Page 152 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

140 Design Meets Business
the study of Barley and Nelsen (1997), they showed that over time one subcommunity - paid EMTs- better succeeded in convincing others of the legitimacy their work, that the other subcommunity - volun- teer EMTs. Such developments, of course all are related to the internal dynamics within the occupation and how these develop over time. In our case, we wonder: do the business designers or the crafts designers ‘win’ the battle? Or do they both compromise and develop a new occupational mandate altogether? Or does a new group of members arrive that alters the foundations - on which the occupational mandate is developing- again? One can imagine that occupational members might break away, mobilize their own community or even start a new occupation. Building on the work of Nelsen and Barley (1997), we urge researchers to start from the idea that occupations are inherently unstable and look at how stability is periodically achieved. Further, as Bechky (2011) mentions in her recent study, we believe that it is beneficial for researchers to adopt a ‘comparative approach’ to better understand occupational emergence. Besides comparing two empirical settings as she recommends, we reckon that in the future researchers might also compare the construction of an occupational mandate at various moments of occupational emergence. In particular, it would be interesting to see whether settlements of intra-oc- cupational struggles alter over time, and what this means in terms of the construction of the occupational mandate.
Further, our focus within the occupation helped to create a better understanding of the struggles informing the construction of an occupa- tional mandate. At the same time, this intra-occupational focus can be considered a boundary condition as contextual developments are out of the scope of this paper. For example, the occupational literature showed that the development of new technologies (Barley 1986; Nelsen & Irwin 2014), organizational (Bechky 2006b) and institutional pressures (Halpern 1992) might also influence the daily activities of occupational emergence (Abbott 1988). In the particular setting of this paper, we can envision that the acquisition of the design consultancy Fjord by the management consultancy Accenture did impact the ways in which internally heteroge- neity was perceived and enacted. In particular, as our findings suggest, the longer serving designers at Fjord feared to become like “normal consult- ants” - often referring to the Accenture consultants. This is visible in the comments they made like “we need to watch out not to be eaten by the beast [referring to Accenture]”. Hence, one can imagine that the longer serving designers at Fjord sensed the arrival of newcomers with a back- ground in business threatening, or at least disturbing. Moreover, one can imagine that the designers responded more intensely to the newcomers’