Page 43 - Design meets Business:An Ethnographic Study of the Changing Work and Occupations of Creatives

1. Introduction 31
phenomena can be captured ‘in situ’, as they unfold in practice. This can help the researcher to reveal empirical details about the dynamic nature of people’s actions. This is especially helpful when studying new and quickly changing phenomena, the emergence of occupations like Service Design. Studying emergent occupations is difficult, as they do not have identifiable institu- tional frameworks yet and occupational members are often dispersed across geographical locations and are sometimes not even aware of their position in a growing occupation (Nelsen & Barley 1997; Fayard et al. 2017).
The field research for this dissertation research was longitudinal in character, spanning about three years. My field research took place in two different organizations. The majority of this dissertation data is collected at Fjord (Chapter 2 & 3), and my first study took place at Waag (Chapter 4). Key sources of data collection in all of my studies were observations, inter- views and documents. The details of my data collection are summarized below and further described (for example in tables) in the empirical chap- ters in this book. Hence, there may be some overlap between the summaries and the empirical chapters.
1.7.1. Doing ethnography at Fjord
The majority of the data for this dissertation has been collected at Fjord, where I did an ethnography for about 17 months. An ethnography is a form of qualitative field research which “usually involves the researcher participating, overtly or covertly, in people’s daily lives for an extended period of time, watching what happens, listening to what is said and/or asking questions through informal and formal interviews, collecting docu- ments and artefacts - in fact, gathering whatever data are available to throw light on the issues that are the emerging focus of inquiry” (Hammersley & Atkinson 2007: 3). As my research is exploratory and inductive in its nature, an ethnography is a suitable approach (van Maanen 2000[1988]).
Doing ethnography has its roots in Anthropology, pioneered by Mali- nowski (1922) who left to the Trobriand Islands to study the local exchange system. He argued that to understand the nature of a social phenomenon, researchers need to live the lives of those under study. Today, we know this process of immersion also as ‘participant observation’. Doing ethnography by means of participant observation “is an active enterprise” (Emerson et al. 1995: 15). It demands not only longitudinal immersion in daily lives of others, and distancing from one’s own life, but also the fieldworkers needs to be constantly aware about what is happening in the field, making deci- sions about what to observe (and what not), asking clarifying questions and capturing insights (Emerson et al. 1995).