Professional identity and anxiety in architect-client interactions

Abstract

Large-scale construction projects increasingly have powerful and knowledgeable clients as project owners with whom professionals, such as architects, must interact. In such contexts, clients may have a significant impact on the constitution of a coherent and stable professional identity. Based on qualitative interviews with 50 architects across four large multidisciplinary professional service firms (PSFs) located in Sydney, Australia, supplemented by ethnographic observations, this article explores how architects constitute their identity in interactions with clients. The findings led us to conceptualize professional-client interactions in terms of two overarching discursive strategies deployed by architects in attempts to manage clients that are powerful and knowledgeable: best for client and best for project. We illustrate the anxieties that architects experience and suggest that attempts to secure professional identity may result in (re)producing an enduring sense of anxiety with unintended consequences for project outcomes and organizational performance.

Performance-based identity in a BIM environment: an architect's perceptions and experiences

“…However, we posit architects to expand their self-concept that transcends their organisational membership to remain motivated and relevant at work. Our proposition is based on the empirical evidence denoting junior architects having experienced emotional anxiety following their lack of involvement in creative and design-related works in prestigious multidisciplinary architecture firms (Ahuja et al. , 2020).…”

“…Yet, much of the identity-related research from architects' perspective centres on their dynamic coping mechanism in retaining their identity based on one's ideal professional prototype and organisational membership (Ahuja et al. , 2017, 2020; Ahuja et al. , 2019; Bos-de Vos et al.…”

“…The design expertise, the creativity and the aesthetics originality that are inherently anchored to the architectural community of practices has been destabilised due to engagement with a powerful, knowledgeable, and tech-savvy clients in a BIM environment (Abdirad and Dossick, 2019; Ahuja et al. , 2020).…”

“…Performance manifestation here is to be subjectively interpreted and appraised by individuals instead of their employing organisation or external evaluator (as in a conventional approach to job performance). Yet, much of the identity-related research from architects' perspective centres on their dynamic coping mechanism in retaining their identity based on one's ideal professional prototype and organisational membership (Ahuja et al, 2017(Ahuja et al, , 2020Ahuja et al, 2019;Bos-de Vos et al, 2019), as opposed to how well they have performed in the various types of performances in a BIM environment. The latter is more critical as a client would consider an architect's performance, behaviour, and personality as key attributes when engaging in architectural services (Frimpong and Dansoh, 2016;Berita Arkitek, 2021).…”

“…The design expertise, the creativity and the aesthetics originality that are inherently anchored to the architectural community of practices has been destabilised due to engagement with a powerful, knowledgeable, and tech-savvy clients in a BIM environment (Abdirad and Dossick, 2019;Ahuja et al, 2020). The architects in such a case would only probably facilitate the design development process and endorse the clients' design-ideas following the early engagement of design co-leaders' as early as at the design stage.…”