The Training Setting as a Social and Liminal Space for Professional Hybridization.

Giuseppe Scaratti,Ezio Fregnan,Silvia Ivaldi

doi:10.3389/fpsyg.2021.804008

Giuseppe Scaratti, Ezio Fregnan + Show 1 more

Open Access

https://doi.org/10.3389/fpsyg.2021.804008

Copy DOI

Abstract

This article addresses the liminality concept as a way to explore a particular group context, relating to a training setting intended as a liminal space, and to highlight its potential to trigger evolutionary personal and organizational identity trajectories. Dealing with a contemporary uncertain, volatile, and ambiguous organizational scenario, people are asked for consistent and quick professional hybridization processes. This article refers to a case study related to an action research process aimed at a cultural transformation and nurturing organizational learning inside an extra-hospital Rehabilitation Center, challenged by a strong organizational reconfiguration and the creation of new functions and roles, among which the one coordinator, responsible for the operational activity to be managed within the units of the organizational context. This article also highlights both the main features that characterize a training setting as a liminal space and identifies the possible plots of professional hybridization paths that a training group as a liminal space can trigger and develop.

Highlights

Thereafter, we address the pivotal aspects of a training setting as a liminal space and conceive it as learning by experience and transformative path (Mezirow, 2000; Scaratti, 2017)
We address a particular configuration of the training setting, focusing on the lived and contextualized experience of the professionals, as a liminal space for enhancing the generative and developmental exploration of the relationship between professionals and organizations
In section “Key Findings: Crossing the Social Limbo of the Liminal Space,” we address the attention to the main plots generated by the training setting interpreted as a liminal space, dealing with a content analysis related to some excerpts picked up from a large basket of the available conversational data collected from the earlier depicted interactive setting

Summary

INTRODUCTION

The evolution toward pluralistic organizational scenarios, which are characterized by an understanding of different goals and interests among the groups that are internal and external to organizations, requires the activation of an agile working mode (Harris, 2015, 2016; Fregnan et al, 2020; Ivaldi et al, 2021) and an adhocratic approach to organizational architecture (Mintzberg, 2009, 2012). Approaching cultures, languages, and representations with which participants see, look at, and organize their daily experience generates a meeting place between the different participants who reciprocally exchange reconstructions and stories, to shape an organizational knowledge that has an impact both in professional trajectories and in the evolution of the system of activity at stake (Scaratti et al, 2009) Such a liminal training setting as a shared workspace becomes itself an ongoing narrative, which is defined by the negotiations and constructions and by the agreements on the realistic sustainability of the process agreed by the participants. Creating personal and collective sustainability through interpretations of the possibilities, synergies, and usable resources is part of a “good job,” capable of responding effectively, and satisfactorily to the real and complex needs of the professional

DISCUSSION AND CONCLUSION

ETHICS STATEMENT