Online Recreation and Play in Organizational Life: The Internet as Virtual Contested Terrain

Abstract

This chapter analyzes the emerging forms of online recreation and play in the workplace and addresses how their benefits and drawbacks are being defined. It discusses how online work and play are often becoming seamlessly melded and sometimes confused, as predicted by Orwell in the epigraph. Managers are responding to online recreation in a wide spectrum of ways, from restricting all “personal” uses of computing to openly encouraging them (often as a means of keeping employees at their desks for long hours).