Page 187 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                4. Facilitating Liminality 175
also expanding beyond regular product design to the design of organi- zational processes (Fayard et al. 2017), might take a more central role in creative processes as their responsibility is to deliver a finished outcome at the end of innovation projects. Accordingly, in commercial environments, the final phase of liminality will most likely be more readily identifiable. Future research might further explore whether practices of activating and morphing can play a similar, though perhaps more limited, role in facili- tating liminality for clients in more commercial environments.
Next, more research is needed on identifying and distinguishing the three phases of liminality. Previous research on liminality in organiza- tional environments showed that liminality can unfold through three phases that van Gennep (1960[1909]) earlier proposed in his work (Eriks- son-Zetterquist 2002; Czarniawska and Mazza 2003). Yet, literature provides little instruction about how the three phases can be distinguished and identified. Our study suggests that the three phases of liminality are in way dependent on the actions of creatives themselves: when the creative workers do not only activate their clients but also engage in morphing, the clients entered the middle phase of liminality, where they experienced feel- ings of ambiguity, community and freedom. As the transitions between the phases unfold gradually, it remains complicated to draw a clear-cut line that separates the phases and the accompanied practices of creative workers. Future research could further identify the boundary conditions of these phases and theorize the gradual development of liminality over time. For example, scholars could study a larger sample of cases of liminality across various organizational settings, and compare these experiences to identify similarities and differences in how liminality unfolds over time.
In conclusion, we hope that our study inspires organizational scholars in the organization studies’ field of liminality and creativity to build on our study and further explore how and by whom liminality is created in today’s society. This paper has shown that in today’s society creative workers might facilitate liminality through activating their clients by letting them play with new technologies and collaborate heterogeneous actors, while at the same time changing their own roles and involvement along with the needs of their clients. In doing so, creative workers offer their clients simultaneously an end and a new beginning.































































































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