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

商业游戏是在第二次世界大战后出现的。在社会转向逻辑发生更广泛变化的背景下，在企业管理与经济范式的交汇处，商业博弈是一种新型市场经济理性出现的产物。商业游戏代表了一种文化技术(KulturTechnik)，它不仅在特定管理风格或经济预测的教育领域有效，而且对整个社会有效：通过控制论、信息学和中间论的论述在智力上产生影响，并就其关键艺术品而言，最终在媒介中实现？计算机？20世纪50年代的严肃游戏使(经济)控制、知识的转变以及适应新媒介和更新的理性概念发生了根本性的变化。商业游戏被设置为关于知识和真理生产的理性话语中的一个可操作元素，这是20世纪的一项相关认识论创新。本项目的目标是分析20世纪50年代至70年代商业游戏的上升趋势和受欢迎程度，以及它们对社会实践的影响，这些影响远远超出了经济学领域。本文以德意志联邦共和国商业游戏的使用为研究对象，结合话语分析、传媒史、经济史和博弈学等研究方法，旨在对游戏作为发达工业社会的一种文化技术所扮演的角色提供新的理解。媒体和文化研究的视角将以对德国商业游戏演变的历史研究为基础和补充。这一跨学科框架对于分析经济学、计算机和信息技术、游戏和社会之间的关系至关重要。经济史、媒体理论和文化研究不是作为单一的、自主的方法来对待的，而是作为紧密相连的工具，提供融合在商业游戏的考古学和谱系学视角中的同步思想交流。此外，该项目关注的特定时间段提供了对当代现实的可转移性：重要的断裂，成为当今后工业转向逻辑的决定性因素，及其相关的危机时刻，植根于20世纪二战后的几年。正是这种历史重组和批判性整合的双重视角，为理解当代话语潮流--从经济学到批判性理论--提供了一个创新的研究项目。

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.