Liminal Space

Liminal space is the territory of professional transition between one settled identity and another — the phase during which neither identity is fully operative and the ground underfoot is genuinely uncertain. Ibarra borrowed the term from the anthropologist Victor Turner, who had adapted it from Arnold van Gennep's studies of rites of passage. The liminal person stands on the threshold (Latin limen), betwixt and between, belonging to neither what was nor what will be. In Turner's studies of tribal initiation, liminality was not an accident of ritual design but the mechanism of transformation — the adolescent could not become an adult without passing through a phase of structured ambiguity in which the old self dissolved and the new self gradually formed. Ibarra recognized the same structure in contemporary career transitions, stripped of ceremonial trappings but operating by identical psychological logic. The AI age has produced liminal space at unprecedented