Page 105 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

2. “Pixel Perfect”: Designers as Craftsmen 93
have a body of abstract knowledge nor a formal authority (Fayard et al. 2017), resistance might not take place via political structures such as lever- aging professional associations (Goodrick & Reay 2011), exerting control over legislation (Starr 1982), or limiting membership (Halpern 1992), but through more micro-practices on the work floor such as counter discourses and skepticism (Kärreman & Alvesson 2009)
2.6. Limitations and Future Research
We identify two limitations that provide opportunities for future research. First, even though we had the opportunity to delve into the reve- latory case of a design firm that is acquired by a management consultancy, the setting of this study might have enhanced what we observed in our findings. Especially, our data shows that designers were concerned that their work was being conflated with that of Accenture, who were also doing service work but with different approaches. The designers reckoned that what distinguished them from the management consultants was in particular their material practices (See also Fayard et al. 2017). Hence, we can imagine that the designers put more efforts in making and using arti- facts than other designers that are not acquired by a management consul- tancy. Scholars could select a more diverse sample of design firms, that are similarly experiencing a shift towards more abstract design work, and compare the creatives’ responses to changing material practices. Future research could, for example, explore how designers cope with changing material practices in design firms that are independent or design firms that are acquired by other design firms (such service design firm Livework that acquired the Dutch product design firm Zilver). In these settings, researchers can explore whether material practices play a similar or perhaps more limited role in responding to work changes, and if so, why so.
At the same time, while material practices are key to all design work (Stigliani & Fayard 2010; Ravasi & Stigliani 2012), we can imagine that the centrality of material practices in design might transform, and over time, even become peripheral. For example, our ethnography took place only three years after the acquisition and designers had already started to do similar work as management consultants. We can imagine that, as time passes by, the occupation of design changes and hence the importance of material practices changes along. We saw that as design is quickly moving into the field of business, the occupation increasingly attracted other types of designers. In particular, more and more designers with a background in business started to work at Fjord. Along with these changes in occupa- tional membership, we can expect changes in the work ethos of designers.