The liminality of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship

In this paper, we develop a process model of trajectory shifts in institutional entrepreneurship. We focus on the liminal periods experienced by institutional entrepreneurs when they, unlike the rest of the organization, recognize limits in the present and seek to shift a familiar past into an unfamiliar and uncertain future. Such periods involve a situation where the new possible future, not yet fully formed, exists side-by-side with established innovation trajectories. Trajectory shifts are moments of truth for institutional entrepreneurs, but little is known about the underlying mechanisms of how entrepreneurs reflectively deal with liminality to conceive and bring forth new innovation trajectories. Our in-depth case study research at CarCorp traces three such mechanisms (reflective dissension, imaginative projection, and eliminatory exploration) and builds the basis for understanding the liminality of trajectory shifts. The paper offers theoretical implications for the institutional entrepreneurship literature

Entrepreneurship and liminality: the case of self-storage based businesses

Purpose The paper applies the theoretical lens of liminality to a consideration of transitionary entrepreneurial business locations. The study exemplifies such transitionary locations by empirically exploring the particular case of self-storage based businesses: that is, businesses that operate for a significant number of hours each week from self-storage facilities. Methodology The study draws on interviews with both entrepreneurs operating self-storage based businesses and operators of self-storage facilities. The interview data is supported by site visits, businesses’ websites, promotional and marketing materials and press coverage. Findings Consistent with our liminal lens, entrepreneurs view their time operating from self-storage as a transitional phase. They do not suffer the high levels of uncertainty and unsettledness usually associated with liminality. However, they experience anxiety related to perceptions of operating from a business location outside the mainstream. Whilst the entrepreneurs benefit from additional services provided by the self-storage operators, this may be at the expense of extra ‘liminal’ work and anxiety experienced by the storage operators’ staff. Originality/value Our study contributes to the domain of entrepreneurship by firstly highlighting the use of non-traditional locations for entrepreneurship and secondly by beginning to theorise this phenomenon through the lens of liminality. We also make a theoretical contribution to notion of liminality by showing that liminality may manifest as a dualism: simultaneously engendering both feelings of increased certainty and security and feelings of increased anxiety

Liminal entrepreneuring : the creative practices of nascent necessity entrepreneurs

This paper contributes to creative entrepreneurship studies through exploring ‘liminal entrepreneuring’, i.e., the organization-creation entrepreneurial practices and narratives of individuals living in precarious conditions. Drawing on a processual approach to entrepreneurship and Turner’s liminality concept, we study the transition from un(der)employment to entrepreneurship of 50 nascent necessity entrepreneurs (NNEs) in Spain, the United Kingdom, and Ireland. The paper asks how these agents develop creative entrepreneuring practices in their efforts to overcome their condition of ‘necessity’. The analysis shows how, in their everyday liminal entrepreneuring, NNEs disassemble their identities and social positions, experiment with new relationships and alternative visions of themselves, and (re)connect with entrepreneuring ideas and practices in a new way, using imagination and organization-creation practices to reconstruct both self and context in the process. The results question and expand the notion of entrepreneuring in times of socioeconomic stress

Punctuated Multi-Layered Liminality in Digital Transformation: The Case of an Automotive Platform

Digital transformation is often characterized as a liminal process as organizations move from established practices to new ways of organizing afforded by digital technology. Two contrasting views exist, however, on the liminality of digital transformation. One view sees liminality as a discrete transient process, while the other sees it as an on-going continuous transition. Building on a case study around a digital innovation initiative of an incumbent automotive car manufacturer, we offer a third view. We find that digital innovation triggers a phase of punctuated, multi-layered liminality that has a material, structural and temporal layer. We explain how material, temporal and structural tensions unfold at the level of practice, triggering new forms of liminal practices. We further develop three mechanisms (boundary testing, temporal bridging, and structural recoupling) that underpin punctuated multi-layered liminality. We contribute by unpacking the relationship between digital innovation and digital transformation

