Page 207 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
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                5. Discussion 195
entities that contain meanings and interpretations (Justesen & Mouritsen 2009; Kornberger & Clegg 2011), “whereby visual artefacts do not merely provide the means to an end, but instead produce an end that prompts immediate action” (Comi & Whyte 2018: 1060). For example, Justesen and Mouritsen (2009) propose that annual reports can communicate the firm’s capabilities and strategies as a standalone object. Both the instrumental and the teleological perspective to artifacts, portray artifacts as a “set of ‘tools’ in the hands of practitioners, failing to fully appreciate the entanglement of human and non-human actors” (Comi & Whyte 2018: 1060).
So, starting from the idea the material practices are intertwined with practitioners, shows that artifacts cannot easily be separated from the practitioner using or developing it. Daily work activities imply the mobili- zation of the artifacts and the body in certain ways. Such view is important because it can help researchers that study creativity and creatives, better understand how creatives organize their daily work and how they cope with changes in their work. In Chapter 2, it is suggested that for creatives it is difficult to adapt to external pressures for change, because they need to ‘drop their tools’ with which they are intertwined. Hence, instead of adapting, creatives might continue former practices because they are used to performing these, and as craftsmen, this might give them the oppor- tunity to improve their own creative skills. Taken together, this disserta- tion research shows that adopting the lens of craftsmanship is beneficial because it allows for a more integrative understanding of creative working, shifting attention to the importance of craft, emotions, and material prac- tices in the work of creatives.
5.2.4. Occupational emergence and the development of an occupational mandate
This dissertation research also contributes to what we know about the emergence of occupations. First, building on the assumption that occu- pations are internally heterogeneous (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017), it is demonstrated that the occupational mandate is negotiated in intra-occu- pational struggles. The literature suggested already long ago that occupa- tions are made out of different constituencies (Abbott 1988). Yet, so far, only little studies have explored heterogeneity inside occupations (excep- tions are Nelsen & Barley 1997; Howard-Grenville et al. 2017). A reason for this can be that most studies have adopted an inter-occupational approach, looking at the struggles between occupations and not within occupations (e.g. Begun & Lippincott 1987; Bechky 2003a). Accordingly, it appears that occupations are homogeneous entities in which all the members share






























































































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