Page 148 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

136 Design Meets Business
style, clothing, and relationship with patients. Because of their authorita- tive demeanor, paid EMTs better succeeded in convincing their audiences (patients, other medical professionals) that they are legitimate practitioners and hence ultimately ‘won’ the settlement of the occupational mandate. Similarly, we show that designers are not only concerned with differenti- ating themselves from other occupations (like management consultants), but also constantly challenge each other’s notions of ‘how work ought to be done’. Yet, whereas Nelsen and Barley primarily explained how EMTs tried to convince their audiences that work is worthy of compensation, our study adopts a more ‘inwards’ perspective and explores how designers tried to convince each other of ‘what they ought to do’. Further, whereas the different communities of EMTs had a clear picture of what belongs to their jurisdiction, the designers at Fjord experienced occupational ambiguity. Hence, another theoretical implication of our study is that inside occupa- tions, members are not only competing but also might also be still defining what are core practices.
When occupations are inherently heterogeneous (Howard-Gren- ville et al. 2017) and unstable, our research suggests that the occupational mandate can be negotiated at all stages of occupational emergence. So far, researchers have emphasized that the occupational mandate is constructed in the early institutionalization of an occupation (Abbott 1988). Moreover, studies have adopted a rather chronological approach in assuming that the development of an occupational mandate is something that happens prior to the solidification of jurisdiction. For example, in their study Fayard and colleagues (2017: 272) cite the work of McMurray (2011: 802): “once a mandate is established, practitioners’ sense of solidarity and identity gives them moral authority to claim that their ways of conduct and thinking related to the work are appropriate and relevant”. While constructing an occupational mandate is indeed a “key early phase” in occupational emergence (Abbott 1988; Fayard et al. 2017: 272), following ‘finding like- minded colleagues’ and before ‘solidifying the jurisdiction’ (Bucher 1988), the development of the occupational mandate is not limited to these early beginnings. For example, in our case, we show that even though designers already make jurisdictional claims and try to solidify their occupation vis a vis other occupations, within the occupation there is still disagreement about interactions with clients. Business designers challenged the idea of craft designers that requests of clients for more involvement can best be ignored. The craft designers believed that clients should be involved at the end of design processes, once their design concepts are almost ready. The business designers, however, reckoned that it was important to ‘make the clients’ happy and include them also during design processes when design