Page 118 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

106 Design Meets Business
In an occupation that is growing and moving into new domains of work (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017), occupational heterogeneity might be intensifying. In times of occupational emergence, and in particular when occupations are changing in new directions, there are often a lot of ‘newcomers’ (Zilber 2002) - or “new generations of specialists trained in the occupation’s core knowledge and practices who have not yet fully grasped the nuanced and tacit aspects of their roles” (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017: 549) that are relatively unembedded in the local context. Newcomers, in turn, might have different ways of acting than longer-serving occupational members and “therefore capable of acting in ways contrary to the estab- lished patterns and norms’’ (Reay, Golden-Biddle & Germann 2006). For example, Reay and colleagues (2006) show how nurse practitioners, who were newly introduced into the Canadian Healthcare system, used their established networks and intimate knowledge in the Canadian Healthcare System to legitimize new patterns of work. Similarly, Howard-Grenville and colleagues (2017) showed that chemistry students who entered jobs as junior faculty members or industry chemists, tried to moralize the work of experienced chemists through performing various roles, such as inno- vator, educator or problem-solver. From these studies, we can learn that while newcomers need to become embedded into an occupation by for example learning the occupation’s roles, practices and norms (Ibarra 1999), newcomers may challenge existing behaviours, norms and values within occupations (Reay et al. 2006).
So far, we know that occupational heterogeneity informs the emergence of occupations (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017). Yet, most attention has been given to occupational members differentiate from other occupations and unite around commonalities. Such ‘external view’ tends to highlight compe- tition between occupations, and not within occupations. As a consequence, we, for example, know little about how occupational heterogeneity informs the specific development of an occupational mandate. One can imagine that - especially when the occupation has a lot of inflow of ‘newcomers’ - there can be differences, discussions and other tensions between occu- pational members. These discussions, in turn, can either be generative (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017) for creating a common agreement - as it pushes occupational members to collectively reflect on occupation’s foun- dations - or constraining - as it heightens differences between occupational members that sometimes cannot be overcome. These observations suggest that when new members arrive in the occupation, the occupational mandate - whether fully developed or ‘in the making’ - can be (re)negotiated. This begs the question central to this study of how internally, within the occupation, the occupational mandate is constructed among its heterogeneous members.