A busy few months ahead for the Play Ethic - our mass paperback version of the book (with new cover, to the left) will be out on September 30th in the UK (buyable here on Amazon.co.uk). I've already done a few radio spots, and am hoping to place articles around the media over the next few weeks (see this interview in Ode magazine).
What's interesting is the increasing amount of academic interest in the Play Ethic. On extended post below is a review in a journal called Organisations and People - which happily describes the book as a 'modern classic' - and downloadable here (pdf) is a very in-depth treatment of 'Play at Work: questions of historical interpretation'. I'm digesting it slowly, but excitedly - and I'm most thrilled by their conclusion:
the new mixture of play and work is an epiphany of ethical inarticulacy which manifests itself at macro and micro-cultural levels. The way in which Kane, Carse and Csikszentmihalyi, for example, propose play as an infinite possibility of being and suggest that all life experiences should be turned into ‘infinite games’ is a cultural expression of this search for a way of leaving behind the 'space of experience' of finitude and reaching new horizons of ‘infinity’. In fact, it is this idea of a world in which ‘everything might be possible’ and in which everybody is entitled to endless enjoyment (what Bruckner calls ‘the utopia of fun’), in which youth is prolonged, and in which life itself will be delivered from suffering and even mortality (and why not? what else is the current investment of hope in the promises of genetic elucidation of man's biological being?) that Taylor suggests is the essence of what he terms ‘ethics of inarticulacy’.
Well, they get that right: the play ethic is, on one level, an attempt to help us cope with our increasing ability to control and 'play with' the fundamentals of our lives - social, material, technological and biological - by developing an ethic for these burgeoning powers.
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