In this short paper, we reflect on ‘algorithmic management learning’ – a phenomenon that dates back to the early twentieth century but has gained fresh impetus in the dawning age of artificial intelligence. In particular, we suggest that management learning has today become a human-machine hybrid. This form of management learning is not only increasingly non-reflexive, it is also impeding the human capacity to be reflexive and to learn reflexively. We conclude by outlining the consequences of algorithmic management learning for the future of this journal.

Comedians are well known for pushing the boundaries of taste, decency and social mores in their acts, often to hilarious effect. But professional comedians must also navigate a range of visible and invisible boundaries as their careers unfold. One of the pivotal shifts occurs with the transition from the live circuit to television. While these two domains are often seen as closely connected, live work and TV work are in fact characterized by very different rules of entry and progression. Drawing on 82 interviews with comedians and other industry players, this paper explores the risks and rewards involved in making the transition from one institutional context to another. In particular, we develop the concept of ‘liminal career boundary’ to explain how and why boundaries emerge in fluid, informal organizational contexts such as freelance creative work. This concept extends our understanding of organizational liminality as a state of disorientating in-betweenness, one that is partly objective (insofar as it is determined by key industry gatekeepers) and partly subjective (insofar as it is perceived by professionals who are attempting to cross a career boundary).

This entry reflects on the meaning and significance of playful work in contemporary organizations. In recent years, playful work has become a prominent managerial technique to combat employee disengagement and low morale in organizations. This trend has its roots in positive psychology, especially Csikszentmihalyi’s concept of flow and Deci and Ryan’s self-determination theory. Developments such as serious play and gamification promise to make work more fun and engaging. However, critics point out that forcing employees to play might lead to unintended negative consequences, such as resentment and cynicism. What’s more, using play to serve corporate objectives might contradict the concept of play itself, understood as a phenomenon that is meant to serve no other purpose apart from its own ends.

Today, it is becoming increasingly common for companies to harness the spirit of play in order to increase worker engagement and improve organizational performance. This paper examines the ethics of play in a business context, focusing specifically on the phenomenon of workplace gamification. While critics highlight ethical problems with gamification, they also advocate for more positive, transformative, and life-affirming modes of organizational play. Gamification is ethical, on this view, when it allows users to reach a state of authentic happiness or eudaimonia. The underlying assumption, here, is that the ‘magic circle’ of play—a sphere that exists entirely for its own sake—should be protected in order to secure meaningfulness at work. However, we argue that this faith in play is misguided because play, even at its most autotelic, is ethically ambivalent; it does not lead inexorably to virtuous work environments, but may in fact have an undesirable impact on those who are playing. Our study thus contributes to research on the ‘dark side’ of organizational play, a strand of scholarship that questions the idea that play always points toward the good life.

This short paper explores the gamification of an online academic conference. At the conference, digital gamification was meant to stimulate increased levels of participation among attendees. Instead, it resulted in a series of unintended consequences. Precisely because it was all too easy to score points and ascend the virtual leaderboard by means of machine-like grinding, the “Conference Challenge” posed a moral dilemma for its players: each participant had to determine for themselves where the border lay between playing the game and gaming the system. We use this case to raise questions about the ethics of game-playing in an academic context. In particular, we suggest that the Conference Challenge is a distorted reflection of what’s already happening in the broader “publication game” in the university.

This paper explores the emerging concept of ‘algorithmic leadership’. Developed in the practitioner literature, the idea of algorithmic leadership implies that machines and human leaders complement each other in the workplace. The machine does the data analysis and the number crunching, while the leader is guided by their gut-feeling and inner moral compass. In this paper, we complicate this division of labour and raise ethical questions about algorithmic leadership. In particular, we argue that the human side of the human-machine partnership already follows a computational logic – such as we find in Cold War game theory and contemporary management science.

There are plenty of books and articles on research methods, but few discuss the nature and purpose of method sections in academic journals. Based on interviews with critical and interpretivist researchers, this short paper examines the nature and purpose of method sections in management and organization studies. We show how researchers make sense of, and struggle with, positivist expectations about the form and content of method sections. Ultimately, we call for greater openness about what method sections might look like and ask whether all academic articles need method sections.

From its inception, leadership studies has embraced the positivist tradition of hypothesis testing. In this tradition, psychometric instruments are meant to ward off belief from scientific practice by testing theories against empirical facts. While leadership scholars purport to conform to the standards of value-neutral science, this paper tells a different story. Drawing on qualitative interviews with 39 positivist leadership researchers, we argue that leadership studies is heavily invested with faith in two main ways: (a) faith in leadership concepts, even when their accompanying measures fall short of methodological standards and (b) faith in leadership studies as a science, even when it is tainted by commercial interests and professional rewards. Ultimately, we suggest that positivist epistemology is accepted in leadership studies as an article of faith. By exploring the interconnection between science and belief in the business school, we draw attention to the secular religion of scientism in leadership studies.

It is increasingly common to describe academic research as a publication game, a metaphor that connotes instrumental strategies for publishing in highly rated journals. However, we suggest that the use of this metaphor is problematic. In particular, the metaphor allows scholars to make a convenient, but ultimately misleading, distinction between figurative game-playing on one hand (i.e. pursuing external career goals through instrumental publishing) and proper research on the other hand (i.e. producing intrinsically meaningful research). In other words, the publication game implies that while academic researchers may behave just like players, they are not really playing a game. Drawing on semi-structured interviews, we show that this metaphor prevents us, ironically, from fully grasping the lusory attitude, or play-mentality, that characterizes academic work among critical management researchers. Ultimately, we seek to stimulate reflection about how our choice of metaphor can have performative effects in the university and influence our behavior in unforeseen and potentially undesirable ways.