By Authors: Lakshmi Ramarajan (Harvard Business School); Julie Yen (Boston University)
Interviewers: Xian Zhu (McGill Desautels Faculty of Management); Lorenzo Maulini (Oxford Saïd Business School)
Article link: https://doi.org/10.1177/00018392241238407
Your recent paper uses the setting of architecture to explore how professionals navigate the tension between their professional and prosocial identities and the consequences this has for their work with clients. We’d love to begin with the story behind the project. Did it emerge primarily from a theoretical interest in multiple identities in professions, or was the architecture context itself the initial spark?
Lakshmi Ramarajan: For me, the project started when I was a postdoc at HBS; it was my first job after finishing my dissertation. I was very interested in multiple identities, and also in a theme that Julie and I both care about: what it means for individuals and organizations to incorporate social good into their work. At the time, I had a very close friend who was an architect. She was telling me about a broader transformation in the architecture profession: this movement around bringing more social responsibility and social good into the field. I was fascinated by it. It had all these interesting features: the profession itself, her world, and this effort to create broader societal change. So I started by talking to her, and then to three or four people she was working with. I realized, “Oh, this is a whole emergent field…people trying to figure out who they are and what they want to do.” That was my initial point of access. We wrote a case on their organization, and then started working more closely with them to develop the research.
At that point, I was a very early-stage academic, so I was discovering and inventing things a bit on the fly, figuring out what it meant to do a large, multi-year research project. Was it quantitative? Qualitative? Should I do interviews or surveys? I ended up doing a bit of everything, and that was the first wave of the project. Then it went dormant for a while, until I had the great luck of meeting Julie. Do you want to take it from there?
Julie Yen: Yes! This was a few years later, when I was in my first year of the PhD program. I was looking for opportunities to get involved in research, and through another advisor I got connected to Lakshmi. It was a really strong fit with my interests: I was broadly interested in people doing prosocial work, or trying to understand what it means to serve society through their work. Since that was already at the core of this project, it became a great match. It ended up being the main way I learned how to do hands-on research throughout my PhD, starting in my first year. I think the paper was accepted in my final year, so it really accompanied my whole doctoral journey.
“One of the big aha moments was when we decided to focus more on the client as the source of the status problem that these architects were having.”
We wonder if there was a specific aha moment in your paper development process?
Julie: We were really focused on context at first—what’s the difference between working in these traditional professional architecture firms and in these non-traditional contexts? We knew that there were pretty big differences, