James March's Technology of Foolishness (Moving toward a Playful Civilization?)

As a result of the realization by various social scientists that the postulate of rationality of human behavior is inadequate to capture actual human behavior, a concept of “bounded rationality” is formed in the science as one of the main prerequisites for the analysis of the behavior of individuals in various fields of activity. The model of bounded rationality serves as a methodological basis of the behavioral theory of the firm, within which a lot of questions from the field of organizational decision-making were highlighted.  James March proposed a model of decision-making - by individuals, organizations, social and cultural systems - based on release from the logic of reason and use of sensible foolishness. Playfulness and playful behavior are at the heart of the “technology of foolishness.” This method allows experimentation, acting unintelligently, irrationally and foolishly. The playful strategy creates productive behaviors at all levels of human activity and can contribute to the transformation of people, organizations, and the social structure as a whole.  In the light of these ideas of James March, a question can be raised as to the vector of development of modern society, where the process of gamification expands to increasingly wider spheres of life of people. Even the science revises generally accepted criteria of the development of scientific knowledge, which is now understood as a variety of probabilistic narratives.  Does all this mean that humanity, by abandoning rationality as a cultural universal and switching to a playful format in its activities, moves to a new level of civilization development, transforming into a playful society with playful forms of thinking and behavior?  Let us recall the words of the great poet W. Shakespeare: “All the world's a stage, and all the men and women merely players” or in other words “mundus universus exercet histrioniam.”