Liminality in Organization Studies

Theory and Method

Maria Rita Tagliaventi

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9780429632143
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Management
• Index: Business

In a time of flexible and mutable work arrangements, there is hardly a domain of organizing that has not been affected by liminality. Temporary workers who switch companies based on projects, consultants who operate at the boundaries between the consultant and the client companies, or 'hybrid entrepreneurs' who start new ventures, while still keeping their previous job, are examples of liminality in organizations. Liminality is also felt by managers who handle interorganizational relationships within customer-supplier networks or scientists who, albeit affiliated with R&D units, have strong ties with their scientific communities, acknowledging that they belong to neither setting thoroughly. Precious hints for enriching our comprehension of liminality in organizational settings can be conveyed by the reflection that has flourished in different fields.

This book advances knowledge of liminality management by elaborating on a model that puts together aspects of the liminal process that have been mostly described in a separate way so far, benefiting from the input provided by experience in sociology, medicine, and education. Through the articulation of a model that accounts for the antecedents, content, and consequences of liminality in organizations, the book intends to prompt quantitative research on this topic. It will be of value to those interested in organizational behavior, organization and management, marketing, sociology of work, and sociology of organizations.

1 The Foundations of Liminality

Introduction

Approaching the fascinating topic of liminality cannot refrain from undertaking a journey that starts with its original, and maybe still more influential, theorization, which resides in anthropology, specifically in Arnold van Gennep’s and Victor Turner’s works. In those early contributions, all the relevant aspects of liminality were introduced and have inspired a growing body of studies in heterogeneous fields, ranging from sociology to organizational behavior, from medicine and health to education, and from tourism to marketing. In this chapter, the core features of the liminal experience are presented and discussed, taking move from the very interpretations provided by anthropological research, to then take into account subsequent elaborations and perspectives offered in other domains that have refined, enriched, and sometimes contrasted the initial framework. Beginning with a definition of liminality, the change of space and time rhythm that liminality entails, the role of rites, ceremonies, and symbols to signal the separation from a former situation, the unfolding of a liminal experience, and the incorporation into a new situation, the breakage of a consolidated and familiar order, the formation of strong ties among individuals sharing a similar experience, and the identity work that is related to the loss of previously held identities, the ambiguity of the current identities, and the possible elaboration of new ones for the future, will be delved into distinctive elements of liminality. Liminal processes can be fruitful and rewarding, but also unsettling and threatening: their positive outcomes as well as their ‘dark side’ need to be investigated to raise awareness about the likelihood of their coming together in most liminal experiences, which makes the overall picture complex and challenging.

Between and Betwixt: Experiencing Transitions

Figure 1.1 Stages of a transition. Adapted from van Gennep (1960) and Söderlund and Borg (2018).

The concept of liminality can be almost unanimously traced back to the anthropological studies made by Arnold van Gennep at the beginning of the 20th century and subsequently revitalized and enriched by Victor Turner (1967, 1969, 1974a, b, 1975). The term ‘liminality’ stems from the Latin Limen or threshold, and refers to the central stage of transition from a previous, known situation to a new one that can be anticipated to varying degrees in different transitions (Figure 1.1). The starting point of a transition, which is the separation from a former state, is usually clearer than the endpoint, i.e., the incorporation into a new state: in other words, what is left behind is more familiar than what may lie ahead. In Turner’s own words (1969, p. 80), liminality is ‘a cultural realm that has few of the attributes of the previous or coming state’ and in which the liminal subject, also called liminar, is a ‘passenger.’ In the anthropological domain, passages occur—and are unavoidable—as a consequence of changes in natural rhythms and human life. In small, rural societies, according to van Gennep (1960), liminality is experienced whenever a significant move is recorded, be it in the environment—for instance, the subsequence of seasons throughout the year—or in human existence, such as the transition from adolescence to adulthood or from singlehood to marriage. While van Gennep underlined the ordinary and almost peaceful pace of liminality, Turner (1974b), who later intensively built on van Gennep’s reflection that was quite overlooked at the time, highlighted the likely strain that passages entail for individuals, imbuing liminality with a ‘drama’ connotation. Being originally entrenched in the ethnographic observation of tribes, and especially focusing on the Zambian Ndembu tribe members facing the transition from adolescence to adulthood, liminality emerges as both an individual experience, i.e., that of the single youngster facing the relinquishment of previous habits and routines to embrace a new status and related responsibilities, and a collective experience that people in the same situation—for instance, all the tribe youngsters turning into adults—jointly handle (Turner, 1967). In his latest contributions on liminality, Turner (1974a) delved into the societal level that can be affected by liminality, making the example of cruel events like revolutions as well as of more playful moments like carnival celebrations.

