Against boundarylessness: The liminal career of the flexible employee

Abstract

This article extends the critique of the boundaryless career concept by focusing on how organizational members may experience boundaries as ambiguous within contemporary career development in organizations. As an alternative to the concept of the boundaryless career, we introduce that of the liminal career. We consider a liminal career as occurring when the normal career path within an organization becomes a state of ‘betwixt and between’, wherein distinctions between social domains and work roles become diffuse, indeterminate and difficult to comprehend. We engage with this concept in relation to three boundaries that remain central within career development: organizational boundaries establishing a distinction between that which is internal and external to the organization, hierarchical boundaries separating employees and managers, and functional boundaries demarcating different work domains. Using a case that illustrates how employees experience ambiguous organizational, hierarchical and functional boundaries, we argue that the concept of the liminal career captures the essence of situations in which there is a lack of clear categories, trajectories and schemes from which to structure career paths in organizations.

Introduction

In the 1980s, Jack Welch coined the term ‘boundaryless’ as a catchword to encapsulate an understanding of organizations as fluid networks. Since then, boundarylessness has come to signal the exaltation of flexible career trajectories, a flexibility enabled by the dismantling of traditional institutions and the dissolution of organizational boundaries (Arthur, 1994; Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). Proponents of the boundaryless career widely assume that a trend towards mobility exists, but this assumption of disappearing boundaries has been the target of considerable critique (Inkson et al., 2012; King et al., 2005; Loacker and Śliwa, 2016). For instance, Rodrigues and Guest (2010) argue that we are currently witnessing not a ‘demise but rather a redefinition, a growing complexity, and a more subjective perspective on career boundaries’ (p. 1170). Exploring the mobility of knowledge workers, Loacker and Śliwa (2016: 658) question the dichotomy between understanding contemporary workers either as unrestrained agents of boundarylessness or as hapless victims forced by necessity into precariousness. Today, individuals in what Loacker and Śliwa (2016) call the ‘mobile middle’ experience a host of ‘complex, dynamic and contestable’ challenges (p. 673).

In this article, we introduce the concept of the liminal career to explore how boundaries within contemporary career development become diffuse, indeterminate and ambiguous. We maintain that contemporary career development cannot be fully captured without new concepts that allow us to understand how boundaries are currently being reconfigured in work organizations. With the concept of liminal career, we investigate how a career path within organizations may become a ‘social limbo’ (Turner, 1974: 57), wherein organizational members experience career boundaries as being riddled with a lack of clarity as regards to work roles, the criteria for career progression and hierarchical structures. In advocating the concept of the liminal career, we situate our analysis within a broader societal development in which, according to Deleuze (1992), the traditional boundaries of the disciplinary society are becoming blurred. Thus, in the ‘societies of control’, the boundaries once found between different institutions like the school, the factory and the prison have given way to ‘continuous variation’ within networks and circuits.

With regard to career development, we see that such a crisis of institutions becomes mirrored in the ambivalence of their employees’ careers. In turn, those who are engaged in career development might feel a lack of clear categories, trajectories and schemes from which to structure their career paths. To capture this sense, the concept of the liminal career offers resources for analysing career experiences where boundaries are not only more important but also more elusive and difficult to define. Unlike the normative connotations inherent in the positive discourse about flexibility, mobility and post-bureaucracy, the concept of liminality also implies the presence of ambiguity, anxiety and precarity. Hence, we suggest that the concept of the liminal career may be able to capture the freedom and creativity involved in contemporary career development while also drawing attention to the uncertainty and insecurity that such development engenders.

The article proceeds as follows. The first part briefly reviews the literature on the boundaryless career by focusing on the three main weaknesses of the concept: its normativity, its lack of empirical support and its lack of clarity. In the second part, we extend this critique by examining the conceptual inconsistencies in the concept of the boundaryless career. In the third part, we introduce the concept of the liminal career with a view to overcoming the weaknesses previously identified. Here, we show that the concept of liminality allows us to explore both the positive and the negative consequences of contemporary career development. The fourth part of the article illustrates the liminal career concept through the example of a Scandinavian public administration office. Using this example, we engage with the concept of the liminal career as it relates to three central boundaries characterizing career development in organizations: organizational boundaries, hierarchical boundaries and functional boundaries. The final part provides a discussion of the liminal career concept in relation to flexibility and the ongoing discourse on precarity.

Boundaryless career research and its discontents

In past decades, researchers have drawn attention to what they see as a radical shift in how work is organized in Western societies, a shift driven by globalization, technological advances, greater international competition and migrant labour flows (Castells, 2000). Taken together, these developments have transformed the conditions on which employment, careers and work organization are based (Boltanski and Chiapello, 2005; Garsten, 1999). From the standpoint of organizational careers within traditional corporations, many researchers view those based on the premise that employers can ‘offer workers job stability and progressive careers in exchange for loyalty and commitment’ (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010: 1158) as antiquated. They propose a number of new types of career trajectories, which they label as ‘post-corporate’ (Peiperl and Baruch, 1997), ‘kaleidoscope’ (Mainiero and Sullivan, 2005), ‘protean’ (Mirvis and Hall, 1996) or ‘portfolio’ (Mallon, 1999). In turn, concepts like ‘flexibility’ (Berg et al., 2004; Kalleberg, 2011) and ‘mobility’ (Costas, 2013; Loacker and Śliwa, 2016) have been introduced to make sense of how these new career paths have evolved. Among the concepts that have gained momentum in career research over the past 20 years, the ‘boundaryless career’ (Arthur, 1994; Arthur and Rousseau, 1996) is the most widespread.

Arthur (1994: 296) defines the boundaryless career in terms of six features: movement across organizational boundaries, external validation, engagement in networks beyond present employer, the dismantling of hierarchical principles of career advancement, the rejection of traditional career opportunities and boundaryless career expectations despite current constraints. Although the concept has this range of features, the idea of the boundaryless career foregrounds how individuals increasingly develop ‘their career capital by crossing organizational boundaries’ (Valette and Culié, 2015: 1747). According to DeFillippi and Arthur (1996), many workers today are not bound by a single organization or occupation to which they remain committed throughout their working lives. Rather, they find themselves operating in fluid networks and mobile clusters that allow them to explore ‘opportunities that go beyond the boundaries of a single employment setting’ (DeFillippi and Arthur 1996: 116). Boundarylessness thus contrasts with an ‘organizational career’ (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996: 5), which emphasizes a career progression along a linear, vertical track according to criteria formulated by management.

