“All work and no play” - conceptions of work, organising and business in historical perspective

Sub-theme CfP for 43rd EGOS Colloquium in Liverpool, July 8–10, 2027

We are very pleased to announce that our sub-theme proposal for next year’s EGOS conference in Liverpool was accepted. We look forward to your submissions, and if you catch us at any conferences over the summer, feel free to ask us any questions you might have!

Convenors:

• Stephanie Decker, University of Birmingham, UK, S.decker@bham.ac.uk

• Valeria Giacomin, Bocconi University, Italy, Valeria.giacomin@unibocconi.it

• Nicholas Wong, Northumbria University, UK, Nicholas.d.wong@northumbria.ac.uk

Description of sub-theme

This sub-theme examines how boundaries between work and play have been historically constructed, challenged, and transformed within organisational 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 contextualising how people in organisations have understood, policed, celebrated, or worried about the relationship between work and play, we uncover the contingent assumptions that continue to influence modern organisations.

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 characterised the work-play relationship across time. This sub-theme will address several core issues, including: How have organisations 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 organisational 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 monetise “play” to form a profit-making enterprise? Ultimately, the sub-theme will explore how historical analyses contribute to the business and organisation 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 historicising them, we can better understand how “the rules of the game” have become ingrained in organisations, the very institutions that shape contemporary economic activities (North, 1990; Suddaby, Foster & Mills, 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, organising, and business, including, but not limited to:

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

• 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 organisation 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 delegitimisation 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)?

Organised play at work: company culture through the ages

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

• How have organisations 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 organised fun (Hassard, 2012)?

Resistance through play: shifting the boundary of acceptability

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

• 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 & Gillet, 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 artefacts, to situate their analyses within specific organisational contexts and time periods.

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

References

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, Kevin. Daniel. (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. London: 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.

Nyland, C., Bruce, K., & Burns, P. (2014). Taylorism, the International Labour Organization, and the Genesis and Diffusion of Codetermination. Organization Studies, 35(8), 1149–1169. https://doi.org/10.1177/0170840614525388

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. New York, NY: Harper & Brothers.

Tennent, K. D., & Gillett, A. G. (n.d.). Explicating archival ethnography: Helmut Käser’s business trip. Management & Organizational History, 0(0), 1–22. 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 (first edition) (1 ed.). Taylor & Francis. https://doi.org/10.4324/9781003121794

Weick, K. E. (1989). Theory construction as disciplined imagination. Academy of Management Review, 14(4), 516–53. https://doi.org/10.2307/258556

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

Convenors

Stephanie Decker, FAcSS, FBAM, is Professor of Strategy and Birmingham Business School and Vice Dean of BAM Fellows. She has contributed to interdisciplinary research that draws on historical knowledge to expand and problematise management knowledge. Her work spans methodological and theoretical issues, as well as empirical research on the role of international business in global contexts that are often underrepresented in business research, such as Africa. She was joint editor-in-chief of Business History from 2020-24.

Valeria Giacomin is Assistant Professor of Economic and Business History at Bocconi University, Milan. Her research explores the historical evolution of global business networks, emerging markets, and organizational adaptation across regions. She has published in Business History, Journal of Business Ethics and Journal of Management Studies, focusing on clustering, agglomeration, and the role of cities in the globalization of business. Her current work explores corporate strategy, branding, and legal governance through historical case studies, ranging from toy companies and global consumer industries to urban clusters and financial centers.

Nicholas Wong is Senior Lecturer in Entrepreneurship at Newcastle Business School, Northumbria University and Deputy Convenor of the Responsible Business Research Group. Nick is Associate Editor of Business History, Editorial Board Member at Academy of Management Perspectives and Editor of SAGE Business Cases in Business History. He is also Co-Chair of the Management and Business History Division at the British Academy of Management and Treasurer of the Association of Business Historians. He has published in, amongst others, Academy of Management Perspectives, Business History, International Journal of Entrepreneurial Behavior & Research, Nonprofit and Voluntary Sector Quarterly, and Journal of Management Inquiry.