Page 40 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

28 Design Meets Business
1982; 1987). In particular, it is suggested that ceremony masters can help to manage feelings of heightened ambiguity and guard the fine line between confusion and creativity. Hence, in Chapter 4 of this dissertation I ask: How do creative workers as ceremony masters facilitate liminality?
In order to answer this question, I conducted a qualitative case study of the social innovation hub Waag Society (hereafter: Waag) in the Netherlands. Creative workers at Waag can be seen as ceremony masters as in innovation projects, they help their clients to move away from exis- ting realities and envision new ones. Typical questions with which clients approach Waag include “what does it mean to have a digital identity in today’s world?” or “how can we improve the customer experience of museum visitors through digital technologies?”. In order to better understand how creative workers at Waag act as ceremony masters and facilitate limina- lity, in Chapter 4 I explore typical examples of Waag’s work. In particular I offer a processual analysis of a project that reveals how Waag’s creative workers facilitated liminality in various phases. I distinguish two practices in which they engage: ‘activating’ and ‘morphing’. This study contributes to organizational studies on liminality by arguing that ceremony masters can facilitate liminality by adopting a liminal position themselves.
In conclusion, each chapter of this dissertation research targets a diffe- rent domain of practices of creatives, namely ‘interactions with artifacts’, ‘interactions within occupations’ and ‘interactions with clients’. Together, the three empirical chapters of this dissertation research, help to develop a better understanding of the changing work and occupations of creatives as they collaborate with business. For an overview of the three practice domains discussed in the chapters, see Table 1.1.
1.7. Doing Qualitative Field Research
A research methodology that is well in line with the practice lens adopted in this dissertation is ‘qualitative field research’. Qualitative field research broadly refers to the timely study of (groups of) people as they go about in their daily practice (Emerson et al. 1995; Bryman (2016 [1995])). Qualitative field research follows an inductive approach. The inductive approach builds on the premise that social reality is interpreted and cons- tructed in people’s actions, and helps to build a grounded understanding of complex phenomena as they naturally occur (Eisenhardt 1989; Locke 2000; Strauss & Corbin 1990). Therefore, the inductive approach is well suited to study new phenomena with little theorization such as the focus of this dissertation, how creatives in today’s society organize their work and occupations.