Play as a Social Immune Mechanism in Public Organizations

Conflicts used to be accepted in the public sector. In fact, the state as a legal form was founded on a recognition that latent conflicts exist between societal and individual interests. Since around 2000, however, the public sector has declared war on all structures – whether legal, organizational, or professional. In this article, I see play as a symptom of this broader tendency to negate negativity in contemporary public governance regimes. In making this argument, the paper draws on Niklas Luhmann’s distinction between structures and social immune mechanisms. Immune mechanisms, which serve to dissolve expectational certainty, protect communication when its continuation is threatened by structures developed by the communication itself. Through examples I show how the public sector recruits play as a communicative form that functions as a new type of social immune mechanism. But play as an immune mechanism is tricky, as it says ‘no’ both to structures and to negativity. Consequently, play attacks not only bureaucratic structures but also the structural possibilities of having conflicts, including ones entailing citizen resistance to the state.