The Play Ethic in Paperback and Academia
What's interesting is the increasing amount of academic interest in the Play Ethic. On extended post below is a review in a journal called Organisations and People - which happily describes the book as a 'modern classic' - and downloadable here (pdf) is a very in-depth treatment of 'Play at Work: questions of historical interpretation'. I'm digesting it slowly, but excitedly - and I'm most thrilled by their conclusion:
the new mixture of play and work is an epiphany of ethical inarticulacy which manifests itself at macro and micro-cultural levels. The way in which Kane, Carse and Csikszentmihalyi, for example, propose play as an infinite possibility of being and suggest that all life experiences should be turned into ‘infinite games’ is a cultural expression of this search for a way of leaving behind the 'space of experience' of finitude and reaching new horizons of ‘infinity’. In fact, it is this idea of a world in which ‘everything might be possible’ and in which everybody is entitled to endless enjoyment (what Bruckner calls ‘the utopia of fun’), in which youth is prolonged, and in which life itself will be delivered from suffering and even mortality (and why not? what else is the current investment of hope in the promises of genetic elucidation of man's biological being?) that Taylor suggests is the essence of what he terms ‘ethics of inarticulacy’.
Well, they get that right: the play ethic is, on one level, an attempt to help us cope with our increasing ability to control and 'play with' the fundamentals of our lives - social, material, technological and biological - by developing an ethic for these burgeoning powers.
Review in Organisations and People, the journal of the Association for Management Education & Development, Volume 12, Number 2, May 2005b
The Play Ethic: A manifesto for a different way of thinking
Pat Kane
ISBN 0-333-90736-1 Pan Macmillan £12.99 Paperback 436pp
By Geof Cox
Pat Kane’s book is every bit a manifesto, railing against the Protestant work ethic and New Labour’s ‘getting people back to work’ thinking, and suggesting a new ethic to cope with an unpredictable world. It is an eclectic collection of ideas and discussion, drawing from ancient and modern philosophy, art, music, education and probably every possible discipline you can think of. (The endnotes and references run to some 79 pages – this is a seriously researched text). But far from being a deep academic treatise, it is highly readable; a book that you can skim for ideas, read in depth or skip to the topic that interests.
This is not an anti-work book as some commentators have suggested, linking it to Tom Hodgkinson's How to Be Idle or Carl Honore's In Praise of Slow; it is not about promoting laziness or slothfulness, it is about challenging some the values and assumptions that exist in our education, politics and society.
As Kane explains in an early chapter: “The core statement of the play ethic now becomes clear. We need to be energetic, imaginative and confident in the face of an unpredictable, contestive, emergent world. We need to accept the complex relationship between all forms of play, whether ancient or modern. Play’s ultimate function for humankind is to maintain our adaptability, vigour and optimism in the face of an uncertain, risky and demanding world. However, we endure a political tendency in the developed countries that believes, by and large, that work is the most functional and useful mode of human existence.”
Kane elaborates his thesis with examples from his own creative and play-full life as a pop musician, journalist and newspaper editor, consultant and activist. Some of the stories and case studies he collects on his journeys are of interest. Some of them are from unexpected sources like ‘re-imagining’ social work in Scotland, some of them are the more expected references to St Luke’s, the Reggio Emilia and Pestalozzi schools, the dot.coms and Silicon Valley.
As a frame for the dialogue, Kane uses a seven-fold typology of the main forms of play in human culture developed by Brian Sutton-Smith which show play to be as productive as it is wasteful and thus reframing the work ethic view of play as wasteful. Some of these definitions of play can be traced back into the ancient world and philosophic writings, some from more modern uses of play. The modern rhetorics are:
- Play as progress – play in education, as healthy development
- Play as imagination – play as art, as scientific hypothesis, as culture
- Play as selfhood – play as freedom, voluntarism, personal happiness – the _expression of individuality
- The ancient rhetorics:
- Play as power – the contest of players – in sport, markets, law, war, even philosophy
- Play as identity – the play of the carnival, the binding rituals of community
- Play as fate and chaos – the play of chance – gambling, risk, the cosmos at play
- …and the seventh is Play as frivolity – laughter and subversion – the puritan stereotype of play adopted by the work ethic culture
Kane expresses the hope throughout the book that the play ethic can be a bridge between results driven management and meaning driven employees in the emerging style of modern organisations. Certainly the Generation Xers and Yers who make up increasing percentages of today’s workforce have been brought up in a culture of play – gaming, play-stations and interactive technology – and we need to adopt different patterns of employment to accommodate their needs. New workers are looking for something more fulfilling and enriching – something that matches their experience. Perhaps, therefore, instead of looking for a work-life or work-play balance, we need to seek more ways to integrate the two.
Two quotations were particularly powerful for me: one from Brian Sutton-Smith who developed the rhetorics – “The opposite of play isn’t work. It’s depression.” And one from James Carse “To be prepared against surprise is to be trained. To be prepared for surprise is to be educated.”
For me this book is a modern classic. Not as predictive as Megatrends or Future Shock in its style, not as concise a comment on modern social philosophy as some of Charles Handy’s writings, but an eloquent commentary on our current and future societal needs.
Geof Cox, New Directions Ltd
