Page 13 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

Preface
Why does an anthropologist study business? For decades, anthropology has been concerned with the study of foreign communities and tribes. In- deed, traditionally, anthropologists have had the tendency to reveal the conventional in the unconventional. To show that ‘they’, albeit their cul- tural and physical differences, are essentially like ‘us’. While this focus on ‘foreignness’ has resulted in rich empirical works and grand theories, in- creasingly scholars have highlighted the relevance of doing anthropology in local contexts (e.g. Nader 1974[1969]; Katz 1997; Turco 2016). For exam- ple, scholars have done their ethnographies in their own organizations (e.g. Ho 2006). Organizations, just like tribes, consist of groups of people who engage in collective action and share particular values. In organizations, people accept certain behaviors while labelling other behaviors a taboo. It is up to the anthropologist to shed light on this, and create a better under- standing of how people organize their work in the workplace.
Intrigued by the opportunity to study organizations with an anthro- pological approach, I did my PhD at the KIN Center for Digital Inno- vation (KIN) at the School of Business and Economics, VU University in Amsterdam. KIN is a motley crew of anomalies, including sociolo- gists, designers, engineers, computer scientists, management scholars and anthropologists, who are interested in studying what people actually do in organizational environments. In particular, our research group studies how people in organizations create technologies and vice versa, how tech- nologies shape work and occupational emergence. My own dissertation research balances somewhere in the middle. It is a study of people that develop new technologies (e.g. designers), but it is done by studying their everyday action.
It took time to find my sweet spot in academia. At the start of my PhD, I had to learn the language of business schools. Getting familiar with organi- zational concepts like ‘coordination’, ‘innovation’ and ‘brokerage’. Halfway into my PhD, I designed and developed my first ethnography. For more than a year, I lived among designers at a design firm in Spain. While doing such intensive research was demanding, it also made me realize that I love