Page 24 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

12 Design Meets Business
normally do not dare to ask; being skeptical and offering an ‘upside down view’ and producing laughter (Ybema et al. 2009). Similar to jesters, crea- tives might take such an insider/outsider role. They might help their clients to become aware and break away from existing realities, while orienting them to alternative futures through making things, play and doing acti- vities different from normal work tasks (Obstfeld 2012). In doing so, crea- tives must get to know the intimate realities of their clients and at the same pursuing critique on these realities. In my fieldwork, one of my informants, explained this as follows:
“If you think of the role of designers, inventors, artists, and other creatives along the history, they have always been invited to an atmosphere in which they are not supposed to be. An atmosphere [in which people] are so ex- hausted of themselves that they need someone to cheer them up, provoke them, make them feel something else apart from boredom and routine. (...) We are the ‘Prozac’ of companies, we are here to wake them up”.
As this fragment suggests, creatives can help organizations to create an atmosphere of positivity and possibility. The interviewee here compares creatives with the ‘Prozac’ of companies, and thereby emphasizes the temporary function of creatives: they can allow for a periodic release of stress or a breeze of fresh air. They can defog the mirror for organizational members, enabling them to look at themselves with fresh perspectives. Moreover, as ‘organizational jesters’ (Ybema et al. 2009) or ‘professional strangers’ (Agar 1990), creatives can function as an organization’s alter ego: they can help them to identify the constraints of their own organization and envision innovation possibilities. They can help organizations move out of the box, or better “on the edge of the box” (Moeran 2013: 3-4). In Chapter 4 of this dissertation, I extend this thought of creatives as jesters, and explore how creatives as ‘ceremony masters’ facilitate liminality for their business clients.
While collaborations between creatives and business professionals appear promising, there are also tensions that might complicate these collaborations. It is no surprise that there are significant differences between the world of creatives and business. Scholars have argued that creatives and business have different identities (Elsbach 2003; 2004), logics (Eikhof & Haunschild 2007), output (Townley et al. 2009), approaches to decision making (Calabretta, Gemser & Wijnberg 2017), and values (Fayard et al. 2017). For example, for creatives it is normal not to know what comes out of their work and, as such, their work processes are riddled with ‘inherent unknowability’ (Caves 2000). As a consequence, creative efforts