Material Practices and Ethos: The Construction of an Occupational Mandate by Service Designers

This study investigates the activities that service designers, as members of a nascent occupation, engaged in to construct their occupational mandate. Building on the literature on occupations, the study shows what members of new occupations need to do before achieving institutional support, and, more specifically, sheds light on the practices they enact when rhetorical and political practices might not be available in this pre-institutional...