PE in the Academic World I

It's been a busy few weeks at the more scholarly/conference end of the Play Ethic's interests. I did my first academic seminar as Visiting Fellow at York University's School of Management - very enjoyable and substantive. They've given me a list of the significant questions asked at the seminar - a few of the significant ones are in extended post below - which I'll endeavour to answer over the next few weeks.

Working on Play: A Dialogue on the Play Ethic

With Pat Kane, Steve Linstead and contributions from Andy McColl, Rob McMurray Sebastian Vos and Ed Wray-Bliss,.

On October 6th 2005, to inaugurate Pat Kane as a Visiting Fellow in the Critical Management Studies Research group of the Department of Management Studies at the University of York, Pat gave two presentations to staff, students and invited guests. One was on the role of the modern shkolar, developing the discussion in Chapter 6 of The Play Ethic (pp 204-8 see also Himanen 2001), in the context of what Pat was going to do over the coming years at York and beyond; the other outlined the key arguments of the book as a whole. In response to the latter, there was a dialogue led by Steve Linstead, Professor of Critical Management in the Department. We reproduce that dialogue, edited and expanded after the event, and some of the other key questions posed, below.

Rob McMurray: Before I start, I’d just like to thank Pat for his presentation and make the point that for me the book’s great strength is its commitment to bringing together sharp observation of contemporary socio-economic-cultural phenomena and new developments in science with a sustained and wide ranging effort to respect theory and ground its deliberations in philosophical reflection that has been historically worked through from classical formulations to current cutting edge challenges.

Steve Linstead I’d like to echo that. I think it is this respect for scholarship, rather than just empiricism or method, that differentiates this book from so many others that will populate the bookstores of airport terminals – Gibson Burrell’s Heathrow Organization Theory – and gives us valuable material to work with and from as it challenges us to develop a new and meaningful approach across the social sciences. It’s an important project and it will mean that the book continues to be discussed, seriously, for some time to come which is what it merits and why Pat’s appointment is for 5 years – in the first instance, of course! I’m delighted that the University of York and the Department of Management Studies have been supportive of this bold vision.

My first question, Pat is one about point of view. It’s a common assumption that play is a luxury, something we can do when we can afford the time, the toys, the tools and technology or the investment in skill or sociability required. Accordingly, reflecting on play and adopting a subject position that allows us to read, narrate or even author the world in terms of play implies a degree of privilege – perhaps a Western, middle-class perspective. The question then is .. can play can be relevant at all to child labour in 3rd world sweatshops, those dying of AIDS in sub-Saharan Africa, the victims of 4th world famine, the global underclasses identified by Bauman and Castells that appear to be the necessary fallout of capitalism, those oppressed not just by totalitarianism but by the everyday terror of genocide?

Steve Linstead: So if what you’re saying is that play is ontological, and that it unites mammals as simply engaged with reality as Gregory Bateson’s otters and reflexively critical about how that reality is represented as Jacques Derrida, our question becomes how do socio-political conditions distort its forms and possibilities? Is play a potential source of emancipation, of resistance, of stimulating human potential and bridging the ontical and the metaphysical – and if it is how best can we possibly attempt that?

Rob McMurray: Could come in here and I press you then to be a bit more specific on how do we enable those at the bottom of the corporate ladder to realise their capacities and selves through play? Even in organisations that are creating the new play commons (such as the BBC) there are armies of cleaners, often immigrants, whose lives are not in-play when it comes to organisational and wider life except in the sense that they are subject to the fates of commercial gods.. They are unempowered and may be working for a subsistence wage. In the absence of an immediate economic or technological revolution what can a play ethic offer them?

Steve Linstead: The next question I’d like to raise is that of the relation of play to self and identity. One of the shadows cast over our modern understanding of the character of the player identity is Kierkegaard’s outline of the aesthetic life as a style of disengagement in part one of Either/Or. For Kierkegaard’s Don Juan type of character, the point of the aesthetic life was to refuse all commitment, but also to take no responsibility for that – the triumph of the player gliding through relationships was not simply to seduce, but to then unseduce the lover into breaking off the relationship and being happy to do so, so that the player could slip free without any guilt being attached for the betrayal or break-up. Sartre sought to combat this bad faith through angst, Levinas through reconfiguring alterity, but neither was a player as such. How can we combat address the power of the received 19th century prejudice against play as being superficial and evasive and present a
vision of play as ethically responsible?.

