In this spirit we invite you to Liverpool, home of the 43^rd EGOS Colloquium 2027. Come and join the fun and discuss questions about organization and games:

• What are the games you find in the organizations you study?

• What are the effects and affects of these games; what are their temporalities, their dramas and values?

• What are the possibilities and limits of theorizing games and what are the spaces, roles, and practices involved?

• Is there an institutional logic yet to be identified around games?

• What are the politics at play; who plays fair and who governs the rules of the game?

•  And what are the stratagems, collaborations, and paradoxes that keep us in the game or out?

Liverpool is itself a city of games: from world-class football teams that make hearts beat red and blue, to race days bringing out costume play and fancy hats. We have dancing crowds cheering Eurovision song contestants and games of local Scouse banter playing out in pubs and at bus stops. Liverpool is a night-time economy of recreation and fun, street entertainment, and the famous ‘ferry across the Mersey’, of course, where crowds gather to watch the tide roll in and out to the beat of Beatlemania.

To this, we invite you all and offer the following list of suggested topics to play with – whilst not being unduly restricted to these:

Games or Play?
For Johan Huizinga we are ‘Homo Ludens’ and play defines our very being, driving passions and desires. These qualities sit alongside our nature as crafting or making-beings (‘homo faber’) and our more instrumental and acquisitive tendencies that make us ‘homo economicus’. We all have to navigate the seriousness and freedom of play at work. ‘Play’ gives room for manoeuvres in a system or technology. There is play in practices, in the trivial and the mundane, when we vie for positions, or for status and rewards within organizations. Here we calculate our moves or gently tease our colleagues, deploy feint and disguise, or try to keep our competitors guessing. These are games that can rapidly descend into cynical and Machiavellian dramas of politics. In creative industries, the play of free association and freewheeling ideas contains an impulse towards transcendence and what Gibson Burrell once called ‘Dionysian intoxication’.

In comparison to games, play is more spontaneous and less controlled, generative in its potential, veering between calls for organization but also a compulsive desire for disorganization. But there is also danger here as play always threatens to become unbound and excessive, beyond the control of management. If the play’s the thing in which to catch the conscience of a king, as Hamlet proclaimed, then it seems that with games we might even risk amusing ourselves to death.

Games as organizational events
Games are also big business. Sports clubs are tourist magnets, often with their own academies, outreach, and merchandise operations rivalling industrial corporations in value and complexity. Events – such as the Olympic Games – pose intriguing temporal questions of organizing, while also blurring the boundaries between business and politics. Quaint board games have given way to computer gaming which, in turn, drives hardware and infrastructure developments, with billions spent on e-sports, gambling, and betting on highstreets or via apps. There is also the use of games in management, education, the gig economy, and online dating – a gamification of business and everyday life, driven by social media and proprietorial algorithms, begging the question whether games are substitutes for 'old-fashioned' things such as management, planning/control, or incentive structures.

Meanwhile, we notice the effects of our often game-based captivation by the many interfaces that populate our lives. This not only produces eerily zombified experiences of others glued to screens on public transport or in lectures. As Wendy Chun and others have shown, it also heralds a new age of cognitive experience driven by affective and visual, rather than reasoned and written persuasion; algorithmically curated echo chambers rather than democratic discourse; a shortening of attention spans; and the computation of 'memories' (as shown by N. Katherine Hayles), whose effects on the polarization of public discourse, post-democratic politics as well as the possibility of plurality and compromise, are only slowly – but already painfully – becoming apparent.

"The Rules of the Game"
Rules enable and constrain, and they are therefore a key dimension of both organizing and games. Who makes the rules is typically a question of politics. State bodies vie with powerful corporations and struggle with post-national infrastructures to instil fair play in economic competition. Rules are important because they stand at the hinge of play and its shift into games. Play is often mindless, where the point is that there are no rules. Children’s play is remarkable for the way in which everyday life is re-mediated by a logic often difficult to fathom – one in which 'how to play' is being worked out at the same time. Here we might find one of the well-springs of that much sought after creativity which, however, can also tip into the asocial and amoral if let run free. The balance between constraint and the playful expression of freedom is refracted when games become contested zones of conflict for activism, grass-roots movements, and subversion.
 

Play unfolds in the boundary between the legal and illegal; it can be shaped by intimidation and coercion, but also by forces of governance that include censorship and new forms of player recognition that produce subjects through sophisticated surveillance and tracking regimes. The work of Shoshana Zuboff or Bernhard Siegert is particularly influential in the study of this kind of phenomenon and opens up organization studies to sociality at ‘the edge of chaos’ to which we can try to apply complexity theory or cybernetics.

