Page 211 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

5. Discussion 199
diverse and even competing parties are collaborating in design projects. For example, my data collection suggests that designers use their rela- tionship with the Accenture consultant to ‘defend’ their own behavior vis a vis clients, and vice versa clients also use their relationship with the Accen- ture consultant to ‘put pressure’ on the designers. Further in Chapter 3 it is demonstrated that even in the in-group there can be multiple parties. In the case of the designers at Fjord, craft designers and business desig- ners had different perspectives and approaches to design. Sometimes, the business designers agreed more with clients than with their peers in the design project. Taken together, sometimes brokers need to bring parties together, whereas in other situations brokers might put more efforts in keeping people apart. These observations highlight the opportunities for exploring the brokerage work in creatives, especially their efforts oriented at connecting diverse actors in open-ended contexts in which access, refe- rrals, information and technologies that determine the success of creative work continuously change (Townley et al. 2009).
5.3.2. Connecting intra-occupational struggles to inter- occupational struggles
This dissertation research could be extended in various directions in the field of occupations and professions (Abbott 1988; Bechky 2003a; 2003b; Nelsen & Irwin 2014; Howard-Grenville et al. 2017; Huising 2015) and in particular extend the little research on the emergence of new occu- pations (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017).
Despite the rapid pace in which the nature of work is changing and occu- pations are born in today’s society (Barley & Bechky 2017), there is a lack of research on the formation of new occupations (exceptions include Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017; Vaast & Safadi forthcoming). The existing lite- rature suggested that for occupations to emerge, they need to pass through several ‘stages’ (Abbott 1988). First, there has to be a group of people that works on similar tasks and recognizes each other as in-group. Then, these people together need to develop common ground, a consensus with respect to how work ‘ought to be done’, also referred to as the occupational mandate. Finally, for occupations to fully establish and become recognized by others as legiti- mate, occupations need to develop jurisdiction. This can be done, for example, through claiming authority over artifacts in the workplace (Bechky 2003a) or through leveraging political associations (Halpern 1992). This disserta- tion mainly focuses on the development of an occupational mandate, joining the little but active group of scholars that explores this topic (Fayard et al. 2017; van Maanen & Barley, 1984; Nelsen & Barley, 1997).