ways.
However, organizational uses of play are frequently framed through instrumental and technocratic logics where play is deployed to enhance productivity, engineer innovation on demand, or generate measurable outputs (Butler & Spoelstra, 2024; Proyer & Sendatzki, 2026). Such framings risk stripping play of its embodied vitality, atmospheric embeddedness, and emergent ambiguity. Such instrumentalist use is reducing it to forms of alienating pseudo-play that obscure its relational and resonant dynamics and ethical potential for meaningful transformation.

In doing so, the sub-theme advances a processual and phenomenologically grounded understanding of play as a site of organizing, rather than merely an intervention or technique.

Play unfolds as an emotionally charged and symbolically rich mode of organizing. It renders visible otherwise hidden processes of role and identity negotiation and power realignment (Tóth & Wieszt, 2025).

These processes of collaborative creativity rely on fine-grained bodily, sensorial, spatial, and atmospheric attunements (Satama et al., 2021) that constitute the conditions for authentic and generative serious play.

Drawing on process-philosophical and phenomenological orientations and ontologies of relational embodiment (intercorporeality), this sub-theme invites scholars to explore play as co-creation and relational event (Küpers, 2017). Such play emerges through bodily encounters, material affordances, spatio-temporal arrangements, and atmospheric tonalities.

We aim to advance theories of play by attending to microrhythms, affective atmospheres (Anderson, 2009), and resonances (Rosa, 2019) through which play becomes more intensive, meaningful, and ethically charged.

Resonance, understood as a momentary relation in which bodies, materials, and temporalities mutually respond, offers a powerful counterpoint to accelerated, disembodied, and performance-driven organizational life (Küpers, 2021). Seeing serious play as a resonant mode of being-together highlights how it can foster care, creativity, vulnerability, and expanded possibilities of co-presence.

Organizational life is increasingly virtual or hybrid, digitally mediated, and atmospherically fragmented. Such conditions reshape how bodies meet, how resonances arise, and how play is enacted and experienced. In such technologically mediated environments, intercorporeality becomes attenuated as bodies are extended, fragmented, muted, or atmospherically thinned through digital interfaces (Jørgensen & Holt, 2019). Understanding how serious play emerges, transforms, or breaks down under these conditions is essential for imagining more generative, ethical, and inclusive organizational futures.

Accordingly, we especially welcome work that explores how play unfolds, transforms, or deteriorates in hybrid and digitally mediated organizational contexts where intercorporeality is disrupted and resonance becomes more elusive.

We would highlight but not limit contribution to the following indicative sub-questions:

1. Phenomenologies of Embodied Resonance & Play

  • How does resonance emerge as a lived embodied experience in serious play, and which embodied markers (breath rhythms, gaze synchronies, and postural alignments) signal shifts or mark transitions from coordination toward deeper attunement?

  • How do sensations of irritation, friction, dissonance, or vibrational intensity fragment and disrupt or enrich the unfolding field of play?

2. Spatial, Material & Atmospheric Shaping of Play

  • How do spatial arrangements, material artifacts, and atmospheric qualities afford and shape embodied experience and sense-making in play, including how different atmospheric tonalities (joy, tension, and safety) influence how play unfolds?

  • How can researchers access atmospheric dynamics through embodied, sensory, or phenomenological fieldwork?

3. Embodied Attunement & Play

  • How do bodily and cultural practices foster, inhibit, or distort attunement necessary for meaningful play, and how do sensory modalities (e.g., movement, gesture, rhythm, touch, sound, and multisensory interplay) shape or disturb embodied attuned co-presence in play?

  • How can phenomenological research and embodied methods illuminate microprocesses of attunement in play?

4. Hybrid & Digitally Mediated Play

  • What forms of attunement are gained or lost in hybrid or digitally mediated play, and how do asynchronous rhythms, split attention, and partial co-presence reshape its atmospheric and relational conditions?

  • How do digital fatigue, desynchronization, or atmospheric thinness and asymmetries influence (dis-)engagement or breakdowns of play?

5. Critical and reflective questions, ethics, vulnerability, and power

  • How do ethical orientations shape and stabilize moments of vulnerability and attunement in play, and what happens when these stabilizing points become fragile, drift, or contested?

  • How do power asymmetries and managerial instrumentalization shape whose bodies set the pace and tone of play, and what forms of embodied resistance arise in response?

  • How are atmospheres and resonance politically manipulated, and how does this affect the possibilities of serious play?

