Page 42 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

30 Design Meets Business
An assumption upon which qualitative field research rests, is that one cannot know what is really going in the life worlds of research subjects, if one is not personally experiencing these life worlds. In other words, it is important to understand the experiences of research subjects in their ‘natural context’ and to collect detailed stories – whether through inter- views, observations or focus groups - that capture these experiences. Accor- dingly, the main research approach of qualitative researchers is ‘embedded research’. This idea of embedded research was already promoted in early work of the anthropologist Malinowski (1922) who made a case against ‘armchair anthropology’, meaning that instead of studying people from a distance, like the comfort of university libraries, it is important to go into the field. As a consequence, qualitative researchers do not only do ‘desktop research’, but immerse themselves in the local contexts of their research subjects for a prolonged time. In my case, this means that I was physically present and followed the daily lives of my informants for a specific time period. Just like the other employees, I entered the company with my own access badge, shared lunch with them, learned their jokes and celebrated positive feedback of clients.
Another assumption that is informing qualitative field research is that for the field researcher, it is important to understand how research subjects interpret their own actions, a practice that Geertz (1973) also referred to as verstehen. The task of a field researcher, hence, is not to uncover the truth, but to interpret the multiple and sometimes conflicting truths that others create about their lives and to craft a, insofar possible, coherent story around it. Accordingly, field research builds on a ‘social constructivist’ research paradigm (Bryman (2016 [1995]). Different than positivism, where it is believed that there is one reality that can be measured, tested and gene- ralized, in social constructivism it is believed that social reality cannot be separated from people’s interpretations and actions. Social reality, from this perspective, does not exist ‘as such’, but is constantly in the making in people’s (inter)actions and it is up to the researcher to uncover these.
The rationale for doing qualitative field research in this dissertation research can be motivated as follows. First, field research can create a more contextualized account of what happens in organizations. By taking into consideration one’s own experiences and the actions and interpretations of informants, field research allows to develop a more holistic understanding. This for example, might help to better understand the context in which the actual work of creatives changes. Another advantage of field research is the immersive and timely approach. This allows, among others, studying pheno- mena that are hard to grasp such as playing with ambiguity (Chapter 4) or the routinized interactions with materials (Chapter 2). Finally, interesting