Page 120 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

108 Design Meets Business
growth of the workforce at the Madrid studio of Fjord, which grew from 6 employees in 2006 to 55 in 2016. The workforce did not only grow but also became more diverse. While in its initial years, Fjord mostly employed designers with a traditional design background, such as product designers, interaction designers, and technology designers, the design firm increas- ingly attracted other types of designers. In particular, the majority of the recently employed designers has a background in business or related disciplines. These designers do not only come from different institutional contexts and have distinct skills, but also perspectives with respect to the purpose and practice of design. Taken together, these three reasons - the infancy of the occupation, the rising pressure to define their complemen- tary capabilities and the inclusion of newcomers - makes Service Design an extremely relevant setting to study the how an occupational mandate is constructed in times of change.
3.3.2. Research approach
The development of an occupational mandate can be studied by focusing on the ‘interaction orders’ - that is patterns of people’s sayings and doings over time- in everyday work activities (Goffman 1959). It can be challenging to study how an occupational mandate is constructed in interactions. The formation of occupations is a diffuse and gradual process, involving all sorts of ambiguity. Further, it is unclear whether or not an occupation will ultimately gain a foothold and define ‘in the moment’ which interactions are relevant (Nelsen & Barley 1997). In other words, it is easier to identify relevant interactions not during but after occupations are established. These practical difficulties “may make the longitudinal observation from an occu- pation’s inception impossible, but they do not completely preclude studying how cultural mandates are constructed” (Nelsen & Barley 1997: 621). A research approach that is especially suitable to study everyday interactions in context is doing ethnography. An ethnography is a form of research in which researchers immerse themselves for a prolonged time in the selected research setting in order to understand the research subjects’ culture, practices, norms and values (Van Maanen 2011). The aim of this research approach is to learn the perspectives and practices of informants by partici- pating in their day-to-day life (Watson 2010; Clifford & Marcus 1986).
3.3.3. Fieldwork at Fjord
For this study, the first author did an ethnography of 17 months. In the first round of data collection, between March 2016 and July 2017, the field-