Page 112 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

100 Design Meets Business
For example, in the illustration above, it is suggested that both designers agree that it is the task of designers to help business improve their user experience. Yet, on the one hand, Nadia - a recently hired project lead with a background in business – believes that it is best to achieve this through first creating a compelling “story”. On the other hand, Carrie - an interaction designer who was working at the design firm for over four years – suggests that it is better to do it “the old way” and first visualize their proposed solution. Nadia, however, believes that “drawing infrastruc- tures” does not reveal the core expertise of designers but rather that of “IT people”. Carrie, in turn, suggests that she feels little motivation to adapt her usual practice and first develop “a compelling story”. Taken together, observations as these, show that among the designers there is ambiguity around the occupation, and in particular what is their jurisdiction (Abbott 19988; Bechky 2003), what counts as expertise and are core activities.
On the one hand, organizational studies on occupations suggested that unclarities around core work tasks are typical to occupations that are still emerging (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Davidson et al. 2007) or significantly changing (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017; Nelsen & Irwin 2014; Pachidi et al. 2014). When occupations are emerging, a group of people unites around a frequently vague but promising opportunity area for work (Bucher 1962; 1988). Often coming from geographically dispersed locations and having different backgrounds (Bucher and Strauss 1961; Van Maanen and Barley 1984), people inside occupations can have different interpretations of what their work essentially is (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017; Nelsen & Barley 1997). Similarly, when occupations are changing, unclarities around the occupation might increase. For example, when occupations are growing, they might attract newcomers who have distinct - and sometimes even competing - ideas with respect to work (Reay et al. 2006). As a conse- quence, newcomers can challenge taken-for-granted assumptions of longer serving occupational members and push occupations into new directions (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017). Taken together, the literature suggests that when heterogeneity inside occupations heightens, it might be difficult to identify, in the spirit of Hargadon and Bechky (2006), what turns a collec- tion of occupational members into an occupational collective.
On the other hand, scholars have argued that for occupations to develop, it is important to construct ‘an occupational mandate’ (Abbott 1988; Bucher 1988; Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017). An occupa- tional mandate refers to “the internally shared understanding and exter- nally perceived right to define ‘proper conduct’” (Hughes 1958 in Fayard et al. 2017: 217). In other words, both inside and outside of a specific occupa- tion, people need to recognize what sets the occupation apart from other