management studies

I would first like to thank Enrico Beltramini and the editors of ephemera for giving me the opportunity to respond to the review, which I found to be a very thoughtful and balanced piece. The review raises a number of substantial issues. Most importantly, it laments a supposed absence of meta-theoretical reflection in the Handbook. My concern is that the review’s call for meta-theory is in fact not much more than an insistence on the academic and intellectual primacy of theology over what Beltramini calls the ‘secular disciplines’ of the social sciences.

Contextualization

Cederström and Fleming’s Dead Man Working, published by Zero Books, is an interesting intervention that gives us a chance to ponder a question, which should be the guiding question for aspiring public intellectuals and academics of a critical bent: Who are we writing for?

Introduction

Play is a capricious concept dragged hither and thither by its many meanings – Burke (1971) identified fifty-three different dictionary definitions of ‘play’ and thirty-nine of ‘work’. While some authors like Huizinga (1955), Sutton-Smith (1997), and Caillois (1961) have used this ambiguity to fruitfully analyse different types of play, I instead focus on the normative understandings of play (and work) within the discipline of management studies.