Page 230 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

218 Design Meets Business
party, carried the risk of jeopardizing my relationship with the other party and compromise the ‘rapport’ I build up with my informants. I experienced such challenge in particular during a moment in my field research when I interviewed one of the clients. The opportunity arose quite unexpectedly: during lunch break the client approached me and said he finally found time to conduct an interview with me. Excited by this opportunity offered, I decided to ‘go for it’. Yet, what I did not know at the time is that there were tensions between the clients and the designers at that time. Because I left the field for some weeks, I was unaware about several conflicts that arose between the two parties. When I finished my interview with the client, the project lead of the design team expressed her concerns. She had the feeling I was talking behind the back of the designers, and worried to further exacerbate tensions among themselves and the clients. What this experience taught me was that doing fieldwork is a political process. One cannot avoid to become part of the power play in the field, but it is impor- tant to be aware and adapt the data collection accordingly.
So, this slightly confessional tale suggests that doing ethnography has much in common with learning a craft or “the efforts oriented at reaching a high level of proficiency in one’s craft” (Baer & Shaw 2017: 1213). It is an explorative and challenging journey. Just like any other exercise in craftsmanship, in order to find your way into doing ethnography, you need to give it time. Not only does doing ethnography itself take time, it also takes time and experience to learn the craft of doing ethnography and add your personal twist to it. There is no ‘ethnography-for-dummies’ for beginning ethnographers that dictates ‘the’ way of doing ethnography (even though this might be not a bad idea). In a way, an ethnographer is an eternal student in a community of ethnographers that all go out there. One can never stop learning but only become better in reaching the ideal of ‘a master ethnographer’.
When doing ethnography demands learning a craft, what does this mean for the way in which we learn and teach our students how to do ethno- graphy in universities? Commonly, students learn how to do ethnography in academic textbooks, university lectures and by reading ethnographic works. Over the years scholars have developed innovative methods and techniques to illuminate how one can practice ethnography, such as doing “multi- site” ethnography (Marcus 1998), relational ethnography (Desmond 2014), network ethnography (Howard 2002), confessional ethnography (Schultze 2000), critical ethnography (van Maanen 2006), visual ethnography (Pink 2007), video ethnography (Smetz, Burke & Jarzabkowski 2014) and increa- singly popular in the last years, virtual ethnography. While these approa- ches can help to design an ethnographic research, most attention so far is