Page 150 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

138 Design Meets Business
anism to temporary cope with the dual pressure of, on the one hand, the need to externally appear like a united occupational community and, on the other hand, to cope with tensions within the occupation. In our case, gossiping allowed designers to express their discontent without harming the collective image they conveyed to their audiences. An example from the field is when the business designers agreed to share their workspace with clients, the craft designers did not openly express their disagreement when clients were present. Instead, in private conversations - during coffee breaks or lunches- the designers made jokes and sarcastic comments. More- over, through ‘being one of them’ doing ethnography allows researchers to capture not only the overt behaviors, but also the more covert behaviors that are fundamental to shaping occupations.
Further, if Weber (1949 in Watson 2010: 213) was right to say that “when people engage in action they are more or less unconscious of its subjective meaning”, it is the task of the ethnographer who studies ‘lived experiences’ to capture practitioners’ implicit behaviors. In our case, the ethnographic approach, for example, allowed us to identify the importance of interactions with ‘time’ in defining the occupation. For example, while the craft designers preferred to spend their work hours on developing a board game called Pensiopoly for user research, the business designers reckoned this was not efficient and might cost too much time. Recently, a group of researchers highlighted the utility of studying ‘time’ and temporal structures to better understand work and organizing (Ancona et al. 2001; Orlikowski & Yates 2002; Berends & Antonacopoulou 2014; Ravasi & Stig- liani 2018). For example, in their study Orlikowski & Yates (2002) showed how one community of researchers organized its meetings around previ- ously scheduled meetings of another community of researchers, to allow for members of both communities to meet face to face and enhance oppor- tunities for collaborations. Another example is the work of Boland and colleagues (2008) who mention in their work how architect Frank Gehry carefully selects when he involves clients in design projects, as this allows him to maintain a sense of control over the design process. These studies demonstrate that interactions with time can help actors to better collabora- tions between occupations and highlight authority over task domains. Yet, so far, we know little about the role of time in shaping occupations. In our study, we contributed to this by showing that inside occupations, people can different approaches to managing time and this can result in intra-oc- cupational struggles. In particular, we saw that the business designers and craft designers rallied over the timing of client involvement. Also, we saw that designers played with the duration of tasks – such as spending a lot of time on making the board game Pensiopoly- in order to orient the behav-