Page 113 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 101
occupations. Establishing an occupational mandate is necessary to develop jurisdiction or achieving legitimacy to control a specific domain of work (Abbott 1988; Bechky 2003a). For example, Fayard, Stigliani, and Bechky (2017) showed that designers differentiate themselves from other service workers on the basis of their ‘ethos’, which was based on the principles of ‘co-creation’, ‘empathy’ and ‘holism’. So, until today, scholars have shown that an occupational mandate can be developed by leveraging common- alities among occupational members, such as demeanor, values and work practices (van Maanen & Barley 1984; Fayard et al. 2017). So, there is a tension emerging. While people inside emerging and changing occupa- tions commonly experience uncertainty with respect to ‘what they do’, they must define commonalities in order for their occupation to be recog- nized. In this context, finding common ground can be challenging and is likely to trigger struggles within the occupation.
So far, however, we know little about the struggles inside occupations (hereafter: intra-occupational struggles) that inform the development of an occupational mandate. Most studies so far have explored how occu- pations emerge retrospectively, once an occupation is institutionalized, and therefore ignored the daily activities and struggles to inform the emergence of an occupation (an exception is the study of Nelsen & Barley 1997). As a consequence, we lack knowledge about occupations that are not only emergent but undergoing significant change – which, in turn, prevents them from ultimately establishing. There is a need to know more about how occupations emerge in intra-occupational struggles because occupations change and grow constantly (Barley 1996; Barley & Bechky 2017). Further, better understanding intra-occupational struggles allow to develop a more comprehensive explanation of how occupations gain legit- imacy and survive over time (Bucher 1988), something that is essential to our understanding of work and organizing (Fayard et al. 2017). Therefore, we ask in this paper: how do members of an emergent and changing occupation define their occupational mandate?
For this paper, we studied the burgeoning occupation Service Design. The first author conducted a 17 months ethnography of designers who were employed at the design firm Fjord. In recent years, especially since business showed interest in Service Design as a source of strategic innova- tion (Gemser & Leenders 2011; Calabretta & Kleinsmann 2017; Elsbach & Stigliani 2018), the occupation of designers changed significantly. Instead of only designing products, increasingly designers developed services and strategies for business (Fayard et al. 2017). As a consequence, while Service Design was first primarily the domain of designers coming from traditional design disciplines such as ‘product design’ or ‘interface design’, the occupa-