Play at work: continuation, intervention and usurpation

Sørensen, Bent Meier; Spoelstra, Sverre

doi:10.1177/1350508411407369

Cited by 80 publications

(92 citation statements)

References 28 publications

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“…While studying the employment practices and relationships in these firms, where previously informal arrangements were being considered for formalization, the manifestations of humour emerged as important to understanding the empirical material being gathered (Ackroyd and Thompson, 1999). This emergent realisation, that humour was important to understanding our findings, reflects the experience of others who have written about humour (Collinson, 2002;Grugulis, 2002) and related topics (Sørensen and Spoelstra, 2012).…”

Section: The Research Studymentioning

confidence: 95%

“…It is found in much, if not all, human social organization but is also highly context-specific (Critchley, 2002;Palmer, 1994). In the employment context, humour and forms of humorous play have been discussed as autotelic (Sørensen and Spoelstra, 2012), often engaged in for its own sake and without specific purpose. It can, however, not only help to alleviate boredom (Korczynski, 2011;Roy, 1960) but also remove overt hostility from relationships, providing a 'safety valve' (Coser, 1959;Radcliffe-Brown, 1940) that enables employees to express discontent whilst reducing pressure to address the underlying causes of their grievance.…”

Section: Humour and Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Understood in this way, humour cannot be packaged or deployed, it cannot be attributed a particular function, or set of functions (Collinson, 2002). Often autotelic (Sørensen and Spoelstra, 2012), humour cannot be directed or turned on and off by the will of management (Collinson, 2002;Fleming, 2009;Warren and Fineman, 2007) and managerial attempts to enhance staff productivity by creating 'staged corporate humor' can be problematic, generating cynicism among employees suspicious of management motives 2005, p. 288). This suggests something of the potential disruptive influence of humour, especially where managers attempt to increase the degrees of formality.…”

Section: Humour and Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

Mallett

Wapshott

2012

British J of Management

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Use policyThe full-text may be used and/or reproduced, and given to third parties in any format or medium, without prior permission or charge, for personal research or study, educational, or not-for-prot purposes provided that:• a full bibliographic reference is made to the original source • a link is made to the metadata record in DRO • the full-text is not changed in any way The full-text must not be sold in any format or medium without the formal permission of the copyright holders.Please consult the full DRO policy for further details. This paper presents in-depth qualitative research on three small professional service firms whose owner-managers sought to introduce greater degrees of formality in their firms' working practices and employment relationships. We focus on humour as an ambiguous medium of informality, yet viewed by owner-managers as a tool at their disposal. However, while early studies of humour in small and medium-sized enterprises support such a functionalist view, our findings indicate its significant limitations. We argue that humour obscures but does not resolve disjunctive interests and it remains stubbornly ambiguous and resistant to attempts to functionalize it. Our findings contribute to studies of humour in small and medium-sized enterprises by challenging its utility as a means of managerial control or employee resistance. They also contribute to studies of employment relationships by exploring humour's potentially disruptive influence within the formalityinformality span, especially as small and medium-sized enterprises seek greater degrees of formalization with implications for how those relationships are conducted and (re)negotiated on an ongoing basis.

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Section: The Research Studymentioning

confidence: 95%

Section: Humour and Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

Section: Humour and Organizationsmentioning

confidence: 99%

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Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

Mallett

Wapshott

2012

British J of Management

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“…Examples include; organizational governance and leadership games (Westphal, 1998), the game of internal organizational politics (Donnellon, Gray, & Bougon, 1986), or to describe the normative rules-of-the-game for career advancement in occupations of professions (Prasad, 2013;Raelin, 2008). Even when viewed in the aggregate all of these approaches still leave MOS with a general dearth of effort in this area (for exceptions see Dandridge, 1986;Meier Sorenson & Spoelstra, 2012).…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 99%

Implications of limited investor attention to customer–supplier information transfers

