Crafting Liminality for Cultural Change

• Economie
• WO
• Studiejaar 6

Reverse Engineering Qualitative Research

Overview

• Impetus of research
• Data sources and setting
• Methodology
• Conceptual model and key arguments
• Presentation of data
• Answers to the research question

Liminal space: betwixt and between

Source

What if it wasn't that? Conversations and Initial research questions

• Noticing moments of liminality in existing data on organizations
• What if it doesn't require a jolt and unsteady times?
• What if it doesn't require outsiders, like "change consultants"?
• What if it doesn't require unlearning before people can move forward?

Data sources

• Annie:  intensive workshops on sustainability within a sports footware company
• 2 interviews with Annie (2008 and 2009), 3 with participants (2009)
• Gwen: Workshops on collaborative leadership and culture merging during health care organization merger
• 1 group interview including Gwen + two participants in 2002, 5 interviews with participants in 2002, 3 interviews with Gwen in 2004, and another in 2007
• William: Workshops about land use when family alcoholic drink company was bought out by a larger corporation
• 2 in depth interviews with William in 2006 and 2007, also 2009 conversation + written material about experiences during workshops

Process

• Sharing and learning about each other's data
  
• Linking data to literature on change and culture
• Tentative categories for understanding the work of the three key informants
• Telephone and face to face conversations, circulation of memos 

through focused coding, reading, reviewer comments, memo circulation, and discussion the authors "came to see the work these people do as crafting symbolic spaces for others to engage new ideas for change."

through focused coding, reading, reviewer comments, memo circulation, and discussion the authors "came to see the work these people do as crafting symbolic spaces for others to engage new ideas for change."

Focused coding: looking for liminality

• defining characteristics: "made safe and culturally ligitimate for participants, allows participants to think about how they poerceive their work, and allows them to experiment and imagine possible futures"
• Identified 30 instances

Analyzing occurance of liminality

• RQ: How do actors craft liminality, and how do they make it productive for others to engage change?
• more coding!
• development of conceptual model

How many rounds of coding was that??

1. 3
2. 4
3. 6
4. this is a trick question

Thoughts about using existing data sets in this way?

Key arguments

1. By inviting new forms of relating and bracketing the every day, people such as Annie, Gwen, and William are able to resource the everyday as liminal
2. By relating new and exisiting cultural resources and allowing pople to experience new things, AGW are ablue to engage the liminal, resulting in new additions to participants' cultural repetoires
3.  When people enact new cultural resources in the every day within a support network of other participants, they disseminate change through interactions with others, which translates liminal experiences and seeds further change

Presentation of key arguments

• Conceptual model
• Walking through each of the three components and 7 sub-components one by one, with examples
• Building from creating to engaging to translating liminal expereinces
• Tying it together in the discussion 

What do you think about articles that walk through concepts one by one in this way?

Presenting data

• Paraphrasing to provide context
• short, in-text quotes to bring the person into the context, expressing emotion through participant language rather than paraphrasing
• longer block quotes to allow people to explain their experience in their own words 
• Providing contextualized, concrete examples of concepts

Answer to research question

• RQ: How do actors craft liminality, and how do they make it productive for others to engage change? 
• They infuse it in the every day.
• Insiders can do it.
• Action, experimentation, and open reflection don't require new cultural resources to compete with old ones - liminal as a source of possibility of new ways of doing things 

How could we further research the role of liminality in organizations? Ideas?

Are you convinced by this research? Why? If not, what would convince you?

Other thoughts?