Page 209 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 197
and growing occupations. Taken together, Chapter 3 contributes to the practice research on occupations (e.g. Bechky 2003a; 2003b; 2006) and in particular occupational emergence (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017). It shows that occupational mandates develop in intra-occupational struggles, that occupational mandates might never fully develop and there- fore occupational ambiguity might persist.
5.3. Suggestions for Future Research
5.3.1. Exploring brokerage work of creatives
This dissertation research offers opportunities for studying the broke- rage work of creatives. Broadly speaking, brokerage work refers to “beha- vior by which an actor influences, manages, or facilitates interactions between other actors” (Obstfeld et al. 2014: 141), enabling disconnected actors to interact economically, politically and socially (Stovel & Shaw 2012). A broker, therefore, is a sort of ‘third party’ and hence might facilitate connections in situations that demand collaboration such as creativity. It can be said that creatives increasingly act as brokers as their work is moving into new domains. To begin with, in this dissertation it is suggested that it has become a core task of creatives to bring together diverse stakehol- ders and allow them to engage in collaborative action (see Chapter 4). For example, especially the case study of Waag Society shows how important it is for creatives to have a broad network of experts in order to mobilize their clients. Future research could study how creatives as brokers enable, facilitate and transform connections between diverse actors.
Driven by the work of Simmel (1950) and Granovetter (1973), brokerage is addressed in many substantive areas of research, among which sociology, economics, and organization studies. Yet, to date there are only a few empi- rical studies of what brokers actually do (Obstfeld et al. 2014; Hargadon & Sutton 1997) and even less about how brokers foster creative work (Lingo & O’Mahony 2010). A potential explanation for this limited academic interest might be the dominance of the structural network approach to study brokerage, emphasizing the personal benefits that can accrue from a broker’s unique access to contacts and information (Burt 1992; Dimaggio 1992; Gould & Fernandez 1989). Key to such view is the idea that brokers are positioned in a ‘structural hole’ (Burt 1992), connecting otherwise unconnected actors. For the broker, this position is advantageous because of its access to diverse ideas, information and technologies.
Whereas the network perspective has demonstrated that and with whom brokers enable collaboration, it offers little insight in how brokers work to