The boundaryless career has come into vogue as a way of depicting how employment relationships are being reconfigured in Western societies, but this has also opened the concept to critique (Inkson et al., 2012; King et al., 2005; Loacker and Śliwa, 2016; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). This critique first of all takes aim at the normative connotations of the concept and its tendency to normalize a neoliberal political regime that privileges free-market thinking and individualism at the expense of collective responsibility and organizational communities (Arnold and Cohen, 2008; Roper et al., 2010). While the emergence of boundaryless careers has been associated with greater personal freedom, self-determination and autonomy, critical observers have drawn attention to the negative aspects that accompany such individualized work arrangements: precarity, unpredictability, uncertainty, insecurity and self-fragmentation (Hoyer and Steyaert, 2015; Kalleberg, 2011; Loacker and Śliwa, 2016; Mirvis and Hall, 1996; Sennett, 2011; Standing, 2011).

Second, the boundaryless career concept relies on the premise that today’s careers operate without boundaries, but critics argue that this premise lacks empirical support (Inkson, 2008; King et al., 2005; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). Typically, the boundaryless career has been associated with knowledge workers or high-tech professionals in Silicon Valley–like settings (Valette and Culié, 2015), but in reality, such sectors are not representative of larger Western economies as a whole. Inkson (2008) maintains that while many in the low-wage segments of the workforce have no commitment to a single organization and thus appear to be engaging in a boundaryless career, they are ‘bounded instead by crushing structural constraints’ (p. 556). Even within occupations touted as epitomes of boundaryless careers, critics have still highlighted the existence of boundaries that significantly influence career development, such as the institutional constraints that regulate job opportunities for IT professionals (King et al., 2005). In the view of King et al. (2005) ‘careers are, and always have been, “bounded”’ (p. 982).

The third critique of the boundaryless career concept centres on its impreciseness. As Rodrigues and Guest (2010) emphasize, the concept is built upon ‘the core assumption of increasing mobility across organizational boundaries’ (p. 1159). Yet, they note that the nature of career boundaries has largely been ignored in the literature (Rodrigues and Guest 2010: 1161). Moreover, Inkson (2008) contends that the concept fails to adequately distinguish between boundarylessness and boundary-crossing. The notion of boundarylessness gives the impression that boundaries in modern work life are dissolving. The notion of boundary-crossing suggests on the contrary that the boundaries themselves remain but that individuals have become ‘border crossers’ (Clark, 2000). Border crossers are assumed to be increasingly able to move between organizations.

Extending the critique of boundarylessness

Although the boundaryless career concept has been the target of considerable criticism, this criticism is not levelled at ‘the concept as originally developed’ but at ‘the way it has been interpreted and proselytized’ (Inkson, 2008: 7). As a result, the concept is ‘all too often taken as given rather than subjected to critical scrutiny’ (Arnold and Cohen, 2008: 9). In the following, we will extend the critique of the boundaryless career. While an understanding of boundaries is important, we will argue that drawing a distinction between the ‘bounded career’ and the ‘boundaryless career’ (King et al., 2005) may be misleading. As Baruch (2006) states, ‘Both descriptions tend to portray opposing archetype models, whereas life is never that simple’ (p. 128). In other words, the dualism between bounded and boundaryless careers has ‘obscured the complexities and subtle nuances’ of how a career develops (Clarke, 2013: 695–96).

Arnold and Cohen (2008) correctly assert that career and boundaries are intimately linked. For example, the movement between two jobs implies crossing the boundary between them. This is affirmed in the definition of career as ‘the unfolding sequence of a person’s work experience over time’ (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996: 4). Regardless of whether a career moves upwards, sideways or downwards, it unfolds in a series of phases that are ‘separated by boundaries’ (Inkson et al., 2012: 331). The very fact that there are phases implies that boundaries between them exist. Essentially, boundaries ‘delimit the perimeter and scope of a given domain (e.g. a role, a country, a home, a workplace)’ (Kreiner et al., 2009: 705). Thus, boundaries express distinctions, such as those between different occupations or hierarchical positions.

Inkson et al. (2012) opt for ‘boundary-focused career scholarship’, which involves studying not only how career boundaries are crossed but also how they come into being and how the disappearance of one type of boundary might give rise to new boundary types. While we are sympathetic to this approach, we believe that research on the boundary-focused career should be supplemented by an understanding of how employees pursuing their own career development might find boundaries ambiguous (Hoyer and Steyaert, 2015). While individuals need boundaries to mark the phases of their careers, employees in organizations that develop careers may have difficulty recognizing such boundaries. What were once clear career phases or steps might become uncertain or confusing, and employees aspiring to develop their careers may find such ambiguity demanding to cope with (Costas, 2013; Ekman, 2014; Garsten, 1999). In this instance, career development is a ‘limbo land’ in which organizational members become lost (Fraher and Gabriel, 2014: 938). The challenge for research is to learn how employees navigate indeterminate and diffuse career boundaries. To address this challenge, we will introduce the concept of the liminal career.

The liminal career

French anthropologist Arnold van Gennep (2006) originated the concept of liminality – later made famous by British anthropologist Victor Turner (1967, 1974, 1995) – in 1909 while studying rituals and rites of passage. In recent decades, the concept of liminality has found its way into organization studies (Beech, 2011; Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly, 2014; Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003; Inkson et al., 2012; Shortt, 2015; Trice and Beyer, 1993). In its original sense, liminality signifies the middle phase of the rite of passage (Van Gennep, 2006), a process with three stages – separation, transition and incorporation. In the first, separation stage, the person undergoing social transformation is deprived of his or her social identity. In the second, transition stage (the liminal phase), the person is cast into ‘a social limbo in which his or her social identity is temporarily undefined’ (Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015: 323). According to Turner (1967), at this point the person is ‘no longer classified and not yet classified’ (p. 96). Thus, liminality is situated at a ‘threshold’ (Beech, 2011) that suspends social boundaries. In the final post-liminal stage of incorporation, the individual is introduced to his or her new social identity.

