Page 167 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 155
Further, interviewing the clients allowed us to get a sense of normalized behaviors that might easily go unnoticed by creatives themselves and to better understand the transformation process at Waag. During both inter- views with creative workers and clients, we tightened our focus by inquiring about pivotal moments of insight, conflict, and change. Such focus helped us to better understand in specific when creative workers changed their behavior and more general, what patterns of behavior were key in facili- tating liminality.
We carried out observations to complement the interviews and docu- ments and improve our grasp of the creative workers’ more fleeting and taken-for-granted practices. A total of 14 observations over a total of 24 hours were conducted by the first author, from May 2015 to February 2016. Observations were targeted at all three projects. The first author joined workshops and meetings as a ‘fly on the wall’ (Lofland and Lofland 2006) to experience the atmosphere and see what was going on personally. Addi- tionally, secondary observations were made using existing video recordings of workshops. These typically lasted between 2 to 20 minutes and were meant to serve as a video report to externals (as part of a tangible project deliverable) or as ‘visual minutes’ for project members. The first author’s notes of events emphasized the creatives’ practices, the space, materials, the atmosphere, and points of surprise, for example.
To get a more complete understanding of the projects, we also gath- ered archival data, including project proposals, reports, meeting notes and strategy documents. The archival data helped us understand not only the proposal stage of the projects we had chosen but also to better understand how the projects unfolded over time. For example, the project reports helped us to triangulate our own conclusions and observations during projects, such as how many people participated in projects, what technol- ogies were used during the project and other factual data. For an overview of all our collected data, see Table 4.2.
4.3.3. Data Analysis
Data analysis happened concurrently with data collection. In particular, it took place after the first phase, and during and after the second phase. In our data analysis, we combined thematic analysis with a process approach to inductive theory building (Gehman et al. 2017). First, we did a thematic analysis (Gioia, Corley and Hamilton 2013; Van Maanen 1979) to develop a conceptual structure that we could use to interpret what creative workers do to facilitate liminality among clients. Then, with the conceptual struc- ture in mind, we used a process approach to understand how the creatives’