Page 212 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

200 Design Meets Business
As most of existing occupational research focuses on the later stage of establishing jurisdictions (e.g. Bechky 2003a), the initiation and first stages of occupational emergence still provide plenty of room for research. There are some studies on the beginning phases of occupational emergence. These studies mostly look at the ‘entry’ problem, namely how new hires learn the moral, social and work codes within an emerging occupation (van Maanen 1973; Ibarra 1999; Anteby et al. 2016). As a consequence, there is still little research on the very first stages in in which members recognize each other as in-group and take the first steps to organize collective action. A reason of this lack of research might be that it is very complex to identify when occupations emerge, let alone defining who belongs to the in-group and what are core tasks.
Yet, at the same time, recent research showed that digital technologies offer interesting opportunities for research on the very first stages of occu- pational emergence (Vaast & Safadi 2016). For example, in their study Vaast and Safadi (2016) explore how the occupation of data scientists emerged through studying micro-blogging on Twitter. This study shows that it is now possible to better track, trace and explore the emergence of new occu- pations. This offers promising venues for future research on the emergence of new occupations like data scientists, influencers, data analysts, interface or visual designers. For example, future research could explore the emer- ging occupation of ‘influencers’ - people who encourage their ‘followers’ on social media platforms to buy and promote certain products or services - through studying their ‘posts’ on the digital platform Instagram. Taken together, as the birth of new occupations largely takes place in a digitally enabled context, there is more knowledge to win about how occupations are born by for example combining quantitative digitally mediated data (such as collecting tweets or #hashtags) with more situated qualitative data (such as retrospective interviews and observations).
There are also research opportunities with respect to the development the occupational mandate. So far there are only a handful of scholars that explored how occupational mandates are formed (e.g. Fayard et al. 2017; Nelsen & Barley 1997; Vaast & Safadi 2016). The existing studies either have explored how occupational mandates are developed within occupa- tions through everyday action (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Chapter 2 & 3 of this dissertation research), or how occupational mandates are shaped vis a vis other occupations (Fayard et al. 2017). Whether adopting a more ‘internal’ or a more ‘external’ perspective, this provides opportunity for researchers that want combine both approaches. In other words, there is room for research on how interactions within the occupation shape external rela- tions with occupations, and vice versa how relations among occupations shape behavior inside occupations.