Instrumental Aspects of Play at Work in Information Technology Organisations
Instrumental Aspects of Play at Work in Information Technology Organisations
Conventional wisdom suggests that play is the antithesis of work. But in the information technology (IT) industry, companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft have positively integrated play into the workplace. In an era when the digital is ubiquitous and where play with IT has become commonplace, exploring the nature of play at work could shed light on the broader question of how humans exist in the world. This is an essential question for contemporary Information Systems scholarship. Drawing on the critical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I offer a narrative account of the instrumental aspects of play at work. I conducted an ethnographic study of the everyday practices of young IT professionals, revealing that workplace play has multiple instrumental aspects which are related to the temporality, spatiality, materiality and sociality of IT work practices.
play, play at work, IT Workplace, Ethnography, Critical Hermeneutics
659-675
Chughtai, Hameed
e8600973-9db8-4649-be67-def5f2a83a72
Chughtai, Hameed
e8600973-9db8-4649-be67-def5f2a83a72
Chughtai, Hameed
(2020)
Instrumental Aspects of Play at Work in Information Technology Organisations.
European Journal of Information Systems, 30 (6), .
(doi:10.1080/0960085X.2020.1854061).
Abstract
Conventional wisdom suggests that play is the antithesis of work. But in the information technology (IT) industry, companies such as Google, Facebook and Microsoft have positively integrated play into the workplace. In an era when the digital is ubiquitous and where play with IT has become commonplace, exploring the nature of play at work could shed light on the broader question of how humans exist in the world. This is an essential question for contemporary Information Systems scholarship. Drawing on the critical hermeneutics of Hans-Georg Gadamer, I offer a narrative account of the instrumental aspects of play at work. I conducted an ethnographic study of the everyday practices of young IT professionals, revealing that workplace play has multiple instrumental aspects which are related to the temporality, spatiality, materiality and sociality of IT work practices.
Text
TJIS-2018-EN-0124.R4
- Accepted Manuscript
More information
Accepted/In Press date: 17 November 2020
e-pub ahead of print date: 21 December 2020
Keywords:
play, play at work, IT Workplace, Ethnography, Critical Hermeneutics
Identifiers
Local EPrints ID: 445232
URI: http://eprints.soton.ac.uk/id/eprint/445232
ISSN: 0960-085X
PURE UUID: 272e285f-d930-46ed-a0ff-963141cd5c28
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Date deposited: 25 Nov 2020 17:33
Last modified: 17 Mar 2024 06:06
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Author:
Hameed Chughtai
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