Play and Organizations

Abstract

There is a long tradition in western ethics tending to delimit all those phenomena that might be clustered under the rubric of play to childhood. When playing is allowed to enter the adult world it is, as a rule, delegated to the realms of leisure and recreation. Work and play, it seems, describe activities and practices which belong to different mental and social domains. Nowhere else is such a stance reflected more clearly than in the administrative disciplines where the study of play is conspicuous by its absence. Apart from a few sporadic attempts playing as the object of study has remained alien to organizational analysis. This is regrettable, particularly in the light of the central importance which the concept of play has assumed in almost the entire space of the social and human sciences (Erikson, 1963, 1978; Axelos, 1964; Winnicott, 1971; Bateson, 1972).