Rob McMurray: I’d like to come on this question of authenticity if I can. You talk about authenticity being a construct. You note that once we realise it is a construct we no longer have to be constrained by it. Could not the play ethic be read as a tract on authenticity - albeit fluid and multiple - but a prescription (Pat Kane's prescription?) for authenticity nonetheless?

Steve Linstead: Somehwat relatedly to this discussion, a question you yourself initiate in the book is the question of audience, of play as display, and I’d like you to expand on that theme a little if you would. Guy Debord made the situationist position clear in arguing that we live in a society of the spectacle, where Marxist alienation is not merely from the objects of production but from the unfolding of reality itself, from which we are largely unattached and look on. Baudrillard took the point further arguing that we don’t just look on at reality because we cannot know what it is independently of our being in it and acting it out – but such a reality is merely a simulacrum of signs, symbols and information that elicits us to participate in particular ways that realise its illusory aspects – we might be alienated, but we aren’t alienated from anything knowable, and we are engaged in reproducing simulacra. So for Debord spectation is important, and for Baudrillard it is more like spectaction – but the point of both is that we perform, that play is play for, that there are audiences even if they are only other players. Perhaps the sort of reality TV that is Big Brother captures this simultaneity. But the question is, if play is performance, how do we arrive at an ethics of display? If play is performative, is it just another form of work that takes us back to a modified work ethic?

Steve Linstead: If we can turn to technology for a moment, we are used to the dualism characterised by the sort of technological determinism that disturbed Marx on the one hand, and the utopia of technological possibility that excited the same Marx on the other, as you note in the book. We have perhaps become used to a more modified prostheticism that sees us extending human capability by means of artifical enhancements rather than by revolution, but such a cyborg vision does raise the question of what it means to be human and whether we are becoming post-human.  Social-technological change as studied, for example, by actor-network theorists argues that objects have agency and that humans are part-objects themselves. If we are going to play with technology, are we thereby compelled to play with what it is to be human and non-human? And in working that boundary, is the play ethic a messy ethic, as John Law might put it?

Steve Linstead: When we turn more directly to organizations and management practices, it is disappointing to find that in the past extremely promising critical analyses have foundered against the problem of changing large organizations. Even in flat organizations, perspectives such as feminism and gendered critique have struggled to avoid becoming part of a new discursive regime of more sophisticated exploitation and control as part of what Hardt and Negri call immaterial labour. As a result it is often argued that approaches based on such critical thinking are only possible in small, organic organizational forms, or slower moving public sector bodies where market pressures are not so powerful as to prevent the occasional eddy forming, Is this true of the play ethic? Can it work in large organizations and the private sector without becoming another fad or fashion to stimulate short term market creativity?

Steve Linstead: An important theme in the book is the developing information age, to borrow Castells` terminology. I’d like to focus on one aspect of that now. If it is true that new network forms of communication can lead both to new distributed forms of surveillance and control but also to new distributed forms of authority and democracy, how can the play ethic help us to avoid the one and embrace the other as we play across technological forms? And as the role of leadership is going to be significant for managing any transition in formal organizations as as we currently know them, does this imply a new style of leadership with  a new skill set  for which we should be training and developing managers – a sort of open source leadership?

