Transient, unsettling and creative space: Experiences of liminality through the accounts of Chinese students on a UK-based MBA

This is the author's accepted manuscript. The final published article is available from the link below. Copyright @ The Author(s) 2009.This article explores the experiences of liminality through the accounts of Chinese students on a UK-based MBA programme. The transient nature of the MBA experience, as well as the international status of the Chinese student, is resonant with conceptualizations of liminality as ‘in between’ space. Based on semi-structured interviews with 20 MBA graduates who had subsequently returned to China with their qualification, we explored their perceptions of outcomes from the course and their experiences as international students on a programme imbued with western norms and values. Results support the unsettling yet creative implications of liminality, as well as the fragmented insecure nature of identities, as individuals pass through the MBA ‘rite of passage’ in terms of ‘becoming’ a manager and entering a new phase of career. Accounts suggest the creation of hierarchical structures within liminal space whereby Chinese students, through their positioning at the margin, have uncomfortable yet illuminating encounters with alterity. At the same time, they experience levels of ambiguity and uncertainty in the post-liminal phase of China-located employments, as new western-based managerial identities collide with dominant discourses of Chinese organization

Fostering the social utility of events: an integrative framework for the strategic use of events in community development

Although the use of planned events for achieving community development has received academic attention from different disciplines, the findings of these literatures are not systematically used towards developing a common understanding aimed at fostering their social utility. The challenge then is to study from an integrated interdisciplinary perspective how the social value of events can be fostered and leveraged for community development. In addressing this challenge, the purpose of this conceptual paper is to shed light on the multi-layered processes that foster the social utility of events. To this end, the theoretical tenets of social leverage, event dramaturgy and social capital are employed and integrated. On this basis, a conceptual framework linking event processes and outcomes is proposed aimed to guide future interdisciplinary research towards strategically incorporating events in community development. This line of research can eventually help create synergies between different event genres and implement joint social leveraging strategies, hence, fostering and magnifying their overall social utility for host communities

Structuring Liminality: Theorizing the Creation and Maintenance of the Cuban Exile Identity

In this article, we examine the exilic experience of the Cuban-American community in South Florida through the dual concepts of structure and liminality. We postulate that in the case of this exilic diaspora, specific structures arose to render liminality a persistent element of the Cuban-American identity. The liminal, rather than being a temporal transitory stage, becomes an integral part of the group identity. This paper theorizes and recasts the Cuban-American exile experience in Miami as explicable not only as the story of successful economic and political incorporation, although the literature certainly emphasizes this interpretation, but one consisting of permanent liminality institutionalized by structural components of the exiled diaspora. We argue that the story of exemplary incorporation so prevalent in the academic literature is a result of structured liminality. We apply Turner\u27s conceptualization to the creation and maintenance of the Cuban-American Exile Identity (Grenier and Perez, 2003). While testing the theoretical postulates is beyond the scope of this article, we interpret previous research through our new theoretical lens

Extracting meanings of event tourist experiences: A phenomenological exploration of Limassol carnival

The common examination of the event and tourism experience can reveal the attached meanings that exemplify the valued characteristics of a destination in the perceptions of tourists. From this standpoint, this study employed a phenomenological approach conducting eight unstructured interviews to explore the experience and assigned meanings of tourists who attended the carnival in Limassol, Cyprus. Results indicate that the meanings of tourist experiences in the carnival were extracted as continuously evolving products shaped by the interaction of two interrelated dramaturgical states, namely the generalized sociality and perceived community metamorphosis, and the interfering dimension of obstruction referring to organizational aspects constraining the tourist experience. The findings of this exploratory phenomenological study bring into the fore the need for more effectively incorporating events into a destination's product mix by designing experiences that leverage event meanings in synergy with unique destination features, thereby enhancing their impact on tourists. On these grounds, it is argued that the phenomenological perspective applied on the study of event tourism can enable destination marketing and management to develop a joint framework for cross-leveraging events and destination assets, hence, synergistically optimizing both social and tourism ends for host destinations. To this end, the study highlights the need for future research to start exploring systematically the relationship between the meanings of tourist experiences and the characteristics of a destination's product mix

Review Article: Victor Turner, Liminality and Cultural Performance.

Victor Witter Turner (1920 – 1983), working with his wife Edith Turner, was an anthropologist deeply concerned with ritual both in tribal communities and in the contemporary developed world. His early fieldwork in African villages in the 1950s was typical of the career development of field anthropologists at that time. He developed a special interest in rituals, seeing these as social drama in addition to the religious expression of the sacred. He drew on the work of Arnold van Gennep (1960, originally 1908) on rites of passage (viz. birth, marriage, death and sometimes puberty initiation), translated into English in 1960: Turner focused on the concept of limen, ‘threshold’ and the term liminality. He later applied this to all performance, including the theatr

“’Chinese don’t drink coffee!’”: Coffee and Class Liminality in Elaine Mar’s Paper Daughter

