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Inter-Play(ing) –
Embodied and relational possibilities of serious play at work
Draft-Paper for:
10th Organization Studies Summer Workshop and Special Issue Organizational
Creativity, Play and Entrepreneurship 21-23 May 2015, Chania, Crete, Greece
To be submitted to Organisation Studies
Wendelin Küpers
Karlshochschule, International University
wkuepers@karlshochschule.de
Abstract
Based on a phenomenological approach this paper discusses embodied and relational
possibilities of serious play at work. The intention is to develop an integral and
transformative understanding of play as individual and collective co-creative action in
organizations. For this the concept and practice of “inter-playing” will be proposed in
which the in-between space of play is seen and experienced as a mediating nexus of
self, others and worlds while involving imaginative engagement and enlivenment.
Furthermore, the paper discusses critically the power at play and the ambivalent
relationship of play to negative feelings, and to positive emotional states.
Specifically, ambiguous play will be interpreted as a mode of activities that involve
experimentations, creative imaginations and enactments of play as an aesthetic reason
unfolding in a field of corporeal presence. While discussing the paradox of serious
play, inter-play(ing) is related to an ethical responsiveness and can serve as an
effective way to cultivate the professional artistry of practical wisdom. Finally, some
practical and theoretical, methodological implications and perspectives on future
research on inter-play in organizations are offered.
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Introduction
As a style of being, play is and remains mysterious as it cannot be made transparent
completely. Play is slippery, elusive and evasive, it defies, and at times it seems to resist,
precise and complete definition or conceptualization, while it might appear and vanish
anytime, anywhere and ‘any-how’, although having lasting effects on individuals, groups,
organizations and societies.
Being part of historical and current developments of human being and culture, the
creation and enactment of play, (like that of games and sports) provide insights into
qualities and (intrinsic) meanings that are or cannot be framed and tamed by
functionalist, economic driven orientations.
Open Ques(tions) in relation to play (autotelicity/exotelicity & play/work)
Conventionally defined play is conceived as not being a means to external ends or
purposes; but as pursuit of internal values and ends; for which rewards can be found
in the act (Meier, 1980: 25). Running contrary to the principled and deliberate
means‐ended approach, play and also games and sports, “may be heralded as a
singularly fulfilled, liberating experience, through which man opens doors normally
closed, alters his habitual modes of perception, refuses categorically to tolerate
premature and limiting closures, views naked simplicity of the world and entities
within it, and inaugurates processes and actions of creative and novel transformation
(Meier, 1980: 31).
But can the (experience of) autotelicity of play happen not only in intrinsically but
also extrinsically valued ventures? What would it mean to move between lived
instances of autotelicity and exotelicity?
Work and play has been conceived as an antagonistic relationship. With its focus on
freedom and openness of purpose, the playful represents seemingly the opposing
‘Other’ of the purpose-driven, rationally organized, utility-oriented economic
thinking with its cost-benefit calculation. But what would it mean that the supposed
existing dissimilarity and irreconcilability between playful and economic dimensions
and processes do carry a specific opportunity?
Inhowfar is work parasitic upon play, respectively how can functions, values and
virtues of play be related to work? What is implied in a binary opposition that
takes work and play as antithetical?
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How to debunk the “myth of separate
spheres” that permeates our culture (Kanter, 1997). This “myth” entails splitting
off the public sphere and the workplace from the private sphere, and from
leisure and play, in an attempt to enhance organizational efficiency,
rationalization, and profitability through control mechanisms (e.g., Mainemelis &
Altman, 2010).
In discussing shifting positions of the relation between play and work Kavanagh
(2011: 350-51) explores various modes. With her we can ask: Is play an (serving)
extension of work, relief from work that is serving rejuvenation, helping to keep a
work-life-balance, or a subverting)resistance within and to work used for reclaiming
and asserting identity (see also Ibarra & Petriglieri, 2010), including via forms of
organizational misbehavior. Or can play be better understood as (informal) usurpation
of work, performatively by exposing the inabilities of formal work organisations?
Contrastingly, play may be conceived as autonomous, an autotelic activity, that is
inwards-driven and engaged in solely for its own sake. As such it is not having an end
other that itself, or meaning exterior of itself or ulterior motive outside of its own
terms of reference), thus incommensurable with work.
As a another form play and work may be understood as integrating categories in work
settings, involving both internal goods (referring to performative and play
dimensions) as well as external goods (measured or work output). Finally, work could
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be understood as epiphenomenon of play, in which the latter is evaluated in terms of
its potential usefulness to work, taking a play-ethic (Kane, 2004) as primary.
How can we leave behind the ideology of a work-ethics that trivialized, infantilises
unserious play in contrast to serious productive work, without loosening the qualities
of conceptually distinguishing both (Sørensen, & Spoelstra, 2012). Inhowfar is play a
much richer phenomenon than functional instrumentaling or appropriational
approaches try to do (Sørensen, & Spoelstra, 2012).
What does it concretely imply that autotelic play has a rewarding telos of its own,
respectively suspends external teleological orientations and utitiltisations that are
treating play as a tool, resource or means (for external ends)?
Why do various companies such as Google, Patagonia, Gore, Motorola, and Du Pont
encourage their employees to use up some of their work time to play freely with new
ideas (Mainemelis & Altman, 2010)?
If ‘it pays to play’ (Deal & Key, 1998, p. 115), what then is the price to pay for using
play in organisations? Or are the practices of work and play more characterized by
different ways of approaching activities or different frames for acting (Glynn, 1994).
Glynn (1994) found that individuals engaging in activities framed as “work” tended
to have an ends orientation, whereas those engaging in the same activity framed as
“play” had a means orientation.
Is play illusion (‘in ludere’ as ‘in play’) or ‘real’, part of every-day-reality; extra-
ordinary liminal or in the very midst or at the fringe of normalizing ordinary?
Inhowfar is it a threshold experience between the true and the false, convention and
illusion, inner and outer reality that is betwixt and between?
How do boundaries in time and space circumscribe play?
How to situate play between uncertainty-freedom-constraint as it usually involves
surprise and uncertainty, while being constrained, moving in loose and flexible
association between means and ends; and generating positive affect (Mainemelis &
Ronson, 2006).
What does a mode of being-(playful-)in-the-world mean for organisations?
How do play, player and playground as well rules inter-play, especially when
understood not as two objective and autonomous poles, but as inter-related co-
constitutive dimensions at play in play?
Link to boy and embodiment:
Etymologically, play as ‘dlegh’ (from Indo-European meaning, literally, referring to
movement, motion, energetic engagement, discovering new possibilities) implying
moving bodies and embodiment and venturing towards the novel.
But how is play incorporated? Who moves in an engaged way, with what or whom,
how and why? How does play constitutes a primordial dialog between human beings’
inevitable bodily openness, commitment, and attachment to the world?
Phenomenologically, embodied play can be interpreted as an existential, intentional
and expressive phenomenon (Torres, 2002). With such a phenomenological approach
play can be approached as is situationally, immediately and directly apprehended and
lived thus understood as it reveals itself in relation to others and in the world. Based
on a Merleau-Pontyian understanding of embodiment and a processual-relational
approach, incorporated playful practice, can be seen as part of a multidimensional,
relational nexus. For exploring this inter-relationality of play the concept and practice
of “inter-playing” will be outlined as part of a transformative inter-practice in
organizational life (Küpers 2011).
