Page 25 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 13
require a degree of experimentation and can perish in too close moni- toring (Harrison & Rouse 2014). This is different to business, in which commonly “economic production relies on certainty, or at least efforts to reduce unpredictability and ‘manage risk’” (Townley et al. 2009: 941). This is only one of the many examples that highlight the differences between the worlds of creatives and business.
Yet, at the same time, each assumed dualism between the creative and business world is problematic. Instead of being each other’s opposites, they are two parts of the same coin. In his famous work, Caves (2000) build a convincing argument in which he proposes that creatives need to operate like business, and vice versa, business need to engage in creativity, in order to survive. For example, for creatives it is important to develop some kind of measurement system to determine the value of their work and create a sustainable business model around their activities. Vice versa, for business it is important to engage in creativity to develop innova- tions and change strategic directions. Moreover, a danger in buttressing a dichotomy between ‘the creatives’ and ‘the humdrum’ is that explanations portray creativity and business as anti-ethical (Townley et al. 2009). Taken together, even though the world of creatives and business are not entirely contrasting, there are significant tensions between the two worlds which makes it interesting to further explore how collaborations between crea- tives and business develop, and in particular affect the work and occupa- tions of creatives. In the following, I further elaborate on this and define the research focus of this dissertation.
1.3. Research Question
While the value of collaborations between creatives and business is demonstrated, it is interesting to study what actually are the implications of such collaborations for how creatives organize action. That is what I set out to do in this dissertation research, in which I follow the pursuit of creatives who experience changes in their work and occupations as a consequence of colla- borating with business in today’s society. It is relevant to explore this pheno- menon for various reasons. To begin with, while studies on collaborations for purposes of innovation are growing (e.g. Deken et al. 2018; Berends et al. 2011), to date we still know very little about the specific emerging context of collaborations between creatives and business professionals. It is interesting to know more about this not only because it is a timely topic, but also because the approaches of creatives and business professionals are significantly diffe- rent (Townley et al. 2009; Caves 2000) and likely to yield new challenges in collaborations that cannot be fully explained by existing research.