Individuals who find themselves in between two different states or roles, one of which is a former familiar one, while the latter may still linger relatively obscure, are dominated by feelings of ambiguity and uncertainty that are meaningfully expressed by Turner (1969, p. 95):

The attributes of liminality or liminal personae (‘threshold people’) are necessarily ambiguous, since this condition and these persons elude or slip through the networks of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space. Liminal entities are neither here nor there; they are betwixt and between the positions assigned and arrayed by law, custom, conventions.

(Turner, 1969, p. 95)

Based on this statement, liminars have since been identified in almost all the fields that have taken this construct into account as being ‘betwixt and between’, since they are ‘temporarily undefined’ (Turner, 1982, p. 27).

The perception of suspension is a major feature of liminal experiences that has been variously addressed in literature. Several meaningful metaphors have been evoked to account for the sense of indeterminateness proved by liminars, such as ‘social limbo’ (Cohn, 2001; Richter, 2016; Bamber, Allen-Collinson, and McCormack, 2017), ‘black hole’ associated with visions of ‘drowning’ and ‘nightmare’ (Kornberger, Justesen, and Mouritsen, 2011), ‘gray area’ and ‘twilight zone’ (Pina e Cunha, Guimarães-Costa, Rego, and Clegg, 2010; Hoel Felde, 2011), or a ‘miasma of sociocultural categorizations and perceptions’ (Cody and Lawlor, 2011, p. 216). The most pertinent way to express what being in the middle of a transition is like is to refer to it as a liminal experience according to the definition offered by Szakolczai (2009, p. 148): ‘an “experience” means that once previous certainties are removed and one enters a delicate, uncertain, malleable state; something might happen to one that alters the very core of one’s being.’

Transitional in-betweenness has peculiar features that make the experience of liminality unique, namely timeliness and spacelessness, rites and ceremonies, anti-structure, communitas, and identity work, which will be analyzed below.

Timeliness and Spacelessness

Liminality prompts deconstruction, confusion, and disorientation in time and space in those who cope with it, as Turner stated when talking about the specific ‘units of space and time’ inhabited by liminars:

Units of space and time in which behaviour and symbolism are momentarily enfranchised from the norms and values that govern the public lives of incumbents of structural positions.

(Turner, 1969, p. 166)

In the case of the Ndembu tribe studied by Turner, entering liminality implied that young people dwell in a detached place secluded from those who did not share their transition and in which they were deprived of opportunities to interact with the outside world (Turner, 1967). Turner (1974a, p. 58) stressed this connotation of liminality by stating that ‘The passage from one social status to another is often accompanied by a parallel passage in space, a geographical movement from one place to another.’