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Accordingly, various forms of in-between of play will be seen as experiential
mediating nexus. This inter-relational spheres of interplaying (players and play-
grounds) brings together self, others and worlds while involving imaginative
engagement and enlivenment between inner and outer life as well as subjective,
intersubjective and ‘objective’ dimensions.
For showing how inter-play is an embodied practice and interrelational event first it
primordial and bodily dimension are demonstrated. Subsequently, a phenomenology
of embodied play respectively playful practice demonstrates the same as situated co-
creative inter-action, characterized by power and ambivalences.
Then interplay is presented as relational, multidimensional concept and practice in
organisations. Especially, the inter-between is outlined as medium of interplaying. To
further qualify interplay, serious play and its paradoxical nature are discussed and as
links to practical wisdom, the concept of a responsive “poietic praxis” and the role of
professional artistry presented. Finally, some practical and political implications and
perspectives are offered.
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Play as embodied and primordial
As a response to Huizinga’s ordering, formal definition of a “play-festival-rite
complex” (Huizinga, 1955, p. 31)
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, in his seminal work on Man, Play, and Games
Caillois (1985) attempts to define play as an free, separate, uncertain, ‘an-economic’
activity that is governed by rules and make-believe (ibd. 9). For him this implies that
it is voluntary, has an unknown conclusion, and produces nothing. (Bataille limited
non-order & transgression). While Huizinga is searching for an all-embracing or
unitary conception of play, and its function for human civilization, Caillois is
reconciled to play’s many forms.
Caillois’s definition of play has the following six elements. Play is (1) free—that is
nonobligatory; (2) separate that is, cut off from reality; (3) uncertain, in the sense that
the results are not known beforehand; (4) unproductive that is an expenditure that
does not create wealth or goods
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(5) rule bound or -governed; and (6) fictive,
operating within a fictitious reality that is, it is “accompanied by a special awareness
of a second reality or of a free unreality, as against real life” (2001b, 9–10).
Accordingly, he offered a specific typology or classification of games: agôn
(competition), alea (chance), mimicry (simulation or role play), and ilinx (vertigo).
Caillois defined these four categories of games specifically: agôn as competition on
an artificially leveled playing field, alea as games of chance and merit. Both became
predominant in ‘advanced’ civilizations. Mimicry as simulation, role-playing, or
make-belief and Ilinx as whirlpooling vertigo, disorientating oneself, thrill-seeking
and risk taking. While referring to pre-human (bodied) foundations of playful
impulses, the latter two have been suppressed or serves as escape.
All the mentioned forms of play comprise bodily and embodied dimensions. The
competing bodies in agon, the exposed, receptive body in alea. A re-embodied
understanding of play revives and reintegrates affective pre-reflexive dimensions of
mimicry (simulation or role play), and ilinx (whirlpooling or vertigo) that tend to be
lost in agôn (competition), alea (chance).
Not only do forms of play entail the body (and pre-reflexive embodiment), but as
Sutton-Smith (1997) argued, play is primordial because advanced mammals use play
to prepare and rehears for complex future social scenarios. It is a foundational form of
‘adaptive potentiation’ – that is, as a generator of possible worlds and actions within
defined times and places, an activity that generates and enacts variability, hence helps
the organism prepare and rehearse as well as adapt itself for the dense and manifold
interactions of the wider social environment.
Play situated between paidia and ludus
Furthermore, Caillois outlines all these categories as being situated within a
continuum between the poles of paidia and of ludus-scheme, ranging as a gradient
between more freer and regulated forms of play. While paidia refers to the principle
of “diversion, turbulence, free improvisation, and carefree gaiety” that is completely
unstructured, frolicsome, and frivolous, ludus, the tendency to bind this
capriciousness with “arbitrary, imperative, and purposively tedious conventions”
signifying activities that are purposeful, contain artificial restrictions, and require
tremendous skill and effort to overcome these impediments.
When this latter principle is applied to the freer forms of play, it calls out in the player
a “greater amount of effort, patience, skill, or ingenuity” (2001b: 13).
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Ludus “disciplines” paidia and in consequence, gives “the fundamental categories of
play their purity and excellence” (2001b, p. 31).
In the emerging field, which is sometimes called ludology, designers try to create for
players environments that feature both coherent, shared systems of rules (ludus) and
opportunities for creativity, spontaneity, and self-assertion (paidia).
Games without paidia seem ultimately sterile, formulaic settings in which players
quickly lose interest; but games without sufficient ludic elements also lack appeal in
that they do not lead the player toward increasingly sophisticated challenges or permit
complex social interaction, thus satisfying experience require to balances order and
disorder.
For Caillois (2001b), there exists an ever-present tension in play between
improvisation and rule-observance, which explain the different kinds of play forms,
and to the shift in play preferences throughout history.
Taking games as cultural factors, patterns and images penetrating a social life shows
how different societies and civilizations are variously characterized, indicating its
preferences, weakness and strengths as well as its stages of its evolution (ibd. P. 83).
Correspondingly, social function of play changes (ibd.: p. 59). While Apollonian
traditions emphasize order, harmony, and rational control with fixed and hierarchical
privileges in which agôn and alea, i.e., merit and heredity, seem to be the chief
complementary elements of the game of living” (2001b, 87); Dionysian societies are
“ruled equally by masks and possession, i.e., by mimicry and ilinx.”
In our contemporary era agôn-alea combination dominates, inviting the question how
to incorporate the qualities of mimicry and ilinx. Games are not inferior settings but
rather alternative worlds, places that allow people to play through the possibilities of
life and, in some cases at least, to find satisfactions denied them in profane society.
However in case of corruption of games, when the boundaries between real life and
the play world become blurred, many curious or perverse patterns emerge. Especially
when external social and psychological commitments become too strong, the
sheltered quality of the play world is lost. Intrusions of external concerns routinely
lead to a specific ‘professionalism’ by which play, intended as relaxation, becomes
work as a kind of ‘obligation’. Also for Huizinga, who depicts contemporary
civilization as one in which material interests, cynicism, and the negation of norms, a
decadence of play becomes evident in the breakdown of the distinction between play
and seriousness, whereby the serious business of life politics, war, economics, and
morality degenerate into pseudo‐play, and play loses its indispensable qualities of
spontaneity, detachment, joy, and thus, its power to act as a culture‐creating activity.
For him the decadence of play is evident also in the commercialization,
professionalization, and politicization of sport, which perverts recreation and reduces
it to crude sensationalism. For him, there can be no civilization without play and rules
of fair play, without conventions consciously established and voluntarily adhered to,
and without knowledge of how to win and lose graciously. The supreme importance
to civilization of the play factor is precisely that, "Civilization presupposes limitation
and mastery of the self, the ability not to confuse its own tendencies with the ultimate
and highest goal, but to understand that it is enclosed within certain bounds freely
accepted” (Huizinga, 1955: 211).
Carlson (2011) helpfully differentiates between attitude and activities, distinguishing
between playing from play activities and gaming from game activities. “Playing and
gaming, as stances or attitudes, are ways in which we do things. They are distinct
intentionalities toward the projects we encounter. For playing, the intentionality or act
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is autotelic, while for gaming it is lusory essentially aiming at a solution of an
unnecessary problem… On the side of intentionality‐ that is the side of attitudes,
stances, and approaches to the world it becomes apparent that the play stance and the
gaming attitude are distinct and compatible. That is, they have a life of their own, but
they also overlap. We see their overlap in the compound or nested intentionality of
what Suits ambiguously calls game playing. It is and intentionality that is both
autotelic and lusory at the same time. Game players, in the deepest sense of those
terms, are looking for engaging artificial problems as an end in itself (Carlson, 2011,
p. 78).