This article offers a reading of the foodservice spaces in Elaine Mar’s memoir Paper Daughter in order to suggest changes in the way we think about class liminality. It argues that by focusing not just on the way the socially-mobile narrator experiences liminality, but also on the ways her working-class parents and co-workers experience it, we can begin to consider some of the complexities and nuances the idea of the liminal offers. In so doing, the article suggests a slightly new approach to thinking about and teaching Paper Daughter

The Role of Market-Mediated Milestones in Negotiating Adolescent Identity Tensions

Purpose This chapter explores the symbolic connections between coming of age liminality and identity-oriented consumption practices in postmodern American culture, specifically among adolescent girls. Methodology/approach Forty-two female participants (ages 20–23) participants were asked to answer the general question of “Who am I?” through creating identity collages and writing accompanying narrative summaries for each of three discrete life stages: early adolescence (past-self), late adolescence (present-self), and adulthood (future-self). Data were analyzed using a hermeneutical approach. Findings Coming of age in postmodern American consumer culture involves negotiating paradoxical identity tensions through consumption-oriented benchmarks, termed “market-mediated milestones.” Market-mediated milestones represent achievable criteria by which adolescents solidify their uncertain liminal self-concepts. Research implications In contrast to the traditional Van Gennepian conceptualization of rites of passage, market-mediated milestones do not necessarily mark a major transition from one social status to another, nor do they follow clearly defined stages. Market-mediated milestones help adolescents navigate liminality through an organic, nonlinear, and incremental coming of age process. Practical implications Rather than traditional cultural institutions (e.g., church, family), the marketplace is becoming the central cultural institution around which adolescent coming of age identity is constructed. As such, organizations have the power to create market-mediated milestones for young people. In doing so, organizations should be mindful of adolescent well-being. Originality/value This research marks a turning point in understanding traditional rites of passage in light of postmodern degradation of cultural institutions. The institutions upon which traditional rites of passage are based have changed; therefore, our conceptions of what rites of passage are today should change as well

From paradox to pattern shift: Conceptualising liminal hotspots and their affective dynamics

This article introduces the concept of liminal hotspots as a specifically psychosocial and sociopsychological type of wicked problem, best addressed in a process-theoretical framework. A liminal hotspot is defined as an occasion characterised by the experience of being trapped in the interstitial dimension between different forms-of-process. The paper has two main aims. First, to articulate a nexus of concepts associated with liminal hotspots that together provide general analytic purchase on a wide range of problems concerning “troubled” becoming. Second, to provide concrete illustrations through examples drawn from the health domain. In the conclusion, we briefly indicate the sense in which liminal hotspots are part of broader and deeper historical processes associated with changing modes for the management and navigation of liminality

Betwixt and Between Past and Present: Cultural and Generic Hybridity in the Fiction of Mary Yukari Waters

The cosmopolitan make-up of the American society has yielded cultural hybrid offspring and this cultural hybridity features strongly in contemporary American fiction. Amy Tan and Mary Yukari Waters are both Asian-Americans who portray such hybridity in their short stories which depict the shifting identities of the self. But do the internal categories of gender, race and ethnicity help in the coherence or do they add to the fragmentation of diverse identities? It is the dynamics of this critique of multiple identification and hybrid cultures that is being traced here in this study and how all this is reflected in narrative responses to such conditions of the examination of the self and, on a broader scale, community. The fiction of both writers usually ends up with a metaphysical human aspiration that retains the past, holds on to the present and looks forward to the hidden joys of the future. Betwixt and between was a term coined by Victor Turner to describe those who are culturally both and neither, that is, they stand at a liminal (border) stage that should be a temporary state, but, in certain cases has become a permanent one. Waters and Tan fulfill Will Kymlicka\u27s exemplary mode of multiculturalism. Kymlicka does not want ethnic/Americans to separate their conflicting identities in order to fit in. They should not bring their lifestyles to conform to various codes; instead, they should have the freedom of multiple identification in whichever place and with whichever group, be it a minority or mainstream. Multiple identification has been a blessing for both writers as both consider it like two alternate worlds that they can resort to the one when they are fed-up with the other. Two short stories were chosen for each writer: Rationing and Aftermath for Mary Yukari Waters; The Moon Lady and A Pair of Tickets for Amy Tan. Cultural hybridity is clear in their appreciation of their ancestors\u27 stoicism, wisdom and guidance on the one hand, and in their willingness to take in American cultural traits on the other. Generic hybridity is exemplified in the interpenetration of the historic, the mythic and the symbolic. The history of China and Japan during World War II is constantly conjured up and the present and the past are intermingled through the workings of memory. The mythic has a powerful presence in the texts of both writers given the influence of the myth in their Eastern spiritual cultures. Names and actions acquire a symbolic significance which adds richness in meaning to the texts. The two writers, moreover, add a touch of folklore to stress their Asian origin and to prove the fact that (multicultural) society and (hybrid) culture must have their influence apparent in all literary texts