Organizational Liminality and Interstitial Creativity: The Fellowship of Power

Formal organizations share a common set of characteristics that include identifiable operating principles and coordinating mechanisms as well as lines of authority and communication. However, some organizations – especially those on the margins of institutional fields – creatively combine institutional and anti-institutional charac-teristics. This tendency, which I call organizational liminality, represents a way in which certain groups resist the isomorphic tendencies of modern organizational life. By comparing a group called The Fellowship, a religious organization of national and world leaders, with peer organizations, I show how formalized liminality is an intentional organizational strategy and discuss how this produces unique resources and liabilities for the group. “We’ve been working through this thing for about the last five months … I was part of a group called C Street when I was in Washington. It was a, believe it or not, a Christian Bible study.”