Book (Full version)
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Architectural firms can be regarded as creative professional service firms. As such, architects need to navigate creative, professional and commercial goals, while simultaneously attempting to fulfil client, user and societal needs. This complex process is becoming increasingly difficult, as the historically established role of architects has become more blurred, contested and heterogeneous. While attempting to reclaim their role or to take on new roles in collaborations with other actors,...
Book Chapters
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Driven by their desire to contribute to the quality of the built environment and wider society, architectural firms collaborate with other actors in heterogeneous interorganizational projects to provide products and services that solve complex spatial challenges. Due to ongoing developments in society and the construction industry, the professional roles that firms perform within these projects have become increasingly diverse, blurred and contested (Ahuja et al., 2017). While the role of...
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Professional roles within inter-organizational projects have become increasingly diverse and contested, yet little is known about how the members of a profession react to the threats of marginalization these collaborative settings entail. Focusing on the architectural profession, in which historically established role boundaries have become particularly blurred, we analyse how professionals address the concept of these boundaries in order to negotiate their roles in inter-organizational...
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Architectural firms often have difficulty generating profit from their services as they pursue not only commercial but also professional goals. These goals frequently conflict and have to be balanced during the process of value creation and value capture. So far, literature has focused on the interaction between the perceived use value for the customer and the fee that is paid to the firm. To better understand how professional service firms realize their organizational targets,...
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Project-based firms have to capture value from the projects in which they engage. This can be a challenging process, as firms need to reconcile project goals and organizational goals while attempting to avoid value slippage. Drawing on case-based interviews with architects and clients, this research reveals how architectural firms used the strategies of postponing financial revenues in a project, compensating for loss of financial revenues across projects and rejecting a project to capture...
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Creative professional service firms experience difficulties in establishing healthy and sustainable business models, as they must reconcile the often competing value systems upon which the models are based. They continuously negotiate between professional values and beliefs and the firm’s commercial goals, resulting in struggles between identity and strategy. Adopting a work lens, this study investigates the reciprocal tensions between identity and strategy in 17 business model design...
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This chapter presents the design-oriented part of my research, introducing a toolkit that can be used for the capture of value in projects. Although the toolkit was specifically designed for architectural firms involved in construction projects, it can also be used by other organizations and in other project contexts.
The chapter is organized into four main sections. It begins by briefly setting out the relevance of the toolkit, with insights from the literature and the previous...
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This research aimed to investigate how architectural firms capture value in the projects in which they are involved, and how architectural firms might be supported in developing strategies for value capture. Section 7.1 provides a summary of the key findings of the research, first with respect to the understanding of architectural firms’ project-based value capture developed in the dissertation (§ 7.1.1) and second in relation to the toolkit for facilitating the development of...
