Maintaining liminal spaces for transition

By drawing on ideas about the social production of organizational space through the day-to-day tactics of space users, we explore how liminal spaces are maintained inside organizations. Liminal spaces include corridors, stairwells and doorways, which exist between dominant spaces such as hospital wards and offices. Liminal spaces are hard to maintain because they are associated with ambiguity and invite reinterpretation, yet they also facilitate important organizational processes like change and creativity. In the context of a qualitative study of an emergency department, we demonstrate how a corridor acts as a liminal space to facilitate patient transitions. We identify three challenges to the meaning of the liminal space, and six tactics that space maintainers use to maintain the liminal space. Our research contributes to an understanding of how organizational spaces are maintained and to conceptual debates about liminality.