Page 27 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 15
vities of creatives, but also participated in them (Malinowski 1984 [1922]; Hammersley & Atkinson 2007). While this dissertation develops insights about the changing work and occupation of creatives as a broader category of workers, most of the studies are done in the context of the emerging occupation Service Design.
In what follows in this introductory chapter (Chapter 1), I will first motivate why this dissertation research in particular focuses on collabo- rations between design and business. In particular, I will provide a small history of Service Design, a creative occupation that only emerged since the 1990s and since then gained significant attention by business. Then, I will explain how the three following chapters (Chapter 2, 3 & 4) of this disser- tation research are empirically and theoretically related. In particular, I will provide more information about ‘the practice approach’ adopted in this study and identify the three separate practice domains around which the studies of this dissertation research are developed. Then, I will discuss the research methods and methodology of this dissertation research. I will conclude with my dissertation outline, in which I give an overview of all the chapters included in this study.
1.4. The Lure of Design in Business
Especially in the last five years, the popularity of design in business has been flourishing. “There’s a shift underway in large organizations, one that puts design much closer to the center of the enterprise”, reads the first line of a 2015 edition of the Harvard Business Review (Kolko 2015) that is largely dedicated to the rise of design in business. Since 2010s, various media outlets emphasize the rising popularity of design. In one of McKinsey’s reports (Agrawal, Dziersk, Sabburai & West 2017), it is stated that there is a wides- pread belief that “infusing your organization with a design-driven culture that puts the customer first may provide not only real, measurable results but also a distinct competitive advantage”. Similarly, in a report of Accen- ture (Neuberger-Fernandez & Barton 2017), design is described as “the skill of the future”. Further, the topics ‘design’, ‘design thinking’ and ‘design process’ have received significant attention in various popular management books (like the work of Brown 2009; Kelley 2005; Verganti 2009).
Attention for design also picked up in the scholarly domain of business and management studies. Researchers have explored the inclusion of design in business (e.g. Elsbach & Stigliani 2018) and demonstrated that design can make firms more profitable (Gemser & Leenders 2011), positively influence stock market prices (Hertenstein, Platt & Veryzer 2005), and help firms buil- ding innovation capabilities (Filippetti 2011; Calabretta & Kleinsmann 2017).