Phenomenology of Embodied Play
Playfulness carries the presence, flexibility, and openness needed to improvise with
and expand the stream of possibilities as they emerge in each moment. The
proposition of the following is that play is (always already) embodied and
embodiment related to a playful relation to the world. This implies that lay just has
only bodily dimensions or involved also the body, but is itself enacted and processed
in an embodied way. Moreover, being embodied is responsively and creatively
playful.
Being embodied is always already a way of playful practicing mediated by living
bodies within a situated and responsive praxis. Merleau-Ponty’s phenomenology of
the body provides a philosophy for understanding play as embodied and embodiment
as playful (co-creative).
Phenomenology contributes to an enriched understanding of practice by returning to
phenomena, things and events in their life-worldly situatedness and meanings.
Phenomenologically, organizations are situated life-worlds (Sandberg & D’Alba,
2009), in which playful practices take place through experiential processes and thus
living action while providing the source and medium for meaning.
Ontologically, the situatedness of practices of play comprises a spatio-temporal
dimension. This implies that it occurs through relations to places (Küpers, 2010) and
states of durability as ‘contextuo-temporal’ realities both providing conditions for
occurring events, activities and sense-making.
Practices of play are always already co-constituted within ‘Being-in-the-World’
(Heidegger, 1962, §12, 13), which makes them “unfolding, fluid, ongoing, shifting,
wholistic, and dynamic” (Weick, 2003, p. 459).
According to Merleau-Ponty (1995, 2012), our body is our way of being also
playfully in the world of everyday-life. Specifically, embodied practices of play are
built upon a pre-reflective and ambiguous ‘ground’ of experiences-as-lived-through
and its expressions. From this viable perspective, the body and embodiment are not
only functioning as surfaces for inscriptions or discursive constructions, but are
having an experiential depth and specificity (Leder, 1990).
“Play, in the middle of the ambiguous world, open players to new horizons,
landscapes that stretch the field of intentionalities, an opening that is so fragile that it
tends to disappear when players go looking for it” (Torres, 2002, p. 136)
Form a phenomenological perspective, ways of playful practicing are embodied,
while inter-involving various bodily modes of practical belonging and engagements in
the world (Csordas, 1994, p. 12).
What renders Merleau-Ponty's phenomenology of embodiment particularly important
for a critical understanding of playful practice in organisation is his critique of both
empiristic realism and materialism, as well as rationalistic idealism and
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intellectualism. Both reduce live-worldly phenomena, perception and sensation either
to the realm of matter or to that of ideas, each failing to explain the expressive sense
of emergent practices.
Empiricist as well as intellectualist views of play swinging back and forth from interiority
to exteriority thus are based on dichotomizing dualisms, thereby missing the radical
dynamic of situated playing. Such approaches fail to notice that the genesis of play(ing)
is, to be found in the articulating point (or primordial hori-zone) between the player and
the playground.
Instead he develops a bodily-mediated and embodied understanding of being in the
world (of practicing) that can be used for understanding play as part of an interwoven
post-dichotomous nexus of “self-other-things” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 57) and
perspectival “integral being” (Merleau-Ponty, 1995, p. 84).
As practices of play are first and foremost embodied and its practitioners are primarily
bodily beings, they are both parts of the world and coextensive with it; constituting,
but also constituted by it. Accordingly, the life-world is found meaningful mainly
with respect to the ways in which practitioners perceive, feel and act within it and
which acts upon them (Crossley, 1996, p. 101) within materially, socio-culturally,
historically, gendered, and technologically impacting realities.
Importantly, embodiment as base for play does not simply mean a physical
manifestation, nor is a body a physico-perceptual objectified ‘thing’ or physiological
resourceful system to be measured for appraising the pulse of an organization
(Akinola, 2010).
Rather, being embodied implies that playful practitioners are dynamically incarnated
in and mediated through mundane experiences, (inter-)actions, emotions and moods,
especially through receptive, situated affectedness or sensually being-at-tuned. Thus,
the embodied playful practicing subjects as well as their socio-cultural embodiment
are situated in an ongoing sensual that is tactile, visual, olfactory or auditory way.
Whatever incarnated playing actors perceive, feel, think, intend or perform as well as
make sense of or cope with, they are bodily exposed to and process their practicing
within a synchronised field of interrelated senses and synaesthetic sensations
(Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 207).
Embodied playing-inter-subjects are those who play while realities and potentialities
or capabilities of play as well as playground mutually condition one other and are
parts of an unfolding expressive process of the project toward the world that people
are.
Play not only reaffirms people’s bodily character in the world, but involves a
meaningful structuration of the back-play-ground, in which it happens. “The center-
background gestalt is not imposed on the player but has a dynamic co-source in the
player herself. Players begin to play when they co-determine, co-structure their
playground in an autotelic spirit. The playground is not something rigid and
predetermined waiting to be acted upon. Nor are players’ sources of absolute freedom
in shaping an infinitely malleable environment. On the contrary, players themselves
make play by co-configuring the playground. In other words, play happens when
people’s playing bodies enter into playgrounds. But, at the same time, all the ways in
which playgrounds and their conditions are available to players are radically
connected with and affected by their playing subject-bodies (Torres, 2002; p. 143).
Thus, practices of play can be seen as a function and emergent process of vivid bodily
subjects and a dynamic embodiment of socio-material realities, in which practitioners
are inter-relationally entangled. The entwinement or infringement between
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practitioner and their intermediating embodied practicing allows considering multi-
folded spheres of experiences and realities of play together. This mutual entanglement
permits to explore the interrelating perceptions, affects, feelings, meanings and
actions as well as inter-personal, social and material dimensions of organisational
practices in a fluid, reversible and integrative fashion (Küpers, 2011b; Küpers &
Edwards, 2008; Küpers, 2015).
Play as situated co-creative event & action and expression
An integral and transformative understanding of embodied play considers individual
and collective co-creative action in organizations (Mainemelis & Ronson, 2006). Co-
creation in and through play can be interpreted as a continually emerging and
integrative process, including corporeal, social, and aesthetic dimensions as part of
inter-relationships of an integral play (Gordon & Esbjoern-Hargens, 2007).
The corporeality, sociality and situatedness in the praxis (of play) render possibilities
for situated creativities and creative action (Joas, 1993, 1996).
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.As Joas in his
pragmatist theory of situated creativity (1996) showed, corporeality together with
situativeness and sociality, reflect the embeddedness of actors. Especially the concept
of situation, as inherently meaningful and constitutive of agency, could be viewed as a
“suitable replacement for the means-ends schema as the primary basic category of a
theory of action” (1996: 160).
The situated creativity of play which resides and emerges through pre-reflective
perceptions and social actions is based on a non-teleological interpretation of the
intentionality of action through situatedness, body-schemes and primordial sociality
of human life and, hence, human agency.
In the spontaneous emergence of play in the world, players are not explicitly aware of
their playing before any act of reflection. Paraphrasing Merleau-Ponty the world of
play is not what the player thinks, but s/he lives through (1962, p. xvi-xvii) as a
meaningful happening and lived expression instead of reflective achievement.
