10.5465/AMBPP.2017.305 PLAY AS PRACTICE RESEARCH: LINKING PRACTICE, PRACTITIONERS, PRAXIS, OBJECTS AND CONTEXT MARTIN SPRAGGON School of Business Administration American University of Sharjah PO Box 26666 United Arab Emirates (UAE) VIRGINIA BODOLICA American University of Sharjah, UAE INTRODUCTION The phenomenon of play has long been viewed as incompatible with organizations that are structured around canonical processes and focus on the attainment of quantitative performance outcomes. Since the main preoccupation of managers was the satisfaction of shareholders’ interests, all the manpower efforts and resources were funneled toward the achievement of higher levels of return on investment (Donaldson, 1996). Any playful undertaking, which was typically seen as inconsistent with performance-driven objectives of corporations, was discouraged and not allowed to intrude in the world of work. Yet, at the beginning of 1980s, researchers have been increasingly recognizing the importance of the informal economy, through its multiple expressions and manifestations, for enhancing corporate success and securing the satisfaction of wider sets of stakeholders. The positive externalities of interpersonal bonding, socializing and networking, group cohesiveness, psychological safety, and healthy organizational cultures started to be widely acknowledged in the management literature (Mainemelis and Ronson, 2006). Playful activities and behaviors of employees were not only perceived more positively by senior managers but also actively encouraged and implemented across a variety of fields. After several decades of research, significant advancements were made to uncover the intricacies associated with the embeddedness of play in the workplace. Although many valuable insights can be drawn from studies on the intersection of work and play, the extant portrait of playful practices in corporate settings is far from being complete. While many scholarly efforts were deployed to further our understanding of deliberate, structured and management-induced play, little is known to date about those instances of play that are spontaneous, unplanned and emerge in the natural flow of job-related tasks (Hoedemaekers, 2016; Karlsen and Villadsen, 2015). Spraggon and Bodolica (2014) introduced the notion of social ludic activities (SLAs) “that is a priori unselfconscious and emergent, inherits autotelic and rational dimensions from prior views of play, draws upon practice insights, and represents the employee perspective”. Even though the authors have recently theorized about the potential benefits of SLAs for the generation of tacit bodies of knowledge at the group level (Spraggon and Bodolica, 2017), the empirical examination of informal types of play remains embryonic. This lack of contributions to the study of spontaneous forms of play may be explained by the difficulty of seizing an emergent and uncontrolled phenomenon through the deployment of a compelling theoretical and methodological approach. In this article, we make a call for more studies on spontaneous manifestations of play and posit that the adoption of a practice lens provides a rich opportunity to revive the field. It is our belief that the current understanding of informal play may be significantly enhanced if grounded within a framework that incorporates five practice-based dimensions, namely