Page 183 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 171
Yoo 2013; Swan et al. 2016). We found that creative workers as ceremony masters foster liminality by empowering their clients to freely experiment with new technologies and connect with actors beyond their own networks (activating), while fluidly adapting their own role and involvement as they sense what is needed (morphing). Activating and morphing allowed the creative workers to separate their clients from existing organizational real- ities, experience ambiguity, freedom and community in the middle phase of liminality, and finally to incorporate their clients in a renewed state back into organizational realities. These findings have implications for organi- zational and management studies on liminality and creative work.
4.5.1. The importance of ‘ceremony masters’ in facilitating liminality
Our research contributes insight into the creative potential of limi- nality, and thereby responds to the interest in liminality as an explanatory concept in organization studies (Söderlund and Borg 2017). The primary focus of existing research has been on those actors undergoing liminality, the ‘liminal personae’ as Turner (2008 [1969]) referred to them. As a result, the literature so far has been silent about ‘ceremony masters’, those who create and safeguard the conditions that can induce liminality in others, and more generally about how liminality can be purposefully facilitated. Prior research seems to assume that liminality is created by the liminal personae themselves (Garsten 1999; Shortt 2015; Sturdy et al. 2006; Swan et al. 2016), or as if liminality is a given - either as a temporary or permanent condition ( Johnsen and Sörenson 2015). For example, Henfridsson and Yoo (2013) suggest that innovation trajectories are liminal by nature and do not question how liminality comes about in the first place.
Our findings show how liminality can be actively facilitated by cere- mony masters, which were in our setting creative workers employed at an innovation hub. The intervention of ceremony masters proved to particu- larly be essential to navigate feelings of ambiguity, freedom and commu- nity. Using van Gennep’s (1960[1909]) framework, we show how ‘cere- mony’ masters are involved in all three phases of liminality (separation, transition, incorporation). Ceremony masters guide and manage others to experience liminality, while at the same time making sure that too much ambiguity is avoided and feelings of community and freedom are main- tained. While our findings are particularly about creative workers, they have broader implications for organization studies, as they show liminality cannot be taken for granted as a characteristic of places, positions, and processes (Söderlund and Borg 2017), but that it needs to be seen in relation