Page 169 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 157
these first order themes into second order themes associated to the prac- tices of activating and morphing (see Table 4.3).
Because of the prevalence of ambiguity in our data, we turned to the literature and found that much of what we observed resonated with the concept of liminality in organization studies (e.g. Garsten 1999). We decided to incorporate this concept into our analysis to further under- stand what creative workers do in their projects (see Gioia et al. 2013: 20). Our reading of the literature on liminality, encouraged us to explore not only feelings of ambiguity but also those of community and freedom in our data (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003). We found supportive data for all these aspects and summarized our findings in a coding scheme (see Table 3), in which we distinguished between first and second order codes. The thematic analysis yielded a conceptual structure which we used in our process analysis.
Process analysis. In the next phase, we used the conceptual structure to analyze how each of the three projects unfolded over time using a process approach (Langley 1999). Based especially the work of van Gennep (1960 [1909]), we discovered that liminality is the middle phase of three phases of a rite de passage: separation, transition and incorporation. Based on this framework, the first author then explored the emergence of phases in the selected projects. As there is little known about the creation of liminality in organizations and there is a gradual transition between the three phases, especially the work of Eriksson-Zetterquist (2002) and Czarniawska and Mazza (2003) helped us to identify how liminality unfolded in the projects. In particular, the first author wrote case narratives (Langley 1999) of all the projects followed by descriptions of how activating and morphing emerged over time, and to what extent feelings of ambiguity, freedom and commu- nity unfolded.
We considered all initial workshops in the three projects as being in the first phase of ‘separation’, as the creative workers used the initial work- shops to embed the clients into a new environment that is distinct from their work as usual. During this phase, the first feelings of community and ambiguity started to develop. The concluding events and the period after the final workshops were labeled as the phase of ‘incorporation’. During this final phase, the clients were brought back into their everyday organ- izational reality. This final phase goes accompanied especially with a renewed sense of community, as van Gennep (1960 [1909]) already argued. The period in between the first and final phase, which covers most of the project workshops, was labelled as the ‘transition’ period. This middle phase was the only phase in which clients sensed all sorts of feelings of liminality, including ambiguity, community and freedom.