Page 52 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives
P. 52

                40 Design Meets Business
knowing where to start, I decided to write empirical narratives of my first interpretations. Besides a first attempt to analyze my data, this was an exercise in externalizing all the knowledge that I embodied. Even though the data was abundant, there was still so much more data in my head that I needed to ‘put out’. I wrote a first narrative on the “celebrating the culture of coolness”, trying to describe the fundamental norms, values and atti- tudes of the designers in the field. Then, I continued and wrote a narrative entitled: “an unexpected marriage: the acquisition by Accenture”, reflecting on the motivations of both Fjord and Accenture to enter such collaboration, and especially what were the implications for the designers. Besides these ‘setting the context’ Chapters, I wrote a more in-depth narrative in which I described the Pensio project in detail. Based on this Chapter I drafted a paper on how the designers took their clients on a ‘hero’s journey’, acting like a sort of organizational jester, trying to change their mindsets using all sorts of artifacts and symbolic performances, which is not part of this book. Then, I wrote a narrative entitled ‘a small history of service design’. This narrative has the basis of the paragraph ‘The Emergence of Service Design’ in this introduction chapter. Writing these empirical narratives took me six months, and helped me to move deeper into the analysis.
Thematic analysis. Developing the chapters was also the start of an inductive analysis of my fieldnotes, transcripts and the documents. After returning from the field, I read over these sources of data over and over again. This helped to identify emerging themes which I could further develop. Key themes that already emerged early on in the data collection were: “design in flux”, “creating jurisdictional authority”, “questioning value of design”, “designers as connectors”, “designer as a jester”, “arti- facts in design work” and “the emergence of design”. I mainly identified these themes through coding by hand, marking important passages and making notes in the side lines. In addition, I used a qualitative data analysis software which yielded 352 codes. In order to link these codes and themes to a question, I then turned to the literature as a next step. The thematic analysis was a process mainly driven by my intuition of what appears inte- resting or counterintuitive.
Moving between data and theory. In order to identify what empi- rical insights might be worth further exploring, I turned to the literature. Especially I read studies on emerging occupations, and the challenges of becoming an established occupation that is recognized by outsiders. The work of Abbott (1988), Bechky (2003b; 2006a; 2011), Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky (2017), Howard-Grenville and colleagues (2017) and Nelsen and Barley (1997) were especially important to situating the challenges of designers into a theoretical debate. For example, I discovered that discus-































































































   50   51   52   53   54