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Towards Professionalization in an Online Community of Emerging Occupation: Discourses among UX Practitioners

Published: 07 January 2018 Publication History

Abstract

The occupational landscape of the digital economy is rapidly changing, resulting in the emergence of multidisciplinary occupations. Emerging occupations such as user experience (UX) design are in high demand, but these occupations lack clear boundaries and have yet to develop into a profession with a specified, coherent body of knowledge. While traditional occupations such as medicine and law successfully claimed their professional jurisdiction and high social power and status long before the Internet, how do these emerging occupations work towards professionalization, particularly as they are increasingly supported by and through online communities? In this paper, we investigate an online UX community to understand how UX practitioners specify their occupational knowledge and professional boundaries. Using this case as an example and provocation, we discuss how online communities support the emergence of new occupations and may play an indispensable role in modern day patterns of professionalization.

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    cover image ACM Conferences
    GROUP '18: Proceedings of the 2018 ACM International Conference on Supporting Group Work
    January 2018
    422 pages
    ISBN:9781450355629
    DOI:10.1145/3148330
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Published: 07 January 2018

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    Author Tags

    1. community of practice
    2. discourse analysis
    3. online communities
    4. professionalization
    5. user experience design
    6. ux

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    • (2023)Being Creative Within (or Outside) the Box: Bridging Occupational Identity GapsManagement Communication Quarterly10.1177/0893318923116738538:1(86-116)Online publication date: 25-Mar-2023
    • (2023)CoArgue : Fostering Lurkers’ Contribution to Collective Arguments in Community-based QA PlatformsProceedings of the 2023 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems10.1145/3544548.3580932(1-17)Online publication date: 19-Apr-2023
    • (2023)Supporting Active Learning in STEM Higher Education Through the User-Centred Design Sprint2023 IEEE Frontiers in Education Conference (FIE)10.1109/FIE58773.2023.10342978(1-10)Online publication date: 18-Oct-2023
    • (2022)Positive developments but challenges still aheadJournal of Usability Studies10.5555/3532713.353271615:4(210-246)Online publication date: 18-Apr-2022
    • (2022)A pesquisa acadêmica sobre o UX Designer: uma revisão sistemática de literatura[re]Design10.35818/redesign.v1i1.11361:1(147-159)Online publication date: 31-Dec-2022
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