Page 200 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

188 Design Meets Business
creative industry, moving into the domain of business can enhance hetero- geneity inside occupations. The arrival of new members, consequently, can challenge former ideas about what are core practices inside the occupation and make it more difficult for emergent occupations to develop an occu- pational mandate, a common understanding of core culture, practices and values, and grow and survive as an occupation.
Changing interactions with clients. Chapter 4 sheds light on inte- ractions between creatives and clients. It is suggested that creatives are increasingly asked by clients to help them transform, change their mind- sets and induce creative behavior. In order to achieve this, the creatives do not develop concrete or finished solutions for business, but help business professionals themselves to become creative through facilitating limina- lity. In doing so, they are not at the center of creative processes themselves but act as ‘ceremony masters’ who help others to become creative. Facilita- ting liminality as ceremony masters can be achieved by ‘activating’ clients and ‘morphing’ between different roles. Moreover, this study suggests that interactions between creatives and clients are changing. Instead of making clients dependent on the creativity of creatives themselves, creatives increasingly help their clients to become independent and engage in crea- tive processes themselves. In other words, the roles and skills of creatives are changing, embracing behaviors they previously did not associate with their own work or craft.
Taken together, in this dissertation it is suggested that as the work of creatives becomes more abstract, this did not only change the actual tasks of creatives but also their occupations. To cope with this, creatives perform various practices. On the one hand, creatives hold onto previous practices (Chapter 2), even when these trigger heated debates within the occupation (Chapter 3). On the other hand, creatives change their prac- tices by not positioning themselves at the center of creative processes but their clients, demanding them to take upon tasks that move beyond what is traditionally associated with creative activity. This dissertation research has theoretical implications, upon which I elaborate next.
5.2. Implications for Theory
5.2.1. Emphasizing the mundane activities of creatives
This dissertation propels a more democratic notion of creativity by suggesting that creativity is not the domain of creatives alone. So far, most of the organization studies on creativity have suggested that creati- vity primarily belongs to an exclusive group of people: ‘the creatives’. It is