For play, there is no autotelic meaning that is complete and pre-existent awaiting
expression in the actions of play, but autotelic unfolding processes of play transpire
through verbal and non-verbal inter-actions.
“Human beings at play live a different reality to the extent that the coming into being
of a new signification embodies creation in the sense of transforming available
meanings… lived in its unfolding moment… Play, to put it differently, alters the
means of expression in which it is manifested and affirmed” (Torres, 2002, p. 150).
Instead of starting with the teleological assumption of given, antecedently fixed ends,
and conceiving action as following choice of appropriate means, the pursuit of those
pre-established ends, a non-teleological conception, as being manifest in playful
action, operates differently. Such a creative situational orientation considers a quasi-
dialogical and responsive relationship between action and pre-reflective contexts. It
understands embodied playful acting as a response to a demanding situatendess, while
also considering the sociality of inter-acting.
Playful actions do not follow predefined or actual ends, but emerge as open-ended
processes.
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Means and ends do not form a transitive order in which one poses no
obstacle to the other and serves solely to fulfill that single purpose. As means and
ends flow in a continuous stream of reversible organising and are part of an elastic
meaning-situation-nexus, the distinction between them is only an analytical and
temporal one. The lived meaning liberated and incarnated in play, that is the
embodied thought which belongs to the player and the playground, relates to
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culture—available meanings—as the ground from which play-expression is possible
(ibd., 2002, p. 175). “Play constitutes a primordial dialog between human beings’
inevitable bodily openness, commitment, and attachment to the world. People’s mode
of being at play enunciates a radical and mutual conjugation of potentialities held by
the body-subject and the world. In other words, as players, humans enter and affect
available playgrounds with their playing bodies while at the same time their playing
bodies are constituted and reconstituted by those playgrounds” (ibd., 2002: 177-78).
Having and receiving the world through spontaneous and meaningful ways makes
playing an expressive process. Players who take up and are taken up by playgrounds,
are situated in an expressing, a pressing out of a configuration of meanings. As this is
realized as an intentional or voluntary act as players are confined to their playgrounds
and what meaning the ‘player-playground intertwinedness’ incarnates. “As a mode of
existing in the world, the tension between the player-playground constitution of play
is always already expressive” (ibd, 2002, p. 180).
Inter-play as embodied ‘inter-practice’ in organisations
Integrating multiple dimensions, play is a co-creative event that is co-created on
individual and collective levels respectively its co-constitutive relationship. For
understanding play as a multi-level process and inter-relational practice, the following
outlines the concept and practice of “inter-playing” as part of an inter-practice. Thus,
onto-epistemologically inter-play will be used as a relational concept for
understanding the process of be(com)ing as well as pragmatically it is seen as
mediated inter-relational practice. Both are seen as embodied and integrate previously
outlined dimensions.
Based on Merleau-Pontyian philosophy and his radicalised relational orientation
understand playful practice and practicing in organizations as a corporeal and
emerging event. The concept of inter-practice of play helps to reveal and interpret the
inter-relationship between being, feeling, knowing, doing, sharing, structuring and
effectuating in and through action, both individually and collectively, as implicated in
organization. Correspondingly, the concept of inter-practices can be used for inquiries
into the negotiating interplay of the inherently entwined materialities, subjectivities,
inter-subjectivities, and objectivities as well as individual and collective
intentionalities and responsiveness of play as they occur and are processed in
organizational life-worlds.
Embedded within the complexities of human and systemic pragmatics, an embodied
and integrative inter-practice includes the experiential and social inter-actions of
actors as well as institutionalized operations of organization as collective agency.
Similar to the conceptualization of practice-configurations that follows a radical
process-orientation (Chia & MacKay, 2007), these playful practices are not only an
aggregation of purposeful activities of self-contained individual actors and material
things. Rather, as embodied, relational practices these are also pre-personal, personal
and trans-individual, social and systemic events of a dynamic, emergent be(com)ing
and meaning-giving or revealing complexes and processes.
Accordingly, embodied (inter-)playing practitioners, their own practices and the
practicing of others as well as an overarching praxis are all inseparable and mutually
implicated in organizations. Therefore, what organisational playing practices are, can
only be understood by pointing to the tendencies, doings and be(com)ing of the
interrelated practicing of various inter-acting practitioners and the specifics of their
situated conditions and dynamic inter-involvement as part of an embodied praxis.
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Metaphorically, this practicing of play resembles more a creative way-finding and
dwelling, in contrast or supplement to a planned navigation and building. A relational
understanding and enactment of this practicing of play is an en-fleshed one as it
enters, processes and renders specific inter-between and integration that in turn is part
of holonomics and trans(re-)lational nexus.
In-(ter-)between as medium & nexus
Accordingly, the in-between spaces and times of play can be seen and experienced as
a mediating ‘ground’ and nexus. This sphere of interplaying connects self, others and
worlds (as play-ground) while involving imaginative engagement and enlivenment
between inner and outer life (Winnicott, 1971). By taking integral and relational
perspectives on co-constituting inter-play; all parts of the actual playing are
interrelated, bringing together the ‘logics’ of individual and collective actions and
processes as inter-relational ‘space in-between’ (Bradbury & Lichtenstein, 2000) in
organizations. As Bradbury-Huang et al. (2010) showed are founded on a relational spaces
that are characterized by an ecology of high-quality interactions, aspirational trust and
learning nourishes collaborative contexts and enduring collaborations in form of projects,
events, and meetings. These help to create enacting sustainability in organizations and
sustainable partnerships across multiple stakeholders.
Overall, it is the relational in-(ter)between, which is the ‘birth-place’ and milieu of
playful practices with their personal, interpersonal, socio-cultural and systemic inter-
relationships, hence fluid identities. It is in this processual in-between, where we can
find the ‘source’ and ‘re-sources’ also for creativity, innovation and surplus-value of
embodied practices of play in organizations and its members.
With the focus shifts towards the processual space in-between (Bradbury &
Lichtenstein 2000), the intermediate field and inter-play, where all parties involved
can meet in mutual admiration and respect in an on-goingness’ of relating, within
embedded con-+-Texts (Küpers, 2012). In this way the enfleshed play emerges as an
event between the nexus of “self-others-things” (Merleau-Ponty, 1962, p. 57) that all
are inter-playing with each other.
Paradox of Serious Play
The concept (and intervention technique) of serious play describes moments in which
play and work are deliberately and meaningfully juxtaposed in distinct organizational
contexts and in relation to outcomes (Statler et al. 2011).
The serious play process involved a distinct mode of intentionality (i.e., playful
openness to emergent change), as well as an alternative medium in which to express
strategic content (i.e., 3-D materials, like LEGO bricks or clay). As a facilitation
practice specific shifts of mode and medium enable participants to generate new
possibilities to interpret their organization and the problems faced by it.
“By giving participants the opportunity to project tacit, unconscious meanings on
ambiguous, and multidimensional, multicolored objects, the serious play process
allowed them to express new thoughts and feelings. Even participants whose voices
would typically dominate reported saying things that they had never said before and
the projective aspect of the process helped to make that happen… By facilitating
serious play interventions in an open‐ended, experimental fashion, the researchers
enabled participants to gain new insights, interact differently with their peers, and feel
more satisfied and committed to their organizations. In addition, participants put
cognitive, social, and emotional dimensions of their own experience directly to use—
12
both by attempting to solve a particular problem and by cultivating their own
capacities to adapt to emergent and unexpected change ” (Statler & Oliver, 2008).