Organizational scholars have shown how the process of moving between jobs inevitably involves a ‘liminal state’ that occasions the renegotiation of an individual’s professional identity (Boland and Griffin, 2015; Conroy and O’Leary-Kelly, 2014; Inkson et al., 2012). However, while liminality has become fashionable within organization studies, it is worth noting that Turner (1974) in his later work warned against applying the concept to modern society. Countering earlier indications that liminality can be found in modern society (see Turner, 1969), Turner (1974) would eventually insist that there is a ‘fundamental distinction at the level of expressive culture between all societies before and all societies subsequent to the Industrial Revolution’ (p. 62). Before the Industrial Revolution, societies made no distinction between work and leisure, according to Turner, but rather between sacred work and profane work. During the Industrial Revolution, however, a clean line was established between work and leisure, as manifested in the demarcation between the workplace and home. Since the Industrial Revolution created a society defined by such sharply drawn boundaries, Turner believes that talking about liminality makes little sense. He maintains that industrial societies contain separate spheres in which play, experimentation and innovation can unfold. To argue this claim, Turner (1974) introduces the concept of ‘liminoid’ spaces, which he associates with any ‘independent domain of creative activity’ (p. 65). While Turner (1974) admits that leisure, for instance, can be ‘conceived of as a betwixt-and-between, a neither-this-nor-that domain between two spells of work or between occupational and familial and civic activity’ (p. 65), such a liminoid space crucially differs from the tribal rituals that he associates with liminality.

Although Turner maintains that sharp distinctions between social domains characterize industrial society, we follow Deleuze (1992) who argues that contemporary society is currently transitioning from the industrial or disciplinary society to societies of control (Fleming, 2015; Fleming and Spicer, 2004; Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015; Weiskopf and Loacker, 2006). In this transition, conventional ‘environments of enclosure’, such as schools, hospitals and factories, enter into a ‘crisis’ (Deleuze, 1992: 3–4). This crisis is reflected in the fact that many of the boundaries that separated the domains of industrial societies, such as the work and leisure distinction, are today becoming ambiguous, fluid and unclear. The individual experiencing this crisis is, in Deleuze’s parlance, better understood as a ‘dividual’ – that is, someone who is split between various identities and thus does not fit any of the established categories of the organization. Such splits call for ‘intensive engagement in provisional identities to transcend continuously changing intertidal zones that exist between order and disorder’ (Söderlund and Borg, 2017: 15).

To grasp the possible consequences of a transition towards control societies, we revisit the concept of liminality. The conventional three-stage view of liminality only makes sense against the backdrop of a ‘regular work environment’ (Johnson et al., 2010: 1513) or under ‘normal social dynamics’ (Howard-Grenville et al., 2011: 535) in which organizational boundaries have remained intact. In other words, a sequential view of liminality presupposes that it is possible to clearly distinguish between, for instance, employees and managers and to identify the process in which a person can cross this hierarchical boundary. Here, however, we want to draw attention to another possible situation – one where employees experience the regular or normal career path within the organization as a prolonged liminal phase.

We find support for this more elastic view of liminality in Turner’s work, wherein a social limbo may be rendered as the norm. Contrary to Van Gennep, Turner (1969) believes that liminality can also become an ‘institutionalized state’, offering the example of the pilgrim, for whom transition ‘becomes a permanent condition’ (p. 107). In such instances, liminality ceases to be a temporal interval between separation and incorporation but rather becomes permanent (Szakolczai, 2000: 211). Permanent liminality has been observed within contemporary work life (Bamber et al., 2017; Boland and Griffin, 2015; Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003; Ellis and Ybema, 2010; Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015). Garsten (1999) shows, for example, how ‘temporary employment’ constitutes a permanent liminal zone since those engaged in such employment are neither fully employed (which is their goal) nor fully unemployed (which is what they seek to separate themselves from). Rather, they dwell in an ‘in-between’ zone of being both employed and unemployed. Since the status of temporary workers is rendered unclear, such workers are left to establish their status as they see fit, which gives them the heavy burden of narrating their occupational identity in a coherent manner.

The transition into the societies of control profoundly affects how the employee is pushed into a liminal space. Here, Inkson et al. (2012) are helpful in explicating how boundaries have traditionally served three distinct roles: as constraints (restricting career possibilities), as enablers (facilitating career development) and as punctuators (structuring career development). With reference to Van Gennep (2006), Inkson et al. (2012) note that boundaries as punctuators provide ‘the markers that help people structure their working lives as they move through the many rites of passage that they encounter’ (p. 333). Such rites of passage presuppose that social structures are momentarily suspended (liminality). The initiand is coached by a ‘master of ceremonies’ (Turner, 1995: 13), who is able to guide the person undergoing the transition from the initial social position (pre-liminal) into the new role (post-liminal). In the process of a hierarchical promotion, the master of ceremonies would be the mentor who serves a ‘career-enhancing function’ (Stephens, 1994: 491), whereby support is provided and responsibility assumed for the protégé’s career development.

While such mentors might be fairly easy to locate in traditional bureaucracies, Weick (1996) notes that one increasingly observes the ‘disappearance of external guides for sequences of work experience, such as advancement in a hierarchy’ (p. 41). This disappearance bears witness to Deleuze’s societal diagnoses concerning how organizational members have to enact tactics that enable them to navigate their career development without either a mentor or clearly defined boundaries to rely upon. In sharp contrast to this, liminality in its original iteration is a ‘threshold’ that marks a ‘transition between’ two states (Turner, 1974: 72). However, as liminality becomes permanent, it becomes increasingly difficult to register the extent to which a transition actually takes place because, as Deleuze (1992) says, we are ‘never finished with anything’ (p. 5). Similarly, career becomes a prolonged state of transition in which it becomes difficult to measure whether any progression exists or boundaries have actually been crossed. Thus, career actors are constantly on the verge of acquiring new competences and roles, embarking on new projects and gaining new experiences.

