Page 206 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

194 Design Meets Business
work. This, in turn, can trigger various negative emotions such as unease and frustration. Finally, also Chapter 4 suggests that emotions are involved in the work of creatives. More explicitly, the creatives at Waag Society are involved in managing the emotions while facilitating liminality. Being upset or frustrated, can slow down creative processes and hence such nega- tive emotions need to be downplayed by the creatives.
Further, the lens of craftsmanship, shifts attention to the role of emotions in the work of creatives, something that is key but we still know little about. A reason for the neglect of the role of emotions in the work of creatives, might be that for a long period, organizational scholars asso- ciated the study of emotions with the domain of psychology. So far, there has been limited attention for emotions in organizational settings (e.g. Hareli & Rafaeli 2008; van Kleef 2009, 2014; Friedland 2017; Elsbach & Bechky 2018). An exception is the work of Elsbach and Bechky (2018) who study how expressing emotions in the workplace shapes the image and perception of employees in the work place. They argue that crying about stress in a public place is condemned by peers, while being sad about family circumstances is seen as acceptable behavior. This dissertation builds on such research in arguing that it is important to warrant attention to expressions of emotions in the workplace to better understand the work of creatives.
Besides shifting attention to emotions, the lens of craftsmanship also helps to emphasize the importance of material practices in the work of creatives. In particular, it can highlight how creatives are intertwined with material practices at work. Such perspective is anchored in the thought that rather than separating artifacts, tools and technologies from practi- tioners, practitioners draw on materials to interactively constitute their work (Streeck, Goodwin & LeBaron 2011). In a sense, material practices have become part of practitioners’ bodies and enacted out of habit, without awareness. It has become a way of ‘knowing in practice’ (Orlikowski 2002), part of their ‘habitus’ and standing in the world (Bourdieu 1977).
Such view on material practices, moves beyond the instrumental and teleological views on artifacts (Ingold 2013; Comi & Whyte 2018). So far, most studies have adopted an instrumental view on artifacts, “conceiving of visual artefacts as instruments in the hands of practitioners” (Comi & Whyte 2018: 1059). For example, pictures, maps, data packs, spreadsheets and graphs and other tools are used to make strategies (e.g. Jarzabkowski, Spee, & Smets 2013; Paroutis, Franco, & Papadopoulos 2015). Or, as I showed in Chapter 2, it is demonstrated that designers make ‘customer journeys’ to help companies think from a user perspective. Other scholars leaned more towards a teleological perspective on artifacts, portraying tools as static