Page 185 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

4. Facilitating Liminality 173
protect people from ‘self-proclaimed ceremony masters taking over and even spinning out of control’ or ruin the potentiality of liminality alto- gether ( Johnsen and Sørensen 2015: 333).
4.5.2. Offering creativity as a service through adopting fluid roles
Our study also contributes to organizational studies on creativity. While scholars have explained how creative workers collectively create content such as ballet (Sgourev 2015), music (Lingo and O’Mahony 2010), video games (Cohendet and Simon 2016) and films (Bechky 2006), our study demonstrates a more mundane type of setting in which creatives can contribute. In particular, we show that creative workers can be of addi- tional value in ‘humdrum organizations’ (Townley et al. 2009), not only by directly providing a creative product to a client, such as is the case with architecture (Boland and Collopy 2004; Jones and Massa 2013), but by encouraging clients to come up with creative solutions by themselves. As such, our study suggests that creativity can be provided as a service, as is the aim behind facilitating liminality.
Further, this paper shows that creative workers can act as ceremony masters and facilitate liminality through adopting the position of liminal beings themselves. Thus, our study reveals a case of ‘double liminality’. Not only the clients of Waag but also the creative workers themselves described the organization in terms of ‘vague’ and ‘unclear’. Creative workers can use experiences of their own creative processes, and the ambiguity involved in it, to facilitate liminality for others. They are especially suitable for this task as they do not only have experience in adopting liminal positions - such as ‘mavericks’ and ‘misfits’ ( Jones et al. 2016) - but also can cope with open-ended and highly ambiguous situations in for example product inno- vation (Stigliani and Ravasi 2012), generating creative ideas during business dinners (Sturdy et al. 2006) or kickstarting new innovation trajectories (Henfridsson and Yoo 2013).
In their liminal position, creative workers ‘morph’ and accordingly, adopt fluid roles, to facilitate liminality. We find that creative workers can intentionally inspire flexibility and unpredictability (Austin et al. 2012) by constantly changing their own roles depending upon what they deem necessary at any given moment. The fluidity of morphing relates to emerging insights on creatives as ‘amphibians’ (Powel & Sandholtz 2012; Jones et al. 2016) or actors that are highly mobile and move between insider and outsider positions and roles such as Picasso (Sgourev 2013) “who was uniquely situated to introduce radical innovation because struc-