Reframed as a specific form of embodied materially mediated practice, serious play
involves sustaining a paradox of intentionality (Statler et al. 2011). This paradox
brings together autotelic behavior that has no purpose (play) and telic purposive, goal-
oriented engagements (serious). Accordingly, the practice of serious play has been
seen as occurring whenever people in organizations engage in autotelic activities
deliberately and intentionally to achieve some desired or emergent outcomes that have
serious consequences for the organization.
As a practice of paradox, serious play is not defined by specific material
circumstances associated with it, or the outcomes associated with it, “but instead the
extent to which participants are frivolously having fun as an instrumental means of
achieving serious productive objectives, and thereby enacting a paradox of
intentionality” (Statler et al. 2011, p. 247). Such use of play is in danger of
appropriating play for specific interests, somehow alien to a ‘free’ playing, but
somehow needed to bring play into world of organization and business. The question
then will be who defines in which way the seriousness and what will be status of
desired or pre-determined outcomes are. If play implies valuing spontaneity, especially
of the responsive body and forms of embodiment, and entails an acceptance of what
might appear first as unorthodox results or outcomes, what happens to playing if it is
utilized. Instrumentalising play and its qualities may then contain, harnessed, tame or
frame it in “serious” ways. Furthermore, the critical question remains: who gets to
play, what kind of game (Kane, 2004, p. 275)?
The challenge will be to design or keep possibilities of play activities that keep its
spontaneous emergences open and to qualify it as being “serious” not only for
economic purposes. Accordingly, to respond to the dangers of appropriating play and
for developing a more integral understanding and practice of serious play and its
ethical dimensions (Statler, 2011) need to be considered and for this linked to
practical wisdom. Research has shown the connection between practical wisdom and
serious play (Statler, 2005), especially for developing practically wise leader(ship)
(Holliday, et al. 2007).
Phronesis and phronetic action are not exhausted by universal rules; as they also
require knowing how, when, where and in what way to apply rules (MacIntyre, 2006:
164) based on practical, situational intelligence (cunningness). For practicing serious
play as part of practical wisdom (Küpers, 2007; 2013; Küpers & Statler, 2008), in
organization, respectively leadership entails various tensions and ambiguities
(Rooney, McKenna & Liesch, 2010). A truly integral practical wisdom embraces the
body (embodied incorporated dimensions), mind (cognitive, logical, rational thought),
heart (feelings, emotions, moods) and ‘spirit’ of individuals and collectives. Striving
for integrity of being, knowing, doing and effectuating, this proto-integral orientation
contributes to accomplishing a genuinely worthwhile purpose that meets present and
future needs sustainably and with this contributes to the well-be(com)ing of all
members and stakeholders of organizations (Küpers 2005a). Such integrity-based
‘wised-up’ playful organizing and leading calls for developing a practice of wisdom
and wise practicing with multi-literacies-in-use (Hibbert, 2013) as part of an enacted
play ethic. Such integral play ethic and the right to play imply an obligation for care
(Kane, 2004, p. 174). This implies that wise players a ‘respons-able’ (ibd. p. 352),
able to respond and enacting a responsive-based responsibility (Küpers, 2012) as part
of a professional artistry and „poietic praxis” of play.
13
Professional artistry & „poietic praxis” of play
Artful qualities and dimensions of play can be conceptualized as professional artistry.
As embodied play is processed by a non-rational tacit knowing and doing, it is
integrally and relationally tied to an artistry of practice (Schön, 1983, 1987),
operating in indeterminate zones of practice. Accordingly, the art of organizing and
managing playfully: ‘reveals itself both in crucially important situations of
uncertainty, instability and uniqueness and in those dimensions of everyday practice,
which depend upon the spontaneous exercise of intuitive artistry’ (Schön, 1983, p.
240).
As a practically habitualized incorporated disposition for acting, this playful artistry
strives towards what makes professional activity work at its best, and thus refers to a
mastery state or condition that makes people perform tasks or functions well. The
artistry of play practices embodies kinds of reflections (Kinsella, 2007) and actions.
These are processed through ways in which the ‘thinking bodies’ (Burkit, 1999) of
practitioners interact with themselves, each other and their environment (as partly
rule-governed play-ground) performatively.
The artistry of plays requires sensibility, imagination, technique and the ability to
make judgments about the feel and significance of the particular (Eisner, 2002).
Particularly, a judgement-artistry allows artful professional practitioners to make
highly skilled micro-, macro- and meta-judgements that are optimal for the given
circumstances (Paterson, Higgs & Wilcox, 2006).
As a specific practicing within a shared tradition, a professional artistry involves a
blend of practitioner qualities, attunement, knowledge, practice skills and creative
imagination processes together with the ability to use them critically, intuitively and
practically (Titchen & Higgs, 2001).
8
Being more an activity-oriented than attitude-
oriented practice, professional artistry is enacted in a mature performance that is
characterized by virtuosity and excellence (Bourdieu, 1990), for example in health
practices (Titchen & Higgs 2008) or leadership processes (Kay, 1994).
Being a ‘cultural virtuoso’ (Dreyfus, 2004) those who employ a professional artistry
use their bodily wisdom to respond also emotionally ‘at the appropriate times, about
the appropriate things, to an appropriate degree, and so on, and to desire and aim at
the appropriate kinds or ends of targets’ (Russell, 2009: 13, 18).
Professional artistry of is processed and manifests in the creative ability to play,
understood as the practice of (pre-reflexive and reflexive) understanding,
interpretation and enactment that can be seen or (ethically qualified) as part, form or
manifestation of phrónêsis, practical wisdom, employed in particular horizons
(Gadamer, 1982; Bernstein, 1983).
Play, like phrónêsis, is not the application of general principles to practical situations,
but resembles more a living dialogue. As play is always play with the other, playing
as a dialogical capability of expression (much like art) is inviting to respond to
participate in creative ways and thereby disclosing engagements in world.
Furthermore, ‘critical phrónêsis’ allows us to view practical wisdom as itself being
responsively poiêtic (Küpers, 2013). This implies that poetic phrónêsis serves both as
means and an end in itself: a means to creating narrative meaning (social creativity)
that includes attention and recognition of others and otherness as well as social
inclusivity as an end, as outlined by Ricoeur in his poetics of possibility (Wall,
2005).
9
14
A playful (poiêtic) phrónêsis enacts performatively through being responsively and
creatively in situations where (embodied) aesthetics become an organizing principle
(de Monthoux and Statler 2008). Accordingly, “phronetic judgment does not
necessarily “solve” problems, once and for all, so much as orienting one to how
problems might “best” be handled on an ongoing basis—for often, as several
international conflicts show, what one thought were the limited boundaries within
which problems needed to be handled can unexpectedly be enlarged…… Phronesis
inheres in the ability to allow for the fluid, indeterminate nature of the circumstances
in which we must act, and to accept that, each time we act, we must, in a sense, start
afresh. We must begin from an initial but unique uncertainty, and by entering into it,
imaginatively explore it in all its details and nuances to arrive at an overall
intersubjectively intelligible sense of its meaning for us. That sense will not merely be
the outcome of a utilitarian calculus but, more important, will be ethically politically
discerning” (Shotter, & Tsoukas, 2014, p. 240).
