Page 123 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 111
the fieldworker collected over 140 documents in the shared ‘Box’ folder in which designers saved project proposals, project planning tools, copies of deliverables and important email exchanges. These documents were used to track the work of designers over time, and for example, retrospectively identify example situations in which designers had key discussions about their work and what decisions they ultimately made with respect to their work practices. Gathering documents, moreover, helped us to integrate the data collected from observations and interviews (Glaser & Strauss 1967). For an overview of our data collection see Table 3.1.
3.3.4. Analytical process
In accordance with doing ethnography, the data were inductively analyzed through reading and rereading fieldnotes, transcripts and other texts, and happened congruently with our data collection (Strauss & Corbin 1990; Hammersley & Atkinson 2007). In this process, we took our “hunches” and surprises seriously to develop emerging themes (Schultze 2000). We used our field notes as primary data for the data analysis, and interviews and archival data to support and refine emerging themes. While the fieldworker took the lead in coding the data, the second author was actively involved, primarily as an interrogator of the data, representing the etic perspective to prevent the fieldworker from ‘going native’ (Van Maanen 2011). Moreover, the data analysis was collaborative as we engaged in regular conversations, puzzling over what our observations could mean and connecting it to the literature. This helped us gather more focused data and to develop a theoretically interesting story.
Developing Case Narratives. Driven by our ‘hunches’ and conversa- tions, the fieldworker first developed case narratives (Miles & Huberman 1994). These case narratives were empirically rich stories, including frag- ments of our fieldnotes, interview transcripts and our archival data, aimed at getting a hold of the enormous amount of data the fieldworker collected in the field. For example, the fieldworker wrote a case narrative about the culture at the design agency of Fjord, which focused on the cultural commonalities between designers such as the way they dress, their values and perspectives with respect to Service Design. Also, the fieldworker wrote a more chrono- logical document about ‘design in flux’, iterating the recent maturing of the whole field of design, and also of Fjord’s activities in specific, including the latest move to business. Next to this, the fieldworker wrote a detailed case narrative about the project in which the fieldworker participated. This narra- tive was especially helpful in identifying heterogeneity among designers. This case narrative about the project became a leading document in our analysis.