We consider a liminal career as occurring when the normal career path within the organization becomes an ambiguous state of ‘betwixt and between’ (Turner, 1967). Here, ambiguity signals ‘being on the boundary line between’ (Oxford English Dictionary). In a liminal career, actors experience a lack of clearly defined paths by which to navigate and orient themselves (Boland and Griffin, 2015). In such a scenario, established demarcations between different social domains are neither completely present nor absent. Instead, such boundaries are indistinct, uncertain and diffuse. Thus, the distinctions between social domains might overlap, or social actors might find it difficult to understand where one domain begins and another ends, as exemplified in the frequently blurred distinction between work and life. Employees might also find it hard to grasp what it takes to progress from one domain to another as often seen in the vague criteria for career progression. In turn, these actors are caught on a threshold between different social domains, their identity rendered ambiguous because they lack coherent symbolic structures, clear guidelines and social structures by which to orient themselves. Insofar as social actors are cast into such liminal conditions, their career development within the organization increasingly requires them to constantly manoeuvre through a variety of grey zones (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010). At the level of the individual, we see that Deleuze’s (1992) ‘dividual’ with its ‘provisional identities’ (Söderlund and Borg, 2017: 15) challenges both the figure of the bureaucrat engaged in an organizational career and the figure of the agentic, protean self engaged in a boundaryless career, a challenge we shall return to in our discussion.

With regard to career boundaries, the concept of the liminal career helps us explore how the boundaries that regulate career development within organizations, such as those delimiting employment categories, hierarchical structure or professional competences, today tend to become diffuse, ambiguous and indeterminate. On this front, the concept of liminal career takes issue with some of the basic premises of the boundaryless career discourse. Within the boundaryless career discourse, it is frequently assumed that boundaries are either objectively present and career actors can cross them (e.g. the mobility of IT professionals that constantly change jobs) or objectively absent and career actors can subjectively construct them (e.g. freelancers that work at home may individually construct a work–life balance). In turn, boundaries take on the character of being clearly defined distinctions between social domains that can be either present or absent. However, contrary to the assertions made within the boundaryless perspective, liminality occurs when such boundaries are neither absent nor present but rather ambiguous, unclear and diffuse. A career actor placed in liminality finds himself or herself in an ambivalent situation.

The illustrative case of the ENC

To illustrate a possible application of the liminal career concept, we will look to the case of career development within a Scandinavian public institution, here referred to as ENC. Three focus group interviews provided the primary data for our study. Two of these were conducted with groups of employees (professional staff and technical staff), and the third took place with a group of managers at the ENC offices. Each focus group session lasted 3 hours. During the interviews, participants were asked to discuss their career-related experiences, while at ENC, including career expectations, what they considered to be a good career and what they believed were their key career development challenges. The first focus group consisted of three women (Linda, Mia and Alice) and two men (Torben and Henrik). The second group consisted of four women (Marianne, Kirsten, Christine and Susanne) and one man (Mark, who is also a middle manager). All of the employees were between 30 and 50 years of age and thus situated in the middle of their professional lives, and they had all worked for ENC between 2 and 8 years, except for Christine, who had been at ENC for 20 years. The third focus group consisted of two managers (Charlotte and Karina). Charlotte worked with career development strategies, and Karina was on the management team responsible for managing human resources at ENC.

Once the material was collected, we analysed the data by carefully reading the transcripts to distil the dominant themes. At this stage, it became apparent that career development at ENC was characterized by ambiguity. Much of this ambiguity related to how the informants talked about the boundaries that governed career development in the organization. In this phase of the analysis process, we also looked for general themes that could help us categorize the material. We organized the data under three respective headlines: organizational boundaries, hierarchical boundaries and functional boundaries. We decided on these categories because they captured the main topics discussed during the interviews. Next, we selected a range of illustrative quotes to show how the informants discussed the three types of boundaries. To capture the ambiguity that characterized career development in the organization, we linked our findings to the concept of liminality. However, we would like to stress that we did not develop our concept of liminal career on the basis of the empirical material but instead followed Beech (2011: 291) as we searched for instances in our data that served to illustrate the concept of the liminal career.

The case study therefore enables us to give ‘empirical depth’ (Costas and Fleming, 2009: 364) to our concept of liminal career. Put differently, we use the empirical material to illustrate a possible application of the liminal career concept rather than to verify the concept. We are aware that our data set is limited and therefore refrain from making generalizations based on the case. While we derived the three themes discussed from the empirical material, our desire is to show how the concept of liminal career can enable us to capture the social limbos that appear to emerge within contemporary career development. Although our approach does not provide an overview of all topics discussed in the focus group interviews, the concept of the liminal career allows us to concentrate on how the participants relate to the organizational, hierarchical and functional boundaries that are relevant to their own career development.

Organizational, functional and hierarchical boundaries

In the following, we will use the ENC case to discuss the concept of the liminal career in relation to three central boundaries within career development: organizational, hierarchical and functional boundaries.

Organizational boundaries

One career boundary that has become ambiguous in many organizations is the one between work and leisure (Kreiner et al., 2009). Normally, work is considered ‘paid employment while “life” includes activities outside work’ (Guest, 2002: 236). However, we increasingly experience instances in which employees are investing their private life in their workplace (Land and Taylor, 2010). This blurs the boundary between work life and private life because many employees are expected to invest their private lives in their careers (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011), thus making space for concepts like the ‘protean’ career in which ‘work and nonwork roles overlap’ (Mirvis and Hall, 1996). We use the concept of liminality not to claim that the boundary between work and life has disappeared as such but to focus on the fact that many employees find the distinction between work life and private life to have become a pressing concern in their career development as they see this boundary as having become ambiguous.

During the ENC focus group interviews, work–life balance becomes a central topic of discussion in relation to career development. Many of the participants emphasize that a successful career would involve merging their work and their private lives to attain a ‘whole’ and hence successful life. However, Mia emphasizes that

If you have a crisis in your private life, then it’s really difficult to ensure that it doesn’t affect your work. If you have a crisis at work and bring it home, your family can sense it. But in the family you ultimately have a close network that can help you deal with the crisis. Here [at work] we have seen people get suddenly divorced or some such, and then you can sense that the person is having a hard time.