Steve Linstead: Just one more question from me. You’ve hinted that in talking about the work ethic we are in fact invoking a multiplicity of work ethics, and that the play ethic may itself have multiple dimensions. But I’d like to stick with the opposition implied between the two at the moment. Towards the end of the book you expand a little on the possibility of another ethic, a Care ethic, that you see operating more alongside the Play ethic in your own life than the work ethic. But perhaps its my old-fashioned sense of structural equilibrium that suggests that if this is so, there must be an antinomous ethic operating to suppress it in the present. What then is the opposite of care? I’d like to suggest that it is a War ethic, one that underpins the idea of legitimate war, that allows allies to invade a country that hasn’t attacked them, and that renders terrorism illegitimate whilst simultaneously rendering pacificism unpatriotic. Of course, such an ethic works hand-in-hand with the work ethic in the military industrial complex – and if this is true it both gives us an idea of the size of the task of inaugurating an episteme in which the play and care ethics might have the upper hand, but also underlines the importance of such a project. Would you agree?

Rob McMurray: If I could pick up on the relationship pf the play ethic to that of care, it is certainly one of the most interesting aspects of the book from a social policy perspective, especially with regard to our altered perception of the latter once it is moved from the realms of imposition and work. Specifically, the idea that care may form part of the subjective expression of self in-play offers a very different perspective on the role of the carer and the processes of caring. Yet, as a responsibility (within your own scheme), and thus potentially an imposition, can individual subjectivities be fully at play in most care relationships and processes. I'm think, for example, of: the husband left to care for the partner with dementia, the prison officer for the offender, the parent for the unwanted child, the nurse for the abusive patient...?

Ed Wray-Bliss: It seems to me that you are doing something similar with the idea of the 'play ethic' that Marx did with the concept of 'labour'.  For instance Marx used 'labour' to signify and celebrate a process where human beings sought to explore their potentiality and creativity, to stretch themselves and make themselves anew.  He criticised the alienation of people from this sense of their own potentiality, the way that labour in capitalist organisations became colonised by and limited to the reproduction of capital rather than the creation or realisation of 'self'.  And your concept of the play ethic seems to celebrate the same sense of human agency as a celebration and recreation of human potentiality - and this is very welcome.  A difference however seems to be that where Marx, by using the concept of labour - a term also rooted in economic or organisational realms - directed his critique at the need to transform capitalist organisations such that all labour could be unalienated,you seem to clearly separate 'play' from 'work' and see them as separate realms.  My question is where does this move leave us politically?  Is the Play Ethic to be pursued (only) outside of the work organisation context?  Does this risk leaving the 'work' context unchallenged?  And if so  - if 'play' only happened in the spaces left after 'work' - wouldn't this undermine opportunities for individuals to explore and express their potentiality?

Andy McColl: With apologies, Pat, this is a three part question! The first part begins with the observation that the 'play ethic' may be something that is real for people in the cultural industries, but would have little resonance in many other sectors.  How do you deal with the issue of access to 'play' in the information age? Secondly, you claim that the play ethic is realisable in a 'post-scarcity' society in which the internet can be seen as an enabling medium. However, the argument could be made that scarcity was largely overcome with industrialisation in the 19th century, and it would be more accurate to describe the western industrialised democracies as an example of 'planned scarcity' where one's access to the resources of society is dependent upon where one sits in the socio-economic hierarchy.  In this scenario the play ethic in one sense is not generalisable, and the medium of the internet takes on a darker tone as a form of control premised upon old forms of industrial organisation - workers, vans and warehouses!  How do you overcome these kind of objections in your book? Finally, in your talk you made reference to scenario planning as a form of play drawing upon some of the experiences of companies like Shell etc. In fact, scenario planning (as far as I'm aware) developed out of military contingency planning and was picked up by the oil companies. Given the continuing close relationship between guns and oil as illustrated in the Gulf War, have you any comments?.

Sebastian BVos: I wonder if you could focus on the ethical issues of the play ethic in areas where ethics has perhaps had a higher and more specific profile such as gene-modification and stemcell research. Do you believe that the role of play should be limited in such areas where ethical standards have not yet been agreed on?

Sebastian Bos: If I could follow up on that, because many managers of bio-tech companies find themselves operating in different cultural settings with various culturally relative ethical standards. What implications do such variations have for a play ethic?

Rob McMurray: Finally, can I take advantage of my position as Chair and steal the last question which I suppose is the big one - how do you prevent the notion of play ethics becominge more than just a potentially lucrative guru fad?