Page 146 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

134 Design Meets Business
pations they distinguish themselves from (van Maanen & Barley 1984; Fayard et al. 2017).
In this ethnography of the occupation Service Design, we show that in emergent occupations, people might experience occupational ambi- guity because they are involved in work that has not been done before and accordingly, people might not have similar approaches let alone shared routines. The designers at Fjord were still exploring what were core tasks and approaches to their work. While they are in the midst of such discovery processes, occupational ambiguity heightened. Newcomers with backgrounds in business and management (‘business designers) arrived and challenged the emergent definitions of ‘what Service Designers ought to do’. They challenged the ways in which already serving designers, who mostly have a background in traditional design disciplines (‘craft designers’), were operating. This led to lengthy discussions in designers’ daily work. In particular, the business designers and craft designers engaged in different interactions with ‘space’, ‘time’ and ‘clients’. For example, whereas business designers believed that it was important to respond to the clients’ demands for more involvement in design processes, the craft designers took more distance. They reckoned that it was best to keep their design solutions a surprise and only involve clients minimally in design processes. While such disagreements express the different approaches of designers to their work, they did not resolve the already existing occupational ambiguity.
In order to work despite the occupational ambiguity, the designers developed temporary settlements. Such settlements included accommo- dating to the preferences of one community – which most often was that of the business designers. Another settlement was developing a temporary compromise, for example, showing that the designers have been working instead of on what they have been working. Finally, another settlement was dividing tasks and doing work tasks with different approaches. Yet, even though the designers found ways to work, the occupational ambiguity persisted. Designers expressed their disagreement with the settlement in backstage behaviors like jokes or gossiping. Our findings have theoretical implications for organizational studies on occupations, and in particular on occupational emergence.
3.5.1. Discovering the Occupational Mandate in Intra- occupational Struggles
Organizational studies on emergent occupations often start from the idea that in occupations people leverage their commonalities vis a vis other what people share in other occupations (Van Maanen & Barley 1984). Our