We take a playfully open and pluralist approach to how EGOSians want to interpret and reimagine – or even play with this theme for their own purposes. We seek to promote fun, dialogue, diversity, and debate and we encourage colleagues to venture a certain spirit of playful experimentation. Some might see an opportunity to test practice theory against the logic of play and games. Others might recall the contribution of game theory or study the materialities of games. There is also an opportunity to return to the canon of organization studies. Max Weber, for example, a consummate player of the German card game ‘Skat’, famously invoked the game's rules to explain the maintenance of social life. There is also a long tradition of studying workplace games in the sociology of work and labour (i.e. Michael Burawoy) which the rise of ‘feminist game studies’ has enriched and extended via the study of new game cultures, player practices, and gaming communities (see the work of Mia Consalvo, Sherry Turkle, Bonnie Tardie, for example). We might also reflect on the recent surge of interest in the study of frames (after the work of Erving Goffman), which might point to the potential of revisiting the role of games as a form of play-making or how management might learn from the kind of sense-making associated with ‘being-in-the zone’ in sport. The rise of postcolonial/decolonial game studies is also starting to shake the dice in organization studies, drawing on scholars looking at the play of the subaltern (Souvik Mukherjee), or the mutual constitution of gaming and racialization (Tara Fickle) and ‘decolonising the games curriculum’ (Hanli Geyser), or the transgressive play with heteronormative assumptions about gender and identity (José Esteban Muñoz).

How the Game is played ...
That markets, societies, and organizations are not level playing fields is also evident from growing disparities between those who amass and control wealth, and those 'players' - human and non-human alike - who are muted, othered, or at best spoken for by others. The rendering of the natural environment, once teeming with life, as an exploitable 'standing reserve', is legitimized through theories of business. Powerful and wily actors manipulate or undercut regulative apparatuses; radically rational ideologies produce imaginaries of technological solutionism that only thinly veil other agendas, while others blatantly disregard laws and regulations, create and exploit loopholes, or engage in perfectly legal but ecologically disastrous short-termism.

This makes games also methodologically interesting, and we look forward to seeing inventive ideas and examples of how organization and organizations can best be studied with method and rigor, but also ethics and care. Organization both requires games and play, but with play it also finds its limits (if not reason!) which extends an invitation to those in the EGOS community who want to think more critically and reflexively about our own implication in the playing of an academic or publishing game, or to seek ways of making organization more serious, less playful or less gamified.

Towards Politics and the Dark Side
It is important to acknowledge that games also provided helpful metaphors to think about the organization-environment relation. Seeing an organization as part of a larger and emergent system requires understanding of the relationship between the individual games played by each organization and the wider collective game that can become reified or independent from the games we play in organizations (as Michel Cozier and Jean-Claude Thoenig argue). And with all politics, there are dark sides to games: games that appeal to the destructive, violent and depraved side of human nature and games that help cultivate an interest in the unconscious world of the id and its fantasies. If we struggle to know the truth behind games of love and seduction (Milan Kundera), what happens when games of commercial ‘love’ link—up local prostitution circles with local business start-ups and New York banks as we have seen in studies of the Vietnamese sex industry (Kimberly Hoang)? What is the nature of organization that makes this happen? The commodification of the once private sphere into AI and algorithmic calculation might also exaggerate our paranoia that our pleasures are being cultivated and organized by an alien life form giving rise to organizations of which we have little understanding or means of  control. Occupational identities might easily slip between online versions of selves, where virtual business is made on SIMS and Second Life, and back into what is left of life outside the screen, its servers and networks of digital infrastructure. The ‘datafied self’ turns Taylorism into a life hack, seeking performance enhancement through diet, spiritual, and physical upgrades. Whilst the games industry might be made up of giant multinational corporations whose form and structure of organization is familiar to us, what happens to our conception of organization when the separation between that which is serious and that which is ‘just gaming’ (as Francois Lyotard may have said) breaks down? The military, for instance, uses game consoles to train combat soldiers and business schools include game simulations to train their students how to start or run a business, while joysticks or graphic user interfaces invented for computer games have found wide-spread adaptation across industries.
 

What better place to discuss these ideas than Liverpool – 'the pool of life' – whose rich industrial and cultural heritage fuses with a diverse, creative, and open outlook to provide a stimulating and welcoming setting for the 43^rd EGOS Colloquium 2027!