Play is a foundational concept that animates life, work, creativity and organization; and while play is essential, it also dislodges the very meaning of these terms. Organization in Play explores different meanings, usages and understandings of play to present novel and insightful perspectives on capitalism, management, markets, bureaucracy and other organizational phenomena. It traces how early capitalism, with its ethos of austerity and distaste for recreation, has given way to a more ludic version in recent times. At the same time, children - those playmakers supreme - have been, curiously, excluded from scholarly conversation about organization. The authors examine this and other paradoxes using a wide range of sources - from Weber to Sesame Street, from Star Trek to Lacan, from Riverdance to Beckett - that shed light on the capricious boundaries between work and play, rationality and foolishness, sense and nonsense. Play points us to the liminal and the extraordinary, where meaning is ambiguous at best, and where conventional notions about order and disorder, movement and stasis, centre and periphery are undone and are put into play. It focuses our attention on the silences and absences, the comic and the theatrical, the folly and the madness of markets, organizations, management and work practices in contemporary capitalism. Drawing on a deep engagement with sociological and organizational literatures, the authors show how a play perspective enhances our understanding of the institutions we inhabit and which inhabit us.

This book provides an analysis of neo-liberal political economics implemented in Ireland and the deleterious consequences of that model in terms of polarised social inequalities, impoverished public services and fiscal vulnerability as they appear in central social policy domains - health, housing and education in particular. Tracing the argument into the domains where the institutions are sustained and reproduced, this book examines the movement of modern economics away from its original concern with the household and anthropologically universal deep human needs to care for the vulnerable - the sick, children and the elderly - and to maintain inter-generational solidarity. The authors argue that the financialisation of social relations undermines the foundations of civilisation and opens up a marketised barbarism. Civic catastrophes of violent conflict and authoritarian liberalism are here illustrated as aspects of the 'rough beast' that slouches in when things are falling apart and people become prey to new forms of domination. -- .

Ireland is going through a period of unprecedented economic and cultural growth and renewal. Living standards in the Republic are growing in an unprecedented manner. These changes are due in part to neoliberal policies in attracting major US capital, and in part to successfully capturing EU capital. The social consequences of these economic events have led to an Ireland which has become cosmopolitan, whose Roman Catholicism has been secularised, and to which Irish people are returning. Laws concerning divorce and sexuality have been liberalised and Ireland has become an urban society for the first time ever. This book explains what has happened socially, but also provide examples of the cultural transformation, which has allowed local creative talent to flow. At all points of the compass, Ireland is an exciting place to live. This book provides a rich analysis of Ireland, examining the problems of benefits of the changes taking place. Inevitably, in a rapidly expanding economy, there are winners and losers: where capitalism works for a wide number of people in a community, the adrenaline flows, but the people who cannot keep up may fall by the wayside. Ireland over the last 15 years, capturing the intensity of the debates that make up the new cosmopolitan multi-cultural Ireland.