Although a boundary between work life and private life might exist, these two spheres influence each other since work-related issues could impact one’s private life and vice versa. This makes maintaining the distinction between the two spheres challenging. Responding to Mia, Henrik explains that

It can be really difficult to keep things separate. There is a tendency for work and leisure to become more and more intermingled, such as in situations where you’re checking your emails at home or when you get a call from your boss in your leisure time. I don’t know if this is an advantage or not. I prefer to be off work when I’m home.

The point here is not that ENC has no boundary between work life and private life, but, as Henrik stresses, the boundary is difficult to enforce. While preferring to maintain a clear distinction, Henrik still admits that checking emails at home or receiving a call from his boss makes it difficult for him to separate work from private life. In turn, the boundary between work and private life becomes an ongoing concern. Here, the concept of liminal career helps us to see that the boundary between work and private life is neither clear-cut nor entirely absent. Instead, Mia and Henrik must constantly cope with the difficulty of separating work from home life. Mia, for example, has done so by making the following promise to herself:

I’ve made an agreement with myself: I never open my computer at home. It’s easy because I only have one computer, and I don’t bring it home unless I’m working from home that day. So I have granted myself this. Using my computer at home was something I did a lot in the beginning, especially on Sundays, when I finished up work I hadn’t managed to do during the week … And I think this is something that you have to manage yourself in this organization.

While Mia maintains the boundary between work and private life by ‘making an agreement with herself’, Torben admits, ‘I think a lot about work when I’m not at work’. As the interviews reveal, many of ENC’s employees frequently continue working after they arrive home. In boundaryless career scholarship such situations have predominantly been conceptualized through the claim that, although the boundary between work and private life might objectively have dissolved, it must be subjectively enacted by members of the organization (see Hirschhorn and Gilmore, 1992; Tams and Arthur, 2010). On this account, boundaries are ‘constructed in the head of those people experiencing it’ (Gunz et al., 2007: 478). In turn, proponents of the boundaryless career also claim that subjective boundaries have replaced objective ones. Yet, these subjective boundaries remain clearly defined for the actors who engage with them.

At first glance, one might assume that members of the ENC organization subjectively construct the work–life boundary. However, the concept of the liminal career allows us to frame this differently. Instead of claiming that the boundary between work and private life is objectively absent and subjectively present, we see members of the ENC organization as having to cope with a work–life boundary that they experience as diffuse, ambiguous and unclear. For this reason, they find themselves ‘somewhere in-between’ (Daskalaki et al., 2016) the spheres of work and private life. In this liminal realm, they must constantly negotiate the distinction between work life and personal life, a boundary earlier held in check in the disciplinary society. The boundary in this case is not objectively missing but rather constantly open for negotiation. Deleuze (1992) terms this the ‘limitless postponement’ of actually clarifying the precise nature of the work–life boundary. As a result, the ENC employees find themselves in a liminal career.

Hierarchical boundaries

In the more traditional organizational career, an individual is assumed to cross the boundary between employee and manager on merits that govern possible progressions ‘through a stable, structured hierarchy’ (Clarke, 2013: 690), following the three-step pattern of liminal passage rituals (Trice and Beyer, 1993). However, proponents of the concept of the boundaryless career insist that increasingly ‘traditional organizational career boundaries, notably hierarchical reporting and advancement principles, are broken’ (Arthur, 1994: 296). The abandonment of bureaucratic principles is often assumed to facilitate flexibility and mobility, but it equally creates situations in which an employee has no clear idea how to advance from one level to the next, such as from employee to manager. While this is true and perhaps most challenging for the employee, the lack of clarity also occurs at the managerial level. Management will sometimes be unsure about how to guide employees on their career paths. While liminal careers might characterize mid-level employees, mid-level managers can experience similar conditions.

At ENC, we can detect a reluctance on the part of management to guide employees’ careers. Although the formal ENC hierarchy contains a fairly clear boundary between employees and managers, the criteria for crossing this boundary remain unclear and diffuse. The middle manager Karina states that she is unable to clearly project career trajectories for her employees at ENC:

We cannot and will not draw career paths for people and say, ‘You just need to do this and that, and then such and such will happen’. Some employees embrace this and prefer not to have a concrete career plan, while others would actually prefer to have [such a guideline] … The whole matter is a big mess in everyone’s heads.

Moreover, while career development normally involves articulations of future scenarios and prospects, Charlotte, an ENC manager, states that ‘one can’t discuss such matters’, that is, career matters, on a daily basis. Another middle manager, Mark, explicitly does not go to work ‘with the goal of being a boss’, preferring to see his work as ‘nursing a lot of people’. Here, the difference between being a ‘manager’ and being a ‘nurse’ must be stressed: while the former stems from the Italian maneggiare, a word directly connected to processes of handling and directing, the latter primarily implies providing care and comfort that fosters the healing process, as opposed to providing direction for that same process.

Under such conditions, middle managers are less motivated or enabled to act as ‘masters of ceremonies’ (Turner, 1969: 89) who outline criteria for career advancement, which Stephens (1994: 491) sees as the task of ‘mentors’. As many have noted, such situations might cause frustration, uncertainty and ambiguity. In this regard, the employee Kirsten would explicitly prefer to have her career opportunities more clearly outlined, if not to feed her options directly ‘served’ by management, then at least to appear to her as ‘structures or models’ that specify principles for advancement. The lack of such guidelines could lead to the ‘aimlessness’ discussed in Arnold and Cohen (2008), when they, quoting Sennett, assert that ‘without clear paths, individuals are left vulnerable to “the sense of aimlessness which constitutes the deepest sense of anxiety”’ (p. 12).

