Page 160 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                148 Design Meets Business
masters’ leading others through a process of transformation (Turner 1982; 1987; 2008 [1969]). In particular, it is suggested that ceremony masters can help to manage feelings of heightened ambiguity among liminal personae that can hamper transformation processes. Yet, so far, organizational liter- ature has neglected the importance of those who guide liminal personae through their experience.
As a consequence, we know little about the role and activities of cere- mony masters in the context of organizations, where liminality is analyzed more as an emergent phenomenon. The purpose of this study is thus to bring back in the ‘ceremony masters’ in organizational studies on limi- nality, and enlighten their actions. Since liminality offers opportunity for creativity (Garsten 1999; Sturdy et al. 2006; Swan et al. 2016), we aim to understand the actions of creative workers as main facilitators of limi- nality. Hence, our research question in this paper is: How do creative workers as ceremony masters facilitate liminality for their clients?
Our insights are based on an in-depth qualitative study of creative workers at a social innovation hub who aim to spark their clients’ imagination and creativity in innovation projects. As ‘ceremony masters’, they enacted two independent but related practices to facilitate liminality for their clients. Through the practice of ‘morphing’, the creative workers changed their own roles and personal representations depending on clients’ demands and needs. At the same time, through the practice of ‘activating’, creative workers encouraged their clients to play and experiment with new technologies while connecting them to a heterogenous group of experts and other inter- ested people. Through the combined interplay of morphing and activating, the creative workers purposely created feelings of ambiguity, freedom and community which triggered liminality among their clients. In other words, creative workers facilitate liminality by being liminal themselves.
With these insights we contribute to organization theory on limi- nality and creativity, by revealing a case of ‘double liminality’. We take the perspective of the ‘ceremony masters’ in facilitating liminality, and propose that creative workers might be liminal themselves in order for their clients to transform. We especially build on the work of Czarniawska and Mazza (2003) and Tempest and Starkey (2004), and add to those the argument that ‘ceremony masters’ can safely guide people through the liminality. We further show that such a perspective adds to the insights on liminality as process, position and place (Söderlund and Borg 2017), by focusing on what practices can be done to facilitate liminality. Also, we respond to the calls for research on activities of creative workers (Jones et al. 2016), and espe- cially in their ‘mundane’ activities beyond engaging in creative processes themselves (Rahman and Barley 2017).






























































































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