The Role of Cajoling Strategies in Path Creation

Carving out new pathways can be challenging, particularly for established organizations resistant to change. Although research has identified the important role of peripheral entrepreneurs in path creation, identifying innovative ideas, and for being motivated to change the organization, less is known about what strategies peripheral entrepreneurs apply when moving ideas from the periphery to the center. This study examines how peripheral entrepreneurs, despite limited resources, effectively employed cajoling strategies over a 20-year span to instigate organizational change. Leveraging the rise in digitalization, these peripheral entrepreneurs utilized three distinct digital cajoling strategies: coaxing, enticing, and teasing to transform organizational structures, revamp work processes, and change established design regimes and traditional mindsets. We discuss the consequences of cajoling as it can be used for both good and bad purposes

Esports, Digital Professionals, and Higher Education: An Autoethnography of an Administrator’s Experience with Liminality

Professional identity is a means for continued livelihood and, in this digitizing world, is in constant flux. Constantly changing occupational roles and professional classes are liminal, that is, they are increasingly “betwixt and between” formerly legitimized, stable categories. If, as current writings on the future of work suggest, a need for liminality in work identities persists, how will institutions of higher education help their students acquire “permanent” liminality? Through the eyes of an administrator at a mid-sized higher education institution, we examine how a university creates a new learning environment under the umbrella of esports. The findings raise questions about digital transitions in higher education and about liminality and the future of work by highlighting esports as a liminal category. The study contributes to the literature on the future of work by offering insights into higher education challenges to “institutionalize” liminality and to prepare future digital professionals

From Shock to Awe: The Awe of Organisation: How do Community-Based Festivals do Institutional Work?

This thesis is based on an action research project with festival organisations and festival organising and is interested in key insights and practice models for changing meaning-making, routines, roles and resource flows and effectively doing what scholars of institutional theory call institutional work. The project is located in a central case study, the Muizenberg Festival, where I haved played a role as a coordinator, and have co-designed the festival process and platform between 2014 and 2019. It is further bolstered by research with several social-purpose festivals, from local and international case studies. The present socio-economic development discourse and practice prevalent in South Africa, and the developing South more generally, has been bounded and constrained by strategies that fail to address a milieu of institutionalised issues. If people cannot exercise agency on underlying institutionalised issues, alternative vehicles for organising in order to do such work are necessary. Festivals exhibit large-scale participation around specific themes in a concentrated time frame. Festivals are known to produce an array of social and economic goods including, amongst others, sense of community and social capital. This study will explore new theoretical perspectives on organisations and institutional work through action research with community-based social-purpose festivals. The study aims to provide cogent theoretical and practical frameworks for the study and practice of festivals as organisations and social phenomena that are pertinent to the study of institutional work, offering a model of development with important learnings for addressing intractable socio-economic issues in innovative ways. The research is embedded with the backdrop of literature that specifically looks at, however not exclusively, institutional theory and festival studies. Three years of action research data, in the form of observation, dialogue interviews, working journals, meeting notes and reports will be used spanning from 2015 until 2017. From this learning, the case will be made for festival organising models as offering new insights for transformative development and provide strategies for deploying tactics of community-based festivals as compelling new approaches to institutional work, from the ground up

The Interplay Between Communitas and Anti-structure in Liminal Innovation

This paper contributes to the nascent debate in the information systems (IS) field on liminal innovation by focusing on how tensions can be resolved during crisis. Liminal innovation is used by scholars to describe iterative processes of experimentation and implementation of IS during crisis. We draw on the concepts of communitas and anti-structure from the literature on liminality to analyse a longitudinal case study of digitalization of contact tracing in Norway during the COVID-19 pandemic and show how they mutually reinforce each other to create a sense of togetherness and urgency. We identify four resolutions to tensions emerging from this interplay: egalitarianism, autonomy, disobedience, and silo breaking. These manifestations of anti-structure and communitas allowed rapid and responsive innovation during a period of intense organizational and psychological stress, and thus contributed to positive performative outcomes by implementing a digital contact tracing system