With managerial decisions deferred and the criteria for career advancement blurred, contemporary career development entails placing ‘much of the burden, hence, stress, on individuals’ (Baruch, 2006: 134). Using the concept of the liminal career, we can view what Karina calls a ‘big mess in everyone’s heads’ as ‘symbolic stress’ (Turner, 1967: 108) that stems not only from the lack of clarity but also from the precariousness and ambiguity involved in career development. Management’s inability to outline career trajectories for its employees leaves them in a liminal career, lacking the necessary master of ceremonies to ensure they get through the ‘integrative phase’ of liminality (Turner, 1967).

Granting that this may generate symbolic stress, the employee Susanne, however, sees a creative vista in this openness: ‘It would be fine if one didn’t see the different trajectories as completely locked in. A nice culture would be one where you were enabled to swap in and out’. Viewed in the optic of the liminal career, we can see that in the absence of clear criteria for career advancement and managerial guidance, employees who experience the liminal career must become their own ‘self-proclaimed ceremony masters’ (Thomassen, 2012: 53). The employee Alice observes that although management has launched various initiatives to improve career development, these efforts ‘still haven’t translated into practice’. Along similar lines, the employee Marianne wishes that possible career trajectories at ENC could be ‘made more clear’. The employee Mia’s reaction is to feel a sense of frustration but also of needing to act:

It’s a bit frustrating sometimes [to work at ENC], because you feel that there should be some kind of plan for where you’re going … [Yet, it’s] hard to really figure out what it is you want.

Management, in turn, explicitly recognizes this ambiguity as being a burden for employees. As the manager Karina says, ‘To be able to endure such conditions, one needs to be extraordinarily self-contained. It’s really a contradiction’. The contradiction here stems from the fact that employees must orient themselves towards the organization to succeed in their careers, but they must also be independent from the organization to be self-contained (Pedersen, 2011). This ambiguity might be conceived of as a form of managerial control that infuses uncertainty into the career development process (Fleming, 2015; see also Inkson, 2008: 556). While these critiques may be aimed at the managerial discourse, it is important to note that middle managers, as we observe in the case of ENC, might themselves feel unable to serve as mentors for their subordinates. Against this backdrop, we suggest that the concept of the liminal career is a more productive lens through which to understand situations where the ambiguous nature of hierarchical boundaries within career development can be observed.

Functional boundaries

Functional boundaries are often associated with ‘competences’ (Bagdadli et al., 2003), understood here as the professional skills required to carry out an occupation. Depending on the specific context, professional specialization can serve to either enable or constrain career development. How best to cultivate the proper set of competences remains central to career development in organizations. An organizational career is often portrayed as a progression within a ‘hierarchy of occupational titles’, each associated with a specific set of competences (Hirschhorn and Gilmore, 1992: 5). However, unlike an organizational career that adheres to a set of competences supporting a fixed professional identity, a boundaryless career is believed to involve a constant, possibly lifelong reinvention and acquisition of new professional skills (see discussion of Arthur and Rousseau, 1996, in Gunz et al., 2007), and to require the ability to ‘play a bewildering variety of roles’ (Hirschhorn and Gilmore, 1992: 5) within the organization.

Not only does the dissolution of occupational identities enable flexibility and mobility, but it can also spark ambiguity and uncertainty because the specific package of competences delineating a work role becomes exceedingly difficult to determine (Costas, 2013; Ekman, 2014; Fraher and Gabriel, 2014; Hoyer and Steyaert, 2015). Hence, each employee within a given work setting might feel that each formal position appears as an ‘ambiguous role’ (Swan et al., 2016). One can use the concept of the liminal career in such circumstances to understand how functional boundaries are ambiguous, thus placing employees on a ‘threshold’ (Beech, 2011) between different work roles. As the career of the employee becomes liminal, his or her professional identity becomes ‘open to definition’ (Garsten, 1999: 603), and each individual is required to cope with ambiguous expectations, demands and requirements on his or her own individual terms.

In the first group interview at ENC, the participants were asked to select a word that could describe their career development. Torben responded in the following way:

I’ve chosen ‘competence’ [to describe my career]. I believe it also involves professional development, and I’ve chosen that word, too. But I think that competence has a quite broad range, since it also involves some personal development. I don’t think this is that important in your career, but there is an element of both [professional development and personal development]. Developing your competences is the most important part of your career.

As Torben’s statement shows, he associates his career with competence development. Competences imply more than expert knowledge; they also concern the development of one’s ‘whole person’ (Fleming and Sturdy, 2011) since personal development remains central to contemporary career development. While Torben believes that professional development is more important than personal development, Alice stresses that this depends on the situation. For example, Alice says that if you want to ‘advance to a managerial position, then you have to develop some personal skills’ and acquire some ‘broader competences’. Used in this context, competence is a more flexible and adaptable notion but also more vague compared with the more specific concepts of skills or qualifications. As opposed to qualifications, competences not only express the current state of an employee but also involve his or her potential. While Torben and Alice disagree about how to balance the relationship between ‘professional development and personal development’, they agree with Henrik, who states that it depends on ‘where your personal focus is’.

The theme of ‘personal focus’ here clearly resonates with the ideological underpinnings of the boundaryless career discourse and its insistence on personal freedom, free agency and a protean self. This results in an individualization of career responsibility (Costas, 2013; Dowd and Kaplan, 2005; Inkson, 2008) as ‘personal focus’ becomes the organizing principle for career development. Within the literature of the boundaryless career, this individualization process tends to be associated with increased flexibility and mobility since employees can choose how to ‘tweak’ or refine their career development now that organizationally defined functional boundaries have presumably disappeared. However, Inkson (2008) highlights how this trend places a tremendous ‘responsibility on individual career actors’ shoulders’ (p. 550) as ‘individuals, not organizations, are responsible for managing their own careers’ (Dowd and Kaplan, 2005: 702). This has been marked as a shift from an ‘organization-centred’ career path towards an ‘individual-centred’ one (see Peiperl et al., 2000).

