Business games as a cultural technique. Transformation of knowledge and controlling at the intersection of economics, computerization and mediality

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Business games come into existence after the Second World War. In the context of a broader change in societal steering logics and at the intersection of corporate management with economic paradigms business games are an outcome of the emergence of a new type of market economical rationality. The business game represents a cultural technique (Kulturtechnik) that is effective not solely in the field of education of a specific management style or economical prognostics, but for the society as a whole: intellectually influential through discourses of cybernetics, informatics and mediality and, concerning its key artifact, finally materializing in the medium »computer«. The serious games of the 1950s enact fundamental changes in (economic) controlling, the transformation of knowledge as well as the adaptation to a new medium and a renewed concept of rationality. It is a relevant epistemological innovation of the 20th century that the (business) game is installed as an operative element in a rational discourse on the production of knowledge and truth. The goal of the presented project is to analyse the upward trend and popularity of business games from the 1950s to the 1970s, as well as their influence on social practices, that reach well beyond the realm of economics. By focussing on the use of business games in the Federal Republic of Germany, the theoretical framework, combining approaches of discourse analysis, media history, economic history and game studies, aims to provide new understandings of the role that games play as a cultural technique of developed industrial societies. The perspective of media and cultural studies will be grounded on and appended by historical research on the evolution of business games in Germany. This interdisciplinary framework is essential to the analysis of relations between economics, computer- and information-technology, games and society. Economic history, media theory and cultural studies are not confronted as single, autonomous approaches but as closely interconnected instruments that offer a synchronized exchange of ideas merged in an archeological and genealogical perspective on business games. Furthermore, the specific period of time, focussed by the project, offers a transferability on contemporary realities: Important ruptures, that became decisive for nowadays postindustrial steering logics and its related moments of crisis, root in the post WWII years of the 20th century. It is exactly this doubled perspective of historical recombination and critical incorporation for an understanding of contemporary discursive currents - reaching from economics to critical theory - that serves an innovative research project.