Justine Grønbæk Pors

Playful organisations: Undecidability as a scarce resource

This article explores how organisational play becomes a managerial tool to increase and benefit from undecidability. The article draws on Niklas Luhmanns concept of decision and on Gregory Batesons theory of play to create a conceptual framework for analysing the relation between decision and undecidability. With an empirical point of departure in Danish public school policy and two concrete examples of games utilised in school development, the article analyses how play is a way for organisations to simultaneously decide and also avoid making a decision, thus keeping flexibility and possibilities intact. In its final sections, the article discusses what happens to conditions of decision-making when organisations do not just see undecidability as a given condition, but as a limited resource indispensable for change and renewal. The article advances discussions of organisational play by exploring the consequences play has for the very conditions of organising and for key concepts in organisation theory.

Playful membership: embracing an unknown future

This article studies the implications of current attempts by organizations to adapt to a world of constant change by introducing the notion of playful organizational membership. To this end we conduct a brief semantic history of organizational play and argue that when organizations play, employees are expected to engage in playful exploration of alternative selves. Drawing on Niklas Luhmanns theory of time and decision-making and Gregory Batesons theory of play, the article analyses three empirical examples of how games play with conceptions of time. We explore how games represent an organizational desire to reach out – not just to the future – but to futures beyond the future presently imaginable. The article concludes that playful membership is membership through which employees are expected to develop a surplus of potential identities and continuously cross boundaries between real and virtual social worlds.

On the history of the form of administrative decisions: how decisions begin to desire uncertainty

Abstract In management and organization history, the concept of the decision has often been understood as an ahistorical phenomenon. The changing contexts, technologies, and subjects of decision-making have been thoroughly studied, but decision itself is rarely made an object of historical investigation. Addressing the question of how the very form of the decision changes in the course of history, this article studies the Danish public administration from the late nineteenth century to today. We argue that, over time, public administration reacts to self-produced complexity by developing higher and higher orders of decision-making resulting in a form of decision-making that deconstructs the very difference between decision premises and decision. We conclude that public administration has undergone a development where decision-making is increasingly used not to absorb uncertainty, but to create uncertainty in order to create new possibilities for public administration itself.

‘It Sends a Cold Shiver down my Spine’: Ghostly Interruptions to Strategy Implementation

This paper offers new theoretical and empirical understanding of interruptions to strategy implementation by drawing attention to their ghostly nature. The paper proposes a theoretical framework for thinking about the ghostly by combining Freud’s concept of the uncanny with theorizing in cultural geography on collapses of linear time as well as with Avery Gordon’s sociological work on ghostly matters. Empirically, the paper examines the ghostly nature of strategy interruptions through a detailed analysis of conversations between middle managers at a strategy seminar in a Danish local government. I portray the uncanny moments where the familiar account of organizational purposes is not so self-evident anymore, but all of a sudden appears rather disturbing. I show how middle managers envision other, darker futures and express the feeling that something else, something different from before, must be done, although they cannot say exactly what. Going beyond previous accounts of strategy interruption, for example as deliberate resistance by middle managers, the paper contributes with new insight into the moments where the neat ordering of organizational realities performed by corporate strategies breaks down and middle managers come into contact with the broader social and political stakes of their work.

The ghostly workings of Danish accountability policies

Abstract This article proposes a framework for thinking about the ghostly, thus arguing that policy can be understood as a landscape of intersecting and colliding temporalities from which arouse curious workings of barely-there forces, spooky energies and vibrating saturations of affective ambivalences. I present an empirical study of a policy agenda of introducing an assessment culture and improving the management of the Danish public school. I explore how all the routines and habits deemed outdated and sought annihilated by a new policy paradigm continue to haunt head teachers as seething presence of lurking resistance towards the policy aims as well as insidious doubts. Thinking about the ghostly contributes to studies of education policy by locating the reality of power in the mundane everyday doings and experiences of educational practitioners and insisting on the very tangled way people sense and intuit the complexities of contemporary forms of power.

Avoiding Unambiguity: Tensions in School Governing

As in many countries, the Danish public school system has in recent years been involved in a variety of assessments and international comparisons. Organizations such as the Organization for Economic Co-operation and Development (OECD) have conducted a number of PISA investigations and reviews of specific subjects either comparing national school systems or explaining factors in single countries. In a political context as well as in a broader public sense these assessments have resulted in a great deal of attention with their findings of how Danish public schools lack a culture of evaluation. In fact the final conclusion of an OECD review from 2004 stated that a culture of evaluation ‘is the one single factor that it is most important to achieve if standards are to be raised’ (OECD 2004: 129).