The concept of liminal career allows us to approach the individualization of career responsibility differently. In the case of ENC, categories for describing career development are available, such as ‘competence’ and ‘professional development’, but these categories fail to fully capture what it takes to succeed. Thus, career development becomes a question of developing the right competences, but the concept of competence remains ‘somewhere in-between’ (Daskalaki et al., 2016) personal and professional development. A competence is, to use the words of Turner (1967), ‘neither this nor that, and yet is both’ (p. 99). At ENC, we see that every member of the organization must engage in both personal development and professional advancement to thrive, yet it remains unclear how one should conceive of the relationship between the two.

Here, we should resist the assumption that ‘objective boundaries’ have been replaced by ‘subjective boundaries’ – that is, that in the absence of clear functional boundaries defined by the organizations, individuals must subjectively construct them. Confronted with the difficulty of specifying the nature of competences, some of the informants resort to ‘personal focus’. Yet, ‘personal focus’ cannot resolve the ambiguity since each employee must adapt to the organization’s conditions. For example, Linda says,

In many of the tasks that we work on, there is an obvious focus on professionalism. But let’s imagine that we merged with [another department], and we were to be integrated, then other things would be at stake. Here we should not let our personalities lead us into isolation – we should welcome our new colleagues. So after such a process, we might answer [the question of what is important for career development] differently.

As Linda explains, many of the tasks assigned to employees require certain specific professional qualifications. However, new organizational conditions like a merger with another department can suddenly change these functional boundaries. To adapt to the inherent unpredictability that ensues from this change, members of the organization must therefore remain flexible, change-ready and mobile (Clarke, 2013). It is important to note that Linda’s description of a departmental merger is fictitious, yet it is nonetheless this prospect – that each individual should expect the unexpected or prepare for the unpreparable – that marks career development at ENC. The concept of the liminal career helps us to understand how career development at ENC proceeds on the basis of uncertainty: employees, having been put ‘permanently on guard’ (Fleming, 2015: 86), experience a lack of clarity as regards the criteria for success in the organization. The concept of the liminal career allows us to see how precarious the functional boundaries at ENC have become, and this very precarity serves to transform once organizational careers into liminal ones.

Concluding discussion

We suggest that the concept of the liminal career has four distinct advantages over that of the boundaryless career. We identify the first at the conceptual level, where the liminal career obviates the need to insist on either the presence or the absence of boundaries. Rather, liminality allows us to understand how boundaries might exist in an ambiguous state, making it difficult for organizational members to navigate them. Second, our suggested concept enables us to consider how today’s career development may both enable and disable employees and middle managers as they deal with their daily work challenges, including the basic challenge of getting a work status at all. Third, the liminal career concept directly relates flexibility to boundaries as a measure of the extent to which an individual copes with liminal experiences and the tasks connected with his or her personal career development.

Finally, the concept of the liminal career enables us to challenge the modern concepts of the clearly demarcated organization and of the independent, self-defining and protean self – that is, the engine of the boundaryless career taking place across such an organization. A liminal career rather fosters a dependent, temporary and contextual self, what Taylor (2007) terms a ‘porous self’ (p. 33, see also Smith, 2012). In the first part of this discussion, we consider the first three points conjunctively, while in the second part, we engage with the ‘porous self’ as necessary to understanding the emergence of work organizations in Deleuze’s societies of control which, in our view, can also be termed the ‘liminal age’ (Thomassen, 2014: 113).

The backdrop of our first point is the insistence in the boundaryless career discourse that career development has indeed become boundaryless. Although some career researchers have used this point as ammunition for a thorough critique of the boundaryless career concept (Inkson et al., 2012; King et al., 2005; Rodrigues and Guest, 2010), they have nevertheless been reluctant to reject the concept outright (Rodrigues and Guest, 2010), while still others have insisted that boundaries exist within career development (Inkson et al., 2012; King et al., 2005). However, the predominant form of critique against the concept of the boundaryless career accepts the basic premise that boundaries can either be present or absent within career development. As such, the discussion has been polarized between those who believe that careers are bounded versus those who claim they are boundaryless. However, as Baruch (2006: 127) notes, such ‘extremes rarely provide a true depiction of real life situations’. In particular, when people make a distinction between the organizational and the boundaryless career, they fail to acknowledge that boundaries influencing career development may be ambiguous, diffuse and unclear. Instead of subscribing to the concept of the boundaryless career, we have therefore developed an alternative, the liminal career, to capture the essence of such situations.

In terms of the presence or absence of boundaries in career development, we acknowledge that anyone experiencing a liminal career might be placed in a social context regulated by boundaries, but the nature of these boundaries – and how to traverse them – may be unclear, diffuse and ambiguous. For example, nurses working in contemporary hospital care are confronted with pressure from health assistants ‘below’ them as well as from doctors ‘above’ them. The assistants aspire to carry out tasks that formerly belonged to the nurses, while the doctors increasingly perform ‘care’ tasks as they interact with patients. As such, even the boundaries in a highly specialized bureaucracy like a hospital are rendered ambiguous, which seems to be engendering stress among healthcare professionals employed throughout the healthcare system. As these professionals operate in the intersection of conventional organizational boundaries, they appear to ‘elude or slip through the network of classifications that normally locate states and positions in cultural space’, as Turner (1969) puts it (p. 95). Here, the concept of liminal career captures this ambiguous state of being ‘betwixt and between’.

Second, and beyond this, the concept of the liminal career enables us to simultaneously consider the positive and the negative aspects of contemporary career development. On one hand, liminality may induce crisis, or even stress. Individuals in a state of liminality lack clear social markers against which to define themselves, for which reason they might fall prey to what Turner (1967) calls ‘symbolic stress’ and be exposed to ‘vulnerability’ (p. 108; see also Sturdy et al., 2006). On the other hand, liminality can also enable creativity, as it dissolves conventional social constraints and allows new social patterns and cultural identities to emerge (see Beech, 2011; Swan et al., 2015). In other words, the individual has what Loacker and Śliwa (2016) see as an experience that is both ‘enriching and burdensome’ (p. 675) – that is to say, an experience of belonging professionally to a ‘mobile middle’ that is bound to keep moving in order ‘to stay in the same place’. Conventionally, movement and transition have been understood as a progression from one position to another. However, since Loacker and Śliwa are exploring the paradox of having to move to retain a stable position, we suggest that the anthropological concept of liminality, applied to contemporary career research, captures this paradoxical complexity: in the liminal career, one must perform according to unknown criteria for formally moving, hence one moves all the time, yet is headed nowhere definite.

