Page 159 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 147
4.1. Introduction
This paper examines creative workers who put their clients in a situation of liminality, with the ultimate aim to stimulate creativity in organization- al settings. Liminality is a concept that originates from anthropology and refers to a transformation in which people move from one state of being to another state (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1982; 1987; 2008 [1969]), and is used in organization studies to illuminate processes through which or- ganizational members transit from one organizational reality to another (Garsten 1999; Czarniawska and Mazza 2003).
Liminality can be a “profoundly unsettling experience” (Sturdy, Schwarz and Spicer 2006: 930) because existing routines, rules and struc- tures disappear before new ones can be formed. Based upon these charac- teristics, however, scholars have suggested that liminality can be condu- cive to creativity and exploration of new possibilities (Garsten 1999; Turner 1982; 1987). Participation in mundane organizational activities, like organizing workshops (Johnson, Prashantham, Floyd and Bourque 2010), enacting roles (Swan, Scarbrough and Ziebro 2016) or having conversa- tions in hallways (Shortt 2015) can allow people to experience liminality and generate novelty (Howard-Grenville et al. 2011). Scholars also demon- strated that escaping from organizational realities (Tempest and Starkey 2004), for example through organizing business dinners (Sturdy et al. 2006) or temporary consultancy projects (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003) can trigger creative behaviors among organizational members. So, whether in the form of activities, roles or spaces, liminality can be a “seedbed of cultural and social creativity” (Garsten 1999: 615) and is “full of potency and potentiality” (Turner 2008 [1969]: 466).
So far, however, most research has examined liminality and its potential for creativity from the perspective of the ‘liminal personae’ (Turner 2008 [1969]: 95), or those who undergo liminality, such as management consult- ants (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003; Sturdy et al. 2006), MBA students (Simpson, Sturges and Weight 2010), temporary workers (Garsten 1999; Borg and Söderlund 2014), managers (Swan et al. 2016), or other organiza- tional employees (Howard-Grenville et al. 2011; Shortt 2015). Traditional literature on liminality, though, has also pointed at the role of ‘ceremony