Studies of liminality beyond anthropology have built on Turner’s thought, underlining the perception of time and space as core aspects of a liminal experience (Cook-Sather, 2006; Wood, 2012; Winkler and Mahmood, 2015). Spaces can be not just dedicated locations that differ from those pertaining to non-liminars, as is the case with engineers working at a project in a separate location from colleagues who are not involved in the project (Wagner, Newell, and Kay, 2012), but also obscure and elusive places like hotels, where tourists stay for a few days while traveling and which are neither home nor an enduring destination (Pritchard and Morgan, 2006), or ‘non-places’ like call centers, shopping malls, and self-storages which can hardly nourish a sense of belonging and identification among employees and attendees (Daniel and Ellis-Chadwick, 2016; Karioris, 2016). Liminal space can be neutral (Tansley and Tietze, 2013), if not even become familiar over time, as commuters acknowledge for the trains or cars that daily take them back and forth from work (Wilhoit, 2017). Finally, liminal spaces can also turn out to be warm and friendly, as happens with the ‘holding environment’ that independent workers build to ease their precarious existence unfolding outside organizations (Petriglieri, Ashford, and Wrzesniewski, 2019) or that organizational members handling a severe crisis create to generate resilience (Powley, 2009; Teo, Lee, and Lim, 2017). Shortt (2015) provided convincing evidence of places that could be interpreted as liminal within the workplace precincts: stairwells, doorways, toilets, and storerooms were used by employees working in hair salons to escape the pressure they felt in the regular working areas, and were constructed as spaces in which to find some relief, develop a sense of belongingness, and cultivate creativity alongside co-workers. This finding is consistent with Dale and Burrell’s (2008) consideration that some working zones may act as an alternative to dominant and clearly delineated areas in which to imagine and try out unconventional behaviors. Liminal space can be a welcoming context also if it is far away from the usual work environment, as is the case with a rural archipelago where individuals gather for a given period of time to elaborate and discuss new work practices or creative ideas (Vesala and Tuomivaara, 2018). Be they imbued with an ambiguous and potentially threatening meaning or, instead, with a neutral or even positive connotation, it is notable that liminal spaces elude ordinary work and life settings.

In a similar vein, the interpretation of time in liminality brings to the fore its undetermined nature. A significant gap between time experimented when dealing with transitions and in regular work or life circumstances emerges from reflection on this topic. Turner (1974a, p. 57) talked about the feeling of being ‘“out of time,” that is, beyond or outside the time which measures secular processes and routines.’ Delanty (2010, p. 31) enriched this interpretation resorting to the expression ‘moments in and out of time’ that individuals in transition from one state to another may live. Perception of undetermined time in liminality can last shortly, for instance, the duration of a consulting project, in line with the anthropological accounts provided by Turner, or, conversely, extend to longer periods, even epochs or eras (Thomassen, 2009).

Eluding the common flow, time passes either too fast or too slowly in liminal spaces, and work and life rhythms differ from how they used to be before embarking on the passage and from those perceived by people who do not face liminality (Vesala and Tuomivaara, 2018). Liminars recurrently speak of time and discuss how it passes by: in a study on universities as sites of transition between life at home and life as independent adults, first-year students evoke a so-called ‘nostalgia for the present’ (Karioris, 2016, p. 91). When they think about their future, they imagine locations, activities, and relationships that mirror their current situation; in parallel, the suspended time that they experience is translated into the future, as if the stage that they are undergoing could become a stable way of living. In this sense, ‘time itself has moved in a polyrhythmic fashion. […] Not only is time both fast and slow, but it is also empty and overflowing’ (Karioris, 2016, p. 92).

The difference in time and space perception that liminars feel with respect to those who do not share their situation, alongside the ambiguity that these differences entail, has led to formulate the terms ‘spacelessness’ and ‘timelessness’ to depict the liminal condition (Kellerman, 2008; Küpers, 2011; Huang, Xiao, and Wang, 2018).

Rites, Ceremonies, and Symbols

Transitions are often solemnized by specific collective rites and ceremonies to signal the detachment from a previous, familiar situation and the succeeding incorporation into a new one (Cohn, 2001; Szakolczai, 2009; Kornberger et al., 2011). Turner (1982, p. 79) defined rituals as ‘prescribed formal behavior for occasions not given over to technological routine, having reference to beliefs in invisible beings or powers regarded as the first and final causes of all effects.’ Later contributions have underlined the very aim of rituals to communicate and underline the beginning and the end of passages:

[Ritual is] a specific behavior or activity giving symbolic expression to feelings and thoughts. A ritual functions to mark a transition, to validate that an experience has occurred, to provide an occasion and location for confirming the reality of a new identity, and to stimulate the expression of memories and feelings associated with the transition.

(Sleight, 2016, p. 55)

Van Gennep (1960) dealt in depth with rites denoting key life passages such as pregnancy, childbirth, and death in rural societies, and defined two types, respectively, anticipating and following the liminality experience: rites of separation and rites of incorporation. Rites of separation serve to celebrate the distance taken from old ways of acting and interacting to start a transition, whereas rites of incorporation have the objective to stress the endowment, at the end of the transition, with a new status or role.