10
Practical, and political, implications and perspectives
Practical Implications
With its experiential, and thus dynamic, status, the described forms and
transformational qualities of embodied playing defy control and elude full
manageability or teachability. Because these relational practices do not exist as a
given, stable, fixed knowledge, they cannot be easily organized or taught, but enable.
Instead of being designed directly as the task would be to design for practices to
happen that is facilitated and encouraged in an ongoing learning process. Part of this
challenge is to prepare and offer supportive conditions and relationships that engender
catalytic circumstances on a situation-specific basis, by which embodied a moments
of play can develop in organizational and educational contexts.
Considering complex intricacies of bodies at ‘work-play’ and working-playing of
bodies and embodiment in practices in organizations and its members, calls to
prepare, facilitate and create favorable circumstances, supporting contexts, and
relationships by which they can flourish. Thus, the task is to prepare and offer
enabling possibilities and facilitations on a situation-specific basis and in a tailored
ways, according to needs and requirements of the given conditions, state of affairs or
transformational goals aspired.
11
Generally, the transmission of culturally-situated bodily, affective and e-motional
sensing, knowing and experiencing in inter-practicing of embodied play can be
cultivated by members of organizations through “education of attention” (Ingold,
2001: 139). Importantly, this is an attention of embedded sentient experiences by
attending with and to the body (Csordas, 1993).
Following a phenomenology of surprise (Depraz, 2010), an attentional openness can
be seen as a disclosing attitude. Expecting to be surprised sensually brings out the
stratified rhythms of affective experiences that subtend it and allow the emergence of
otherness, difference and newness through play(ing). The paradoxical capacity of
expecting surprise – understood as an active receptivity for the unpredictable – are
part of a phenomenology of birth and event (Dastur, 2000), contributing to openness
towards indeterminate futures.
To inter-practice embodied play as enacted through improvisation and to “rehearse
spontaneity” (Mirvis, 1998) individually or in communities of improvisation (Machin
& Carrithers, 1996), requires fostering settings such as the cultivation team-training
15
for creative action (Vera, 2002). As a cultivated craft of enacted inter-practice,
improvisation requires situationally applied orientations and skills that can be learned
through continual practice (Crossan et al., 1996: 25). This mediation can be realized
via bodily experienced, situated ‘felt-sense’ and co-emerging ‘felt-shifts’ as enacted
through focusing (Gendlin, 1992; 1995).
12
Especially, inter-relational sensitive ways of arts-based learning (Taylor & Ladkin,
2009) are helpful for developing inter-practices of embodied practices of playing.
These are drawing on various collage, video, drawing or painting, poetry, sound or
other art-forms to embody aspects of experience that are then available to develop
including an ethical sensibility. Such art-based approaches can make use of different
but entwined modalities of knowing and learning, including the experiential, practical,
presentational and propositional modes that are mutually supportive and enhancing
(Heron, 1992). Being more ‘aesthetically attuned’ (Hansen & Bathurst, 2010) through
artistic means, embodied ‘moments’, especially corporeally experienced ‘aesthetic
moments’ of playful presence can then thrive.
Practically, embodied playful attitudes as well as the systematic use of artful
responses can help facilitators to transform problems and conflict by giving the
opportunity for creative solutions (Sclavi, 2008, p. 178).
The practical challenge will be to find ways of trans(re-)lating especially
presentational expressive or aesthetic knowings and processes of play to existing
organisational settings and leadership situations. This trans(re-)lational challenge lays
in creating forms that can be recognised and hold value within current organisational
contexts where the propositional and rational-cognitive and instrumental orientations
are dominating.
Furthermore, to realise embodied, creative inter-practices of play, organizational
members require access to available material, financial as well as affective,
emotional, cognitive and social resources. All of these resources and facilitating
conditions are closely related to political implications.
Political Implications
Part of a critical political reflection is considering the dark side of play. Play can
imply an irresponsive gambling by taking risk and unleashing desires without
considering possible consequences; or may lead to a sense of ‘childification’ of
leadership which may undermine managers’ authority and status or by contrast
involves macho-games that reinforcing a masculine dominance. Furthermore, may the
use of play within the domain of work reinforce a general move toward the
colonization of individuals’ inner lives by an institutional logic of effectiveness and
productivity? Thus, companies can set up supposed “play spaces” as a subtle form of
attaining normative control over their managers (Kark, 2011, p. 523).
Considering a ‘political life of sensation’ (Panagia, 2009) in relation to embodied play
calls for a redistribution and reconfiguration of the sensible. For Rancière (2004;
2010), this involves aesthetic ruptures. These are challenging the ‘share of the
sensible’ that defines the respective places and the parts. Thereby it becomes possible
to alter the field of the possibilities and capacities of what and how something can be
seen, heard, thought, said or otherwise expressed. Taking equality as means of
contesting hierarchical and exclusionary distributions of the sensible, accordingly
allows imagining other forms of arrangements, preserving the possible as possible. In
this context, it might be interesting to link embodied play to a critical performativity
that is using possible tactics of critical affirmation, ethics of circumspect care, a
16
progressive pragmatism orientation, and a focus on potentialities and normative
emancipatory stance, rework discourses and practices (Spicer et al., 2009, p. 545-
554).
On a collective level this also implies critically exploring group dynamics or
governing functional and structural issues within the organisational system that
exclude certain practices of play or players. Who gets to play what kind of game?
Inter-practice of play is realized through non-purposive, non-rational and especially
silence(d) practices in organisational life. Phenomenologically, it is therefore
important to explore what is or cannot be expressed, processed or practised playfully.
This implies also those phenomena that are strategically unthinkable, supposedly un-
doable or tabooed.
Conclusion
From a phenomenological perspective this paper has shown the role of embodied,
inter-relational and transformative dimension of play situated between paidia and
ludus related to organizational life-worlds. As co-creative (holonic) event, action and
expression, inter-play(ing) was interpreted as an ongoing emerging multi-dimensional
integrative process of an embodied ‘inter-practice’. Its in-(ter-)between spheres were
discussed as media that play-ground-linked links and transforms playing selves,
others and worlds in organizations.
Furthermore, the paradox of serious play, the role of a professional artistry and
„poietic praxis” of play as ethical responsive have been discussed and various
practical, and political, implications and perspectives outlined.
The embodied experienced in-between of inter-play can be seen as a movement,
organizing ‘principle’ and sourcing media of creativity, thus as ‘realm’ for where and
how inter-rupting play is incipient as ‘entrepreneuring’ or ‘organisation-creation’
(Hjorth, 2014). Considering this connection to ‘enterprising’ play, player and
playground as well as rules and further actors, these are not objective and autonomous
poles, positions or structures, but as inter-playing co-constitutive dimensions of
‘Organization in Play’ (Kavanagh et al., 2011). Accordingly, play is neither the
simple effect of an exterior stimuli (the playground) nor a mere internal production
(the player), or compliance to guiding structures (rules). Rather, inter-play is a
particular expression and style of living understood as “a certain way of handling
situations” (Merleau-Ponty, 2012, p. 342). This interplaying handling is processed as
a dialogue and chiasmic meaning-generating nexus between ‘body-subjects’,
embodied others and the enfleshed world. Accordingly, a style of interplaying serve
as an actual, embodied presentation of meaning and as the actualization of the
possibility of expression. Styles and its expressive gestures of interplay emerges as an
intertwining of facticity and freedom, as the appropriation of a given situation and the
transcendence of it; the prospect of a thoroughgoing perspectivalism. Thus, they
constitute interplayingly the transformation of facticity and point of view into a mode
of access to being as becoming in and through organising.