Zhu

2014

The Quarterly Review of Economics and Finance

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We examine the (dis)incentive effects created by the respective tax systems to invest in human capital in Atlantic Canada and compare this to a select group of provinces from the rest of Canada. While findings show a steady decline in effective tax rates through the years, thereby creating an incentive effect to invest in post-secondary education, disproportionately higher rate gap differentials in the Atlantic Provinces, on average, combined with negative comparative statics reveal a somewhat different undertone. The counterproductive nature of the competing policies effectively nullifies any status quo argument for education or tax policy in the Atlantic Provinces, when compared to their brethren. The graduate retention rebate provides some solace to the narrative in helping to alleviate early tax burdens and equalize returns, but is difficult to claim effectiveness in assuaging any monetary windfall associated with migration. IntroductionThe goal of this paper is to assess the (dis)incentive effects created by the provincial tax systems for human capital investment in Atlantic Canada. Our test subjects are university graduates, but we note that such methodology could be applied to any level or subset of the population that possess human capital deemed scarce and productive, in the economic sense. We do not purport to suggest that university graduates are more important in the economic well being of an economy than, say, skilled trades or college graduates, e.g., and encourage one to think of our case as a subset of a larger sample of possibilities. Our presumption, like our goal, is simple; namely, an empirical investigation of incentivizing the tax system in Atlantic Canada remains an unexplored possibility for strategic policy implementation to retain and recruit scarce resources in the market for human capital. We use the impact on effective tax rates (ETRs) and rates of return as our policy litmus test and explore by empirical and simulation analysis the unilateral exploitation of a select number of provincial tax systems. Some may claim that this work puts the * Collins would like to acknowledge the support of the CRS-SSHRC institutional research grant at St. Francis Xavier University in helping to complete this research.proverbial cart before the horse, as it were, since to attract workers a province needs the requisite infrastructure and such may not be currently present at the appropriate level(s) to warrant an increase in the supply of skilled labour. To that end, we suggest that a more accurate assessment (or, at least, a plausible alternative) might be akin to a "chicken or the egg" argument; namely, which comes first? We leave this debate up to the interested reader for now, and focus on establishing the empirics of the analysis in an effort to add the requisite fodder for a more informed discussion.While previous research has examined the disincentive effects created by the tax system for, e.g., university and college graduates (see, for instance, Burbidge et al., 2012), the current study is diff...

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“…This rhetoric acknowledges that to avoid instrumentalization, management has to treat human dignity as its ultimate precondition and end (Pirson, 2017;Trittin, Fieseler, & Maltseva, this In the following, I therefore deliberately exclude from discussion play at work, organizational play, or serious play (Sørensen & Spoelstra, 2012;Statler, Heracleous, & Jacobs, 2011), as well as innovation and design games, gamestorming, LEGO® SERIOUS PLAY®, and similar current uses of games, play, and toys to facilitate rationally accountable creativity in organizations (Deterding, 2015, p. 38, 47;Hannula & Harviainen, 2016). While both are receiving significant attention in management research, they overwhelmingly constitute serious games and playful design, not gamification (Deterding, 2015a).…”

Section: The Two Futures Of Gamification In Managementmentioning

confidence: 99%

Gamification in Management: Between Choice Architecture and Humanistic Design

Deterding

2018

Journal of Management Inquiry

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Gamification in management is currently informed by two contradicting framings or rhetorics: the rhetoric of choice architecture casts humans as rational actors and games as perfect information and incentive dispensers, giving managers fine-grained control over people’s behavior. It aligns with basic tenets of neoclassical economics, scientific management, operations research/management science, and current big data-driven decision making. In contrast, the rhetoric of humanistic design casts humans as growth-oriented and games as environments optimally designed to afford positive, meaningful experiences. This view, fitting humanistic management ideas and the rise of design and customer experience, casts managers as “second order” designers. While both rhetorics highlight important aspects of games and management, the former is more likely to be adopted and absorbed into business as usual, whereas the latter holds more uncertainty, but also transformative potential.

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Play at work: continuation, intervention and usurpation

Cited by 80 publications

References 28 publications

Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

Informality and Employment Relationships in Small Firms: Humour, Ambiguity and Straight‐talking

Implications of limited investor attention to customer–supplier information transfers

Gamification in Management: Between Choice Architecture and Humanistic Design

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