Page 39 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 27
To answer this question, I studied the occupation Service Design at the design firm Fjord. Service Design is an emerging occupation that only exists as a paid form of work since the early 1990s (Fayard et al. 2017). In recent years, and especially since business interest in Service Design increased, the occupation has rapidly grown (Elsbach & Stigliani 2018). As a consequence, the occupation does not only include more members, but also more diverse members. Especially, the occupation is attracting profes- sionals with MBA degrees and former experience in the corporate sector. The work approaches of these business professionals differ from existing members in the occupation Service Design, people who have been trained in traditional design disciplines such as product design or interface design. Moreover, my ethnographic study of Service Design offers interesting opportunities for further exploring how an occupational mandate is deve- loped while heterogeneity inside the occupation is increasing.
1.6.3. Interactions with clients
Finally, in Chapter 4 of this dissertation research, I explore how ‘inte- ractions with clients’ change as creatives collaborate with business. Earlier in this introductory chapter, I mentioned that increasingly business professionals have approached creatives for purposes of innovation. In a way, then, creatives have been asked to act as the ‘catalysts’ (Sgourev 2015) and help organizational members to change their mindsets and trigger creativity. In this dissertation, I argue that creatives help business clients to ‘become creative’ in temporary projects. To achieve this, creatives faci- litate liminality for their business clients. Organizational scholars used the term ‘liminality’ to capture temporary and transformative experiences in organizational settings (Garsten 1999; Czarniawska & Mazza 2003; Sturdy et al. 2006; Howard-Grenville et al. 2013), such as innovation trajectories (Henfridsson & Yoo 2013). Liminality is a concept that originates from anthropology and refers to a transformation in which people move from one state of being to another state (van Gennep 1960; Turner 1982; 1987). So far, the organizational literature on liminality has explored how people undergo liminality, such as management consultants (Czarniawska and Mazza 2003; Sturdy et al. 2006), MBA students (Simpson, Sturges and Weight 2010), temporary workers (Garsten 1999; Borg and Söderlund 2014), managers (Swan et al. 2016), or other organizational employees (Howard-Grenville et al. 2011; Shortt 2015). While we begin to understand how people undergo liminality, we now very little about how liminality is created. Traditional literature on liminality pointed at the role of ‘cere- mony masters’ leading others through a process of transformation (Turner