Overall, inter-play indicates and points to an inter-between as the extra-ordinary
liminal in and through which meanings are ambiguous at best, and where
conventional dualistic positionings are undone and put into play, opening up
wiser form of organising. Thus, there is wisdom in “ inter-playfoolness”!
17
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1
Correspondingly, play has been defined as a vacation from reality (Erikson, 1950), purposeless
activity fundamentally different from earnest activity (Lorenz, 1994). Accordingly, it has been
perceived as voluntary intrinsically driven activity without a specific purpose that is done for its own
sake and is associated with pleasure and enjoyment (Brown & Vaughan, 2009; Kolb & Kolb, 2010).
2
Huizinga (1955) saw play as an activity that effectively precedes and shapes culture and, indeed, is a
continuing source of cultural creativity and change. Taking play as an organizing principle of human
culture and civilization, he (1955, 3–13) defined play as an activity possessing the following qualities:
(1) it is voluntary; (2) it is different from ordinary affairs, especially in its disregard for material
interest; (3) it is secluded or limited by special times, places, and cultural configurations; (4) it explores
tension and balance within a framework of rules; and (5) it is characterized by secrecy and disguising.
“Summing up the formal characteristics of play we might call it a free activity standing quite
consciously outside “ordinary” life as being “not serious”, but at the same time absorbing the player
intensely and utterly. It is an activity connected with no material interest, and no profit can be gained
by it. It proceeds within its own proper boundaries of time and space according to fixed rules and in an
orderly manner. It promotes the formation of social groupings which tend to surround themselves with
secrecy and to stress their difference from the common world by disguise or other means.” (1955: 13).
20
According to Huizinga (1955), cooperative interactions of play lay the groundwork for human culture
(e.g., rituals, contests, games, art, language, governance, and science).
3
In contrast to Huizinga’s requirement of play’s intrinsic exclusivity, or the complete corruptive nature
external goods have on the intrinsic is countered by Callois. For him the unproductive and intrinsic
orientation does not exclude the possibility of external factors playing a part in conjunction with the
intrinsic nature of the activity. Many things can both be goods‐in‐themselves while at the same time
still being constitutive of other goods. As external elements can exist within play the question emerges
how they relate to internal dimensions, especially how the world of play is related to means‐ended
work production. Caillois considers play relative to function in determining that it is unproductive.
which implies play may be measured against conduct that is means‐ended. Certain values inherent
within each activity resonate with a person’s particular stage of development, interests, experiences
that contribute to a very meaningful mode of achieving self‐actualization. Each stage of growth as
result of this transformative experience, in itself, demonstrates the value of play. Such personal
productive value shows that play is not just “useless”. While Huizinga simply precludes play from
being useful for external goods in his definition, Caillois considers play relative to function in
determining that it is unproductive, which implies that play is being assessed against conduct that is
means-ended.
4
According to Button-Smith (1997), there are seven ideological rhetoric of play which all emerged
with changing philosophical and psychological developments dating within the past 200 years.
Specifically, he differentiates between ancient rhetoric of fate, power
4
, identity, and frivolity, having a
much stronger standing in classical literature and modern rhetoric of progress, self, imaginary, and the
self (ibd. 10-11).
4
As Button-Smith showed each of these rhetorics has a historical source, a particular function, a
distinctive ludic form, and specialized players and advocates, and is the context for particular academic
disciplines (ibd. 214). For him no rhetoric of these play form can be totally identified with any play
practice the way the ludic form is played and all verbalizations about a ludic experience are not the
same as that experience (ibd. 216). “Because forms of play, like all other cultural forms, cannot be
neutrally interpreted, it is impossible to keep ambiguity from creeping into the relationship between
how they are perceived and how they are experienced” (ibd. 216). He is trying to unmask the
tendentiousness and hegemony of these rhetorics, and showing the irreconcilability of these different
play complexes. What is needed is a critical reflection on and enactment of the in-corporated
significance and possibilities of ‘serious play’ for contemporary organizational life.
5
As Joas in his pragmatist theory of situated creativity (1996) showed, corporeality together with
situativeness and sociality, reflect the embeddedness of actors. Especially the concept of situation, as
inherently meaningful and constitutive of agency, could be viewed as a “suitable replacement for the
means-ends schema as the primary basic category of a theory of action” (1996: 160). The situated
creativity which resides and emerges through pre-reflective perceptions and social actions is based on a
non-teleological interpretation of the intentionality of action through situatedness, body-schemes and
primordial sociality of human life and, hence, human agency. Instead of starting with the teleological
assumption of given, antecedently fixed ends, and conceiving action as following choice of appropriate
means, the pursuit of those pre-established ends a non-teleological conception operates differently. A
creative situational orientation considers a quasi-dialogical relationship between action and pre-
reflective contexts, and understands embodied acting as a response to a demanding situatendess, while
also considering the sociality of action. Actions do not follow predefined or actual ends, but particular
‘ends-in-view’ as means of situated organising (Dewey, 1922). For Dewey the end-in-view is a plan or
a ‘hypothesis’ that guides present activities and is to be evaluated by its consequences and revised
throughout the activity guided by it. Thus, these ends-in-view are based on judgments and assumptions
about the type of situation and the possible actions that flow from it. Conversely, the situation itself is
not a fixed, objective ‘given’. Situations are interpreted and defined in relation to capacities for action.
Starting from the situation, action follows a series of various ends-in-views that remain relatively
undefined at first, but are specified through on-going reinterpretations and decisions about means.
Actors test out and revise their courses of action as each end-in-view itself becomes a means for further
ones. Means and ends do not form a transitive order in which one poses no obstacle to the other and
serves solely to fulfill that single purpose. As means and ends flow in a continuous stream of chiasmic
reversible organising and are part of an elastic meaning-situation-nexus, the distinction between them
is only an analytical and temporal one. As a situated creative action located in an indeterminate,
unpredictable and uncertain world, practical wisdom serves as a means of deliberating foresight in the
21
light of what may occur or reflect the realisation of future possibilities; creating and enacting new ways
of life destined for meaningful ends (Küpers, 2007, 2013a).
6
As such, they might pursuit particular ‘ends-in-view’ as means or media for dealing with an uncertain
situation or for situated organising (Dewey, 1922). For Dewey the end-in-view is a plan or a
‘hypothesis’ that guides present activities and is to be evaluated by its consequences and revised
throughout the activity guided by it. Thus, these ends-in-view are based on judgments and assumptions
about the type of situation and the possible actions that flow from it. Conversely, the situation itself is
not a fixed, objective ‘given’. Situations are interpreted and defined in relation to capacities for playful
action. Starting from the situation, action follows a series of various ends-in-views that remain
relatively undefined at first, but are specified through on-going reinterpretations and decisions about
means. Actors test out and revise their courses of action as each end-in-view itself becomes a means for
further ones.
