Page 151 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

3. (Re)Negotiating Service Design 139
iors of other members and steer the occupation into a certain direction. So, our study adds to organizational studies by showing the importance of studying time interactions in occupations.
Besides studying time, our study also demonstrates that doing ethnog- raphy can help to identify interactions with space. It is not a new thought that studying space is useful to understand occupations. In her study of a manufacturing firm, Bechky (2003a) for example shows that collabora- tion between different occupational groups, including assemblers, engi- neers, is facilitated by entering in each other’s work environment - hence collapsing occupational boundaries. In the same study, she showed that erecting boundaries in workspaces, such as refusing the physical involve- ment of other occupational groups can complicate collaborations. Another example is the study of Kellogg, Orlikowski and Yates (2006), who show how practitioners with an interactive marketing firm encourage collabo- rative efforts between different occupational members through making their work visible and legible to each other in a digital environment, what she calls the ‘trading zone’. While ‘the trading zone’ is oriented at the collective, it can also trigger jurisdictional disputes within the occupa- tion by for example fighting over the importance of ‘speed’ over ‘quality’ in work. While these studies show that studying the spatiality of inter- action can reveal a lot about how common ground is built between and within occupations, our study adds to this by showing that space can also intensify heterogeneity and contestations in occupations. Taken together, recognizing the importance of studying backstage behaviors and implicit behaviors (such as interactions with time and space), we believe that doing ethnography can provide the sort of sensitivity for the local context which makes it possible to identify the complex nuances of social life that often are difficult to identify by practitioners themselves (Bechky 2006b; Clif- ford & Marcus 1986; Orr 1996).
3.6. Limitations and Future Research
This study has limitations. The ethnographic approach adopted in this study gave us the unique opportunity to join the designers at Fjord in their daily routines for over a period of 17 months. Precisely because of this immersive character of this approach, the study was limited in time. Hence, questions with regard to what happens over time with respect to the occupational mandate are left unanswered. It would be interesting to follow the subcommunities and explore which subcommunity becomes externally recognized as more ‘legitimate’ practitioners, especially with respect to the changing market in which they operate. For example, in