At a higher level of abstraction, in his later contributions, Turner (1974a) identified rites characterizing the entry into a liminal condition as rites of effacement, aimed at signaling that customary routines, roles, and references must be dropped, and rites of ambiguity or paradox, which are bound to communicate the lack of clarity of the incoming liminal stage and its sharp difference from the former habitual state. Rites can be challenging, even humiliating, as is the case with the installation rite conferring the highest status (Kanongesha) to a senior chief in the Ndembu tribe described by Turner (1969), which implies nakedness of the people involved, insults, and images of death. Remarkably, rites are not plain demonstrations devoid of any practical content, but are meant to act as a guidance for action, as van Gennep (1960, p. 92) clearly stated: ‘one should not forget that in the ceremonies of initiation in particular, the elders, instructors, or ceremonial chiefs recite what their other members of the group perform.’ Turner (1982, p. 79) expanded on the essence of rites by writing that ‘Rules “frame” the ritual process but the ritual process transcends its frame.’ With reference to the Kanongesha rite, unpleasant aspects of initiation are a powerful reminder that chiefs nevertheless remain members of the community that they must dutifully and humbly serve.

Relevance of rites increases in highly institutionalized settings and decreases in less institutionalized ones (Söderlund and Borg, 2018). In general, rites tend to fade in contemporary societies in which a critic perspective prevails over a respectful abidance of rules and hierarchy (Boland, 2013; Adorno, 2015). In spite of this consideration, a wide range of less flamboyant rites and ceremonies are reported in modern organizational contexts to underscore liminal experiences. In consulting projects, which are commonly interpreted as liminal situations (Sturdy, Schwartz, and Spider, 2006; Sturdy, Handley, Clark, and Fincham, 2009), start-up meetings communicate investiture of consultants and divestiture of organizational members, whereas delivery and presentation of the final report can be likened to a ceremony of divestiture of consultants and (re)investiture of organizational members (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003). In a related vein, divestiture and investiture rites accompany, respectively, the exit from the ‘comfort zone’ represented by one’s own employing company and competencies, to enter an unfamiliar realm, and the later reincorporation into the familiar context with renewed competencies and revised professional and personal identities (Ryan, 2019).

Similarly, in the education field, involvement in ‘stretch projects’ (short-term projects aimed at developing students’ autonomy), passing professional exams, and undertaking Master’s qualifications have all been traced back to ceremonies signaling the transition to new, yet relatively undefined states (Tansley and Tietze, 2013).

In addition to rites, liminality can be characterized by specific symbols associated with the experience of passage (van Gennep, 1960; Turner, 1967). Symbols can be defined as ‘things regarded by general consent as naturally typifying or representing, or recalling something by possession of analogous qualities or by association in fact or thought’ (Turner, 1967, p. 19). In describing Ndembu rituals, Turner (1969, p. 360) referred to the ‘rich proliferation of liminal symbols’ and the ‘symbolic milieu’ that accompany initiations with a long period of seclusion similar to the induction into secret societies, and detailed how symbols act as a powerful means to indicate the dramatic change undergirding transitions (Turner, 1969, p. 359):

Liminal entities, such as neophytes in initiation or puberty rites, may be represented as possessing nothing. They may be disguised as monsters, wear only a strip of clothing, or even go naked, to demonstrate that as liminal beings they have no status, property, insignia, secular clothing indicating rank or role, position in a kinship system - in short, nothing that may distinguish them from their fellow neophytes or initiands.

Dominant symbols, i.e., symbols that ‘occupy the central role in ritual processes and are rather broad repositories for complex congeries of referents’ (Wieting, 1972, p. 145), can have distinctive properties (Turner, 1967). They can represent more elements at the same time (condensation of meanings), they can collapse heterogeneous meanings (unification of meanings), or they can juxtapose the ideological pole, inspired by principles of social organization and moral values, and the sensory pole, made up of the natural and physical features (polarization of meanings).

In order for rituals to be productive for transitions, the...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Series Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Dedication Page
• Table of Contents
• Preface
• 1 The Foundations of Liminality
• 2 Liminality and Organizations
• 3 Emergent Perspectives on Liminality
• 4 Towards a Model of Liminal Experience
• References
• Index