7
Furthermore, ‘inter-play’ is enacted as bi-sociative acts (Koestler, 1964) that is as dance between
‘parts’ and the ‘whole’ in organizational change context. As such, it is transforming in a participatory
embrace that enacts new worlds and creates new boundaries and play spaces, thus allowing
differentiation and integration. Arthur Koestler’s (1964) term of “bisociation” defines a mind state
according to which any creative act is the result of two (or more) apparently incompatible frames of
thought. According to Koestler, there are three ways in which bisociation can occur, each with a
different effect. Associative frames can collide as in the case of comedy. They can temporarily unite in
an aesthetic experience as they do with art. Or they can fit together into a new more comprehensive
frame as they do with scientific discovery. Each mode of boundary play expresses a different
relationship between the parts and the whole. In the comedic mode, the part asserts itself over the
whole with a laugh. Aesthetic innovation, on the other hand, is a self-transcending encounter between
frames that creates a deep participation of the part with the whole such that the unity of the whole is
revealed to the part (even if the part takes credit for the artwork). In scientific discovery, the “aha!” or
“Eureka!” of discovery is part-centered, while the integration of the new knowledge affirms a new
level of coherence between the parts and the whole. The bisociative act depends in various degrees on
unconscious processes and imaginative leaps beyond the boundaries of routine thought. Bisociation, as
Koestler defines it, is fundamental to play. Mammalian play bisociates between everyday life and the
play space, whereas simpler forms of play bisociate solely between physical frames. Play, then
involves the dance between parts and the whole where the part can assert itself over the whole (e.g.,
comedy), the whole can assert itself over the part (e.g., aesthetics), or the part and whole can strike a
balance—a creative tension (e.g., scientific discover). Play in its best moments serves to transform both
the parts and the whole in a participatory embrace that enacts new worlds and creates new boundaries
and play spaces.
8
According to Higgs, Titchen and Neville (2001), professional artistry involves a blend of qualities,
skills and processes, particularly: practitioner qualities (for example, connoisseurship, emotional,
physical, existential and spiritual synchronicity and attunement to self, others and events); and practice
skills (for example, expert critical appreciation, ability to disclose or express what has been observed,
perceived and done and meta-cognitive skills used to balance different domains of professional craft
knowledge in the unique care of each patient, and to manage the fine interplay between intuition,
practical reasoning and rational reasoning and between different kinds of practice knowledge). Creative
imagination processes are imagining the outcomes of personalized, unique care interventions and
creative strategies to achieve them.
9
Ricoeurian phrónêsis is one part within a larger hermeneutic investigation into questions of narrative
and meaning that are quite explicitly poetic; inquiring the poetical role of imagening within the context
his larger poetics of the will. Ricoeur’s hermeneutics enables him to take up the concept of phrónêsis
as a practice in which selves take the singularity or alterity of others into account. However, the end or
goal of critical phrónêsis is never completed, but always to be pursued is an ever-greater ‘mutual
recognition’ of self and other, while recognizing the tragic nature of human (finite and limited)
practice, action or existence itself, which is rendering poetic responses.
10
In this sense a professional artistry as „poietic praxis” of play moves fom utility to (a Spiel of)
usability in the corporeal order of things (Keller 2005). This implies that practices and processes of
embodied play are not limited to an empirical locality in objective time and physical space. Rather,
such play processes a bodily and fleshly intentionality that structures significance and sense associated
with an open experience of temporality and spatiality unfolding across “the field of presence” as form
of socio-cultural and historical coherence (Keller, 2005: 178). While utility is a principle can be
defined by functional formality and socio-economic quantity within practice, usability is an actual
22
experience concerning the psycho-social and socio-cultural qualities and strains of concrete practice
(Keller 2005, 174). As play of corporeal intentionality, “the usability of a thing is the momentary and
continuous structuring of an entire culture-historical praxis into a field of presence that upholds a
particular practice: a usage, and thereby a thing as well as its user (Keller, 2005: 192). “The conception
of elementary meaning as corporeal intentionality allows us to highlight the topic of usability as our
profound interplay with things within all sorts of practices and fields (Keller, 2005: 198). The
elementary relations in the order of the play consist of the reciprocity of intertwined and reversible
positions, and its elementary dynamics comprises the asymmetrical responsiveness and irreversible
hyper-dialectic (ibd. 190) of such positions. The order of combined reciprocity, asymmetry and
irreversibility with which these aspects constitute a play (as Spiel) is a kind of aesthetic reason: an
intentionality of implication and explication structuring the ways in which the meaning experienced in
a certain situation folds into and folds out of various events. The elementary way in which this
aesthetic reason “makes” sense is in the pre-cognitive, engaged kind of reflection that is common to the
four aspects of a Spiel: the expressive-perceptual “folding back” of an ephemerally appearing
“something” that prevents its immediate disappear-ance, or – in other words – the holding on to this
“something” in so far as it is distinguished as any Gestalt at all. Usability is an experience of the
performative significance and sense of a thing (Keller, 2005: 190). The usability lies in the “natural”
convenience and authenticity with which things are associated with our own existence: the “effective
reality” (Wirklichkeit) or “corporeal pragmatics” of their relevant, suitable, supporting and confirming
inter-play with us. The oriented structuring of the usability of a thing resumes its particular socio-
cultural field of application as the sense and order of a field of presence. Usability is nothing but a
practical differentiation of corporeal intentionality: the spontaneous and efficient concretion of a rich
general praxis into a precisely situated focus (Keller, 2005: 199). The immediate and spontaneous ex-
perience of a thing’s usability implies a sociocultural and psychosocial foundation of historical
coherence and relevant anticipation. In its vertical ontology, usability is a practical matter based upon
aesthetic being, but horizontally, the expressive-perceptual structuring of usability is direct and
instantaneous. As a play of corporeal intentionality, the usability of a thing is the momentary and
continuous structuring of an entire culture-historical praxis into a field of presence that upholds a
particular practice: a usage, and thereby a thing as well as its user. With this conception of corporeal
intentionality, a thing’s usability must be clarified in the light of the praxis to which the thing in
question belongs (Keller, 2005: 199).
11
For these undertakings, advanced facilitative practices, like open-space, future-search, mind
mapping, scenario, affinity diagrams, and world-cafe2 technologies and workshops might be helpful.
These types of creative approaches and proto-integral practices are excellent for mediating more
integrative and inclusive perspectives and realisations as well as enactements of embodied design in
and as leadership. They are inherently collaborative in nature, and because they each bring multiple
points of view together around an issue of importance, working with organization’s members and
characteristics of embodiment, allowing them not only to make contributions, but –co-design, while
moving towards finding common ground. Incorporating the development an integral practice (Leonard
and Murphy 2005) of some sort among practitioner—a mind, body, heart, and soul approach and
mindfulness practices is a key to developing them as being able to respond w-holistically to situations
with their whole embodied.
12
Referring essentially to the perception of one’s own sensory and visceral experiences, the ‘bodily felt
sense’ is a significant phenomenon in both psychotherapy and body-oriented psychotherapy. Gendlin
defines felt sense as “a special kind of internal bodily awareness … a body-sense of meaning”
(Gendlin, 1981: 10), which the conscious mind is initially unable to articulate. By staying with a felt
sense, a shift in meaning may eventually occur that brings a physically felt relief in the way the body
holds that issue. Referring to a change that is actually happening, Gendlin defined felt-shift as “the
body talking back” (Gendlin, 1996: 97) or as a kind of resonating that occurs when we check with our
body about the accuracy of a felt-sense, or an initial handle for a felt-sense. This shifting is a way of
recognizing the appropriateness of a felt-sense, which in and of itself is already a fulfillment, a carrying
forward of the whole, a “symbolic completion” (Gendlin, 1964: 10).
