How to claim what is mine?

Abstract

In response to changing demands and competition, professionals engage in boundary work to negotiate their roles in relation to other actors. While most research on boundary work of professionals has investigated the socio-political dimension of the profession as a whole, we take a relational perspective to analyse how roles are being negotiated on a day to day basis in inter-organisational projects. We focus on architecture as an established profession, which has long been embedded in role structures of the building industry but since the financial crisis experienced an erosion of their share of the declining volume of work. We identified three different strategies with which architects attempt to reclaim their role: 1) profession-oriented reinstating of their role, 2) project-oriented flexible adjusting of the role to serve the client, and 3) firm-oriented entrepreneurial attempts to claim a new role. For each strategy we discuss the relational implications in the interaction to other actors in the field.