Third, proponents of the boundaryless career concept assume that flexibility comes of erasing boundaries. Once boundaries are removed, individuals can enjoy boundless flexibility by moving freely across occupations, spaces and organizations. For example, functional boundaries associated with an organizational career tie employees to specific occupations, while those engaged in a boundaryless career constantly reinvent their professional identities and endeavour to remain flexible on the labour market (Hirschhorn and Gilmore, 1992). What this assumption about flexibility underestimates, according to Inkson et al. (2012: 333), is that boundaries not only constrain but also enable flexibility. Thus, boundaries can actually provide support for career progress and movement. Conversely, according to Smith (2007), the position of boundaries as a career support implies that organizations without boundaries thus fail to facilitate flexibility:

Without the clearly defined hierarchy of roles and responsibilities that characterized its ancestor bureaucracies, the flexible organization lacks the reference points by which one is able to tell whether one is moving forwards, backwards or sideways or not moving at all in one’s career. (p. 196; see also Sennett, 2011: 15)

Although this is an important critique, stressing that flexibility, mobility and autonomy actually require boundaries to be in place, we can see that this view appeals to an understanding of organizations predicated on clear organizational, hierarchical and functional boundaries. This predication is what Deleuze is challenging as he recounts what he sees as a current transition between disciplinary societies and what he terms the societies of control. This brings us to our fourth and final point for discussion – the ensuing ambiguity of boundaries and the production of the ‘porous self’.

An understanding of organizational boundaries as clear and distinct echoes Deleuze’s (1992) view regarding the now waning societies of discipline that consist of ‘environments of enclosure – prison, hospital, factory, school, family’ (p. 3–4). The boundaryless career discourse, of course, emulates this structure as it is conceptualized against the backdrop of a strong, active and coherent protean self, what Taylor (2007: 33ff) calls a ‘buffered self’, that is, a self that has a buffer between itself and the world. Hence, it may act freely and autonomously, not least by crossing whatever boundaries it sees fit to. Yet, this is the very conception of self that changes with the liminal career: the disciplinary environments of enclosure have now, according to Deleuze, entered into ‘crisis’. Therefore, no reinstallation of clear boundaries can effect a simple return to enclosures and well-known selves. Instead, Deleuze stresses the need to acknowledge how the boundaries that previously demarcated different enclosed domains have today become ambiguous (Fleming, 2015; Fleming and Spicer, 2004; Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015; Weiskopf and Loacker, 2006). This also makes it difficult to locate the corporation, for example, in geographical space and chronological time since ‘the corporation is a spirit, a gas’ (Deleuze, 1992: 4). However, this does not mean that the boundaries have been dissolved but rather that a person is often unsure at which point he or she has managed to cross them. This results in a constant sense that ‘one is never finished with anything’ and a need for permanent training (Deleuze, 1992: 5). Instead of the post-liminal ritual of reintegration (Van Gennep, 2006), this results in ‘limitless postponements’ (Deleuze, 1992: 5, italics in original) in which the subject becomes a ‘dividual’. Instead of the monadic, atomistic and individually free agent of the boundaryless career, one now deals with the fragmented, socially dependent and culturally determined dividual (Smith, 2012).

Here, we should continue exploring how those who experience a liminal career must navigate a zone between the traditionally demarcated, bureaucratic organization, on one hand, and what Turner (1969) terms an ‘anti-structure’, that is, the liminal phase, on the other. If structure is ‘essentially a set of classifications, a model for thinking about culture and nature and ordering one’s public life’ (Turner, 1969: 127), then anti-structure refers to the margin of structures where normal classifications can become suspended. Anti-structure releases the members of a society from conventional social roles, thus generating creativity but also uncertainty. In the societies of control the dialectic between structure and anti-structure has been replaced with a marked tendency towards anti-structure, a fact that has allowed the liminal career to take hold. The resulting social marker is what we with Taylor (2007) have termed a ‘porous self’, which in itself balances the once disciplinarily confined autonomous self and the radically determined and controlled dividual of the control societies. The porous self is constantly engaged in securing ‘provisional identities’ in the demanding zones between order and disorder (Söderlund and Borg, 2017: 15) or between the organization and the anti-structure (Turner, 1969). To strike such a balance when cast into a zone between order and chaos, employees as well as organizations must, as we have seen, go through a precarious and laborious process.

Such processes can be assumed to proliferate further in today’s post-disciplinary society, in which the crisis of institutions has changed how work is organized in a number of areas. Against the backdrop of rising economic inequality in many developed economies, career is, through self-employment, portfolio careers and on-demand business models, increasingly becoming a responsibility mostly for the isolated individual (Fleming, 2017). While in a class society based on discipline and institutions the benefits as well as the burden of such changes were distributed collectively if not exactly evenly, the effects under a post-disciplinary society are much more unforeseeable. It appears that also here a precariat will carry the main burden, and likewise, those in it will be more prone to experience a liminal career as a more permanent condition, and, as such, usually lack a mentor to facilitate career transitions (Weick, 1996: 41). Yet, we must expect the liminal career to become an experience realized in very diverse settings and thus to cross established distinctions, even those, as our article has sought to argue, pertaining to welfare economies and their public institutions. Future career research in organization studies could benefit from exploring the liminal paths not only of precarious groups such as zero-hour contract employees or underemployed workers but also with regard to off-premises employees such as consultants (Czarniawska and Mazza, 2003; Johnsen and Sørensen, 2015) or airline personnel (Fraher and Gabriel, 2014).

The additional rise of transnational, platform-based firms like Facebook, Amazon and Google causes more unpredictability to permeate the career landscape, further highlighting the precarity of the possible paths emerging within contemporary career development. Yet, as Deleuze (1992) would insist, there is ‘no need to fear or hope, but only to look for new weapons’ (p. 4). We have in this article offered the concept of the liminal career as one possible weapon for dealing analytically with the current work predicament of modern societies and the future challenges this will bring.