To better understand the forces propelling the excess which characterizes much of Western society and culture, management scholars increasingly appear to be addressing notions such as play and playfulness. Through a number of narratives, homing in on a do-it-yourself movement within the heavy trucks industry in which users are displaying a keen interest in aesthetic aspects of their work tools, this book attempts to further and complement such discussions. It does so by exploring the creative processes which seem to constitute a certain playfulness, a certain playful practice set on excessive decoration of heavy duty vehicles — a practice which, moreover, appears to be spreading aesthetic values more generally within this industry. From a psychoanalytical perspective, and emphasizing and examining the relationship between fantasy and desire, it argues that in order to understand the driving mechanisms at work in such processes, one has, however, to look beyond the idea of the playful as being something thoroughly harmonic or pleasurable. Drawing mainly on Slavoj Zizek’s readings of the French philosopher and psychoanalyst Jacques Lacan, it argues that we must instead look beyond the pleasure principle in order to understand why something always emerges, where nothing really seemed to be needed. / QC 20100812