Page 149 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 137
concepts are still in the making. Taken together, our study builds on existing research by showing that the occupational mandate is not limited to a particular phase of occupational emergence but rather can be devel- oped at all times.
3.5.2. Promoting an ethnographic approach to study occu- pational emergence
Our study contributes to organization studies on occupations by high- lighting the importance of doing ethnography to better understand how occupations emerge. Predominantly, studies on occupational emergence are done with an institutional approach. The institutional approach focuses on the public aspects of occupational treats occupational emergence and treats occupations as structures that have a clear beginning and ‘end’. Accordingly, the emergence of occupations is mostly studied with a retro- spective perspective, once occupations are already established (e.g. Halpern 1992). Yet, drawing on the foundational work of Abbott (1988), who argues that occupations are constructed in everyday work, we promote the idea that doing ethnography is a suitable approach to study the emergence of occupations (e.g. Bechky 2003a; 2003b; 2006). By immersing oneself in the daily context (Van Maanen 2011) of occupational members, ethnographies allow for ‘thick descriptions’ (Geertz 1973) of occupational emergence and consequently to theorize empirical observations. Moreover, we agree with Bechky (2007: 1761) who writes that “deepening our understanding of work life would enable us to develop more comprehensive and interesting organ- izational and occupational theories”.
In particular, our work shows how doing ethnography can reveal dynamics in occupations that otherwise are likely to remain unnoticed. For example, doing ethnography allowed the fieldworker to identify “back- stage behaviors” (Goffman 1973), such as joking and gossiping, among the designers. Through following the designers wherever they went, both during and after work hours, the fieldworker could not only capture the discussions among designers about ‘what a Service Designer ought to do’ during formal meetings, but also the comments and talks of designers after such meetings. Previously, research showed that studying backstage behav- iors can help to reveal role expectations and coordinate action (Bechky 2006a), to express demeanor of expertise (Nelsen & Barley 1997), and to underline “dynamics of respect, collaboration and expertise crucial to the horizontal divisions of labor that are common in postindustrial workplace” (Barley, Bechky & Nelson 2016: 125). We elaborate on these studies by showing that backstage behaviors such as gossiping can also be a mech-