Donncha Kavanagh – författare

Web3 is the latest transformation of the World Wide Web, centred on public blockchains, Crypto tokens, and an ideology of decentralisation. Defining Web3 presents the state of the art in socio-cultural and economic research from leading scholars in the field of cryptocurrencies and blockchains. Exploring Web3 as a ‘crypto-carnival,’ the papers in this collection take the carnival as their central motif and organising frame to mirror how Web3 is permeated by the carnivalesque, with its games, play, politics, anarchy, dissimulation, humour, vulgarity, excessive consumption, and counter-cultural aesthetics. Walking the line between both enthusiasts and critics, the authors analyse the token economy’s messy complications, excesses, dangers, and tensions, and how they might play out for the future of the Internet.Bringing together researchers, artists, and organisational designers to explore Web3’s potential as a progressive platform for creative social coordination, this uniquely experimental volume tackles the deceptively simple question, ‘What is Web3?’ and imagines where it might take us next.

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 constitutes the refereed proceedings of the IFIP WG 8.2 Working Conference on Information Systems and Organizations, IS&O 2016, held in Dublin, Ireland, in December 2016.The 12 revised full papers presented were carefully reviewed and selected from 75 submissions. The papers are organized in the following topical sections: doing process research; exploring affect and affordance; considering communication and performance; and examining knowledge and practice.