AUS professors win Rupert Chisholm Best Theory-to-Practice Paper Award

Professors Martin Spraggon and Virginia Bodolica from the AUS School of Business and Management co-authored a research paper that won an award from the Academy of Management at its annual meeting held August 9-13 in Lake Buena Vista, Florida.

The paper, entitled "Toward an Alternative Form of Play in Organizations: A Practice-Based Perspective on SLAs," won the Academy of Management's Organizational Development and Change Division Rupert F. Chisholm Best Theory-to-Practice Paper award. The paper was presented during the "Creative Approaches to Organizational Development and Change" session of the Academy of Management and included in the 2013 Best Paper Proceedings of the Academy of Management annual meeting.

In their paper, Drs. Spraggon and Bodolica observe that the "the current literature on play in work settings continues to be dominated by studies on serious play." The authors "seek to respond to recent calls for a more detailed examination of other manifestations of play in organizations and studying other practitioners than top managers by introducing the concept of social ludic activities (SLAs) as a specific form of playful practice which espouses the employee rather than the managerial perspective."

Drs. Spraggon and Bodolica draw upon a practice-based approach to explore "how employees, in the pursuit of their everyday tasks and in their copings with organization-induced events, enact SLAs to produce valuable outcomes or resist managerial oppression." The authors advance an "integrative framework that accounts for the dialectical relationships between the micro and macro levels and incorporates the practice, practitioner and praxis elements into the analysis of the SLAs' practice." The paper features two empirical vignettes that illustrate the enactments of SLAs in two software firms and concludes with the discussion of SLAs' implications for both scholars and practitioners.

Drs. Spraggon and Bodolica are associate professors in the Department of Management of the AUS School of Business and Management.