We welcome contributions that explore how atmospheres, attunement, and resonance shape the emergence, transformation, and breakdown of serious play. The sub-theme invites conceptual, empirical, and methodological innovative work engaging with emergent, improvisational, and paradoxical forms of play within contemporary organizational life. We particularly encourage interdisciplinary, integrative, and practice-based approaches that employ or connect phenomenology, process theory, organizational aesthetics, affect studies, anthropology, sociology of work, design research, and “more-than-human” perspectives. Sessions will be designed as embodied and interactive workshop spaces that foster dialogue, experimentation, and developmental feedback, in line with the spirit of sustained and engaged scholarly exchange and the sub-theme’s commitment to resonance and co-presence while offering a foundation for research collaboration among participants.


References
  • Anderson, B. (2009). Affective atmospheres. Emotion, Space and Society, 2(2), 77–81. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.emospa.2009.08.005
  • Beech, N., Burns, H., de Caestecker, L., MacIntosh, R., & MacLean, D. (2004). Paradox as invitation to act in problematic change situations. Human Relations, 57(10), 1313–1332. https://doi.org/10.1177/0018726704048355
  • Butler, N., & Spoelstra, S. (2024). Playful work. In Elgar encyclopedia of organizational psychology (pp. 523–526). Edward Elgar Publishing.
  • Celestine, N. A., & Yeo, G. (2021). Having some fun with it: A theoretical review and typology of activity-based play-at-work. Journal of Organizational Behavior, 42(2), 252–268. https://doi.org/10.1002/job.2492
  • Jørgensen, L., & Holt, R. (2019). Organization, atmosphere, and digital technologies: Designing sensory order. Organization, 26(5), 673–695. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350508418805285
  • Küpers, W. (2017). Inter-play(ing): Embodied and relational possibilities of “serious play” at work. Journal of Organizational Change Management, 30(7), 993–1014. https://doi.org/10.1108/JOCM-12-2016-0267
  • Küpers, W. (2021). Inter-practices in resonance as new forms of working in organisations. In J. Aroles, K. Dale, & F. de Vaujany (Eds.), Experiencing the new world of work (pp. 13–38). Cambridge University Press.
  • Proyer, R. T., & Sendatzki, R. (2026). Examining play and playfulness at work: Current knowledge, practical applications, and future research directions. Annual Review of Organizational Psychology and Organizational Behavior, 13(1), 251–276. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-orgpsych-020924-064249
  • Rosa, H. (2019). Resonance: A sociology of our relationship to the world. John Wiley & Sons.
  • Satama, S., Blomberg, A., & Warren, S. (2021). Exploring the embodied subtleties of collaborative creativity: What organisations can learn from dance. Management Learning, 53(2), 167–189. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507620985226
  • Scharp, Y. S., Bakker, A. B., Breevaart, K., Kruup, K., & Uusberg, A. (2023). Playful work design: Conceptualization, measurement, and validity. Human Relations, 76(4), 509–550. https://doi.org/10.1177/00187267211070996
  • Statler, M., Roos, J., & Victor, B. (2009). Ain’t misbehavin’: Taking play seriously in organizations. Journal of Change Management, 9(1), 87–107. https://doi.org/10.1080/14697010902727252
  • Statler, M., Heracleous, L., & Jacobs, C. D. (2011). Serious play as a practice of paradox. The Journal of Applied Behavioral Science, 47(2), 236–256. https://doi.org/10.1177/0021886311398453
  • Tóth, R., & Wieszt, A. (2025). Exploring post-succession role transitions: A study of family day play dynamics. International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, 31(9), 2356–2380. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJEBR-10-2024-1164


Wendelin M. Küpers is Research Professor of Leadership and Organization Studies at Corvinus University of Budapest and head of the Regenerative Transformation research group. His research brings together phenomenological and processual approaches and cross-disciplinary perspectives to explore embodiment, ethics, aesthetics, and creativity in responsive and responsible forms of organizing and leadership. He has published widely in leading journals and books, including contributions to a Routledge series on practical wisdom, seeking to reorient organizing and leading toward more reflective, relational, and regenerative forms of engagement.
Matt Statler is the Richman Family Director of Business Ethics and Social Impact Programming and a Clinical Professor of Business and Society at NYU Stern School of Business. Previously, Matt served NYU’s Center for Catastrophe Preparedness and Response as the Director of Research, worked as the Director of Research at the Imagination Lab Foundation in Lausanne, Switzerland following several years as a management consultant in New York City. He completed a PhD in Philosophy from Vanderbilt University, was a Fulbright Scholar at the University of Heidelberg, and obtained Bachelor’s degrees in Spanish and Philosophy from the University of Missouri.
Rita Tóth is a post-doctoral researcher in the Department of Organizational Behaviour and Human Resource Development at Corvinus University of Budapest. Her research examines play and playfulness in organizations with a particular focus on temporality, ceremonial practices, and succession processes in family firms. Her work explores how these forms of play shape leaders’ role transitions during succession processes and contributes to the broader dynamics of the family business systems. She is currently extending her work to questions of spiritual and affective attunement in organizational play and its various modes of expression–emerging in organizational phenomena.