Page 117 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 105
labor associations and hence identifying emerging occupations and gaining access to it might be difficult (Nelsen & Barley 1997). And even when a researcher gains access, it might be difficult to study the construction of an occupational mandate as members of fledgling occupations are often not yet articulate and intentional about what they consider key to their work (Ibid.). Another reason for little studies on occupational mandates might be that studies on occupational emergence are often done once an occu- pation is already institutionalized. Scholars adopting this approach often track the emergence of occupation retrospectively, from its institution- alization to its beginning, through the study of public statements, polit- ical activities and the development of official associations (Kronus 1976; Halpern 1992). Especially recognizing that members in new occupations often come from different backgrounds and might not agree on core prac- tices and values, a question that remains underexplored is how internally occupational members identify and define commonalities.
3.2.2. Heterogeneity inside occupations
So far, explanations on occupational emergence rely heavily on defining “the ties that bind” between occupational members (Van Maanen & Barley 1984: 291). Focusing on commonalities risks overlooking the heter- ogeneity inside occupations. Heterogeneity in occupations cannot be avoided because “actions [of occupational members] are not cued by a stable sense of who one is as an occupational member, but instead by who one is in particular situations” (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017: 529). For example, in their study van Maanen and Barley (1984) show that although commercial fishermen appear to be a homogeneous group for outsiders, fishermen themselves see clear differences between traditional fishermen that are ‘educated’ and fishermen that for example work ‘part-time’ or are considered as ‘outlaw’. Also, Nelsen and Barley (1997) suggest that inside occupations there are differences among its members. They show that in the EMS there are two communities of practitioners: paid and volunteer Emergency Medical Technicians (EMTs). Paid EMTs acted more authori- tatively, expressed in the uniform they wore, the medical jargon they used, and that they purposely excluded volunteer EMTs from important tasks with patients. The volunteer EMTs appeared more altruistically motivated as they spend more time with patients, talked about their work in terms of ‘offering help’, wearing casual dress and displaying a lot of empathy with their patients. These two examples show that within occupations diverse ‘sub-communities’ can exist that hold different views and practices with respect to how work is done.