Game Playing

Game playing at work experientially links the structural features of work and employment with workers’ willingness to persist on the shop floor. Game playing at work constitutes an arena of autonomy and meaning that workers carve out in their daily activities on the shop floor. However, game playing also helps coordinate the interests of workers and managers, and it has been seen as a key process in the generation of consent on the shop floor. In early industrial sociology, analysts often observed how workers, when faced with the monotony and the drudgery of work, would often play games to pass the time or attempt to derive relative satisfactions from work.

In 1979, in Manufacturing Consent, Michael Burawoy laid out a general framework for understanding the importance of game play in the labor process. While working as a miscellaneous machine operator in a Chicago industrial plant, Burawoy made a connection between the organization of work as a game and the generation of consent on the shop floor. Burawoy identified a game of “making out” on the shop floor—workers attempted to maximize the best rates possible, given the task at hand. These workers continually tried to “make out,” given the limitations of supplies, uncooperative co-workers, or shoddy machines. In order to “make out,” workersdrew from a repertoire of skills and accumulated knowledge. To play the game, there needed to be an objective and an element of risk, and workers needed to be able to actively affect the outcome. While playing the game, workers received relative satisfaction from work and gained control over a portion of the labor process. However, Burawoy argues that these games represent workers’ consent to much larger processes and relationships, namely the extraction of surplus value and exploitation. As workers attempted to maximize their return for effort and derive some satisfaction from work, they simultaneously provided management with increased levels of productivity.

As industrial production has waned in the American economy, sociologists have recently brought the game metaphor into the service economy. In the industrial model of employment relations, there are two main actors—workers and managers. Managers actively shape the playing of work games by establishing the rules, ensuring participation, and ending the game if it threatens managerial control. So then, how does game play unfold in the service economy, with its triangular relationship between workers, managers, and customers? Two recent books, Class Acts by Rachel Sherman and The Labor of Luck by Jeffrey Sallaz, bring the game metaphor to bear on work in the service economy. Both Sallaz and Sherman observe that game play [Page 312]in the service economy often involves customers. Sallaz shows that casino dealers in the United States play an entrepreneurial game, where dealers try to extract tips from clients by providing them with service and advice at the table. Dealers attempt to maximize the tips they receive at the table while simultaneously getting the client to play additional hands. Researching front-of-the-house luxury hotel workers, Sherman shows how interactive service workers often engage in games of skill and control in an effort to gain status among co-workers and control over clients and the pace of work. In this case, game playing entails workers asserting their autonomy in the face of control and external constraints.

...