Page 184 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

172 Design Meets Business
to ‘ceremony masters’ who actively facilitate and shape experiences. Further, our study offers insight in the specific practices that incite limi- nality. In particular, we found that the practice of activating was enacted in all three phases of liminality, but with an emphasis on the first and third. It is important that ceremony masters use activating practices in the first phase to separate clients from their existing structures. They do so by offering alternative options and possibilities, such as new people, new tech- nologies and an environment in which existing structures and positions are actively questioned. Similarly, in the third phase, creatives activate clients to move away from the middle phase of liminality by letting them present new insights and empower and prepare them for taking (renewed) posi- tion in the existing organizational settings. Morphing was added to the second phase of liminality in particular. In this phase, it was still impor- tant to gather people so they could form a community, and stimulate them to experiment and play with technologies, as part of the activating prac- tice, but morphing proved vital in guiding people in this phase with lots of ambiguity. In particular, through morphing, creative workers tried to avoid feelings of frustration or other negative emotions that emerged as a consequence of heightened ambiguity and as a consequence could hamper creative processes. Through combined practices of morphing and acti- vating, clients could experience not only a sense of freedom and a commu- nity feeling, but also ambiguity (without it overwhelming them). It is likely that the temporal nature of the collaboration with Waag heightened the
intensity of participants’ experiences.
Further, our findings show the importance of ceremony masters as
they safeguard people from harm while undergoing these liminal phases. Earlier research demonstrated that liminality could generate both frustra- tion and exhilaration among those undergoing it (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003). For example, Sennett (1998) highlights the limits of liminality, arguing its destructive aspects and fragmenting potential. Such frustration can be a roadblock in the pursuit of creativity in liminality (Swan et al. 2015). Our findings, however, add to the more positive takes on liminality of Czarniawska and Mazza (2003) and Tempest and Starkey (2004), by emphasizing the role of ceremony masters. As ceremony masters, the crea- tive workers have the important task of guiding others (clients) towards their own aims in becoming more creative and, moreover, making a differ- ence. For example, putting a lot of emphasis on activating client partici- pation heightened individual experiences of ambiguity and created frus- tration. To maintain liminality when this happens, the creatives morphed into more integral roles, took control over how their clients made sense of events, and provided more direction. As such, ceremony masters can also