Page 147 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 135
study contributes to this by highlighting that within emergent occupations people might not know what they have in common, and in particular, what core work tasks are. In other words, one of the theoretical implications of our study is that we show that in emergent occupations people might experience occupational ambiguity. Our study contributes by showing not only how occupational members struggle over the definition of their still emerging occupation, but also how the arrival of newcomers might inten- sify occupational ambiguity. We suggest that ambiguity can arise around all sorts of themes, in our case this was interactions with space, time and clients. Elaborating on this, in the spirit of Strauss and colleagues (1963: 167), we promote the idea that occupations are ‘unstable’ and promote the idea that in occupations “no change”, and even change, “must be worked at”.
Further, our study adds to existing organizational studies on the devel- opment of an occupational mandate, by highlighting the importance of looking at the role of intra-occupational struggles in occupational emer- gence. So far, most organizational studies explained the development of an occupational mandate from an inter-occupational perspective, empha- sizing how occupational members leverage their commonalities vis a vis other occupations. For example, in the study of Fayard, Stigliani and Bechky (2017) it is demonstrated how Service Designers develop their occupational mandate on the basis of a shared ethos, which is different from that of other workers involved in similar work domains (such as management consultants or product designers). Our study adds to such research by showing that occupational mandates are not only developed in inter-occupational struggles but also in intra-occupational struggles. While the inter-occupational perspective shows that occupations do not exist in a vacuum but evolve in interactions with other occupations, it risks overlooking what happens inside occupations and hence tends to display occupations as relatively homogeneous entities.
Yet, as recent research showed, occupations are internally heter- ogeneous (Howard-Grenville et al. 2017) and shaped by the competing struggles of occupational members (Nelsen & Barley 1997). Hence, it is important to shed light on the intra-occupational struggles that shape the development of the occupational mandate, and the overall emergence of occupations.
The work of Nelsen and Barley (1997) on the emerging occupation of Emergency Medical Services (EMS) is one of the rare studies that provided insights into how intra-occupational competition can inform the devel- opment of an occupational mandate. In their work, they describe how paid and volunteer emergency medical technicians (EMTs) challenge each other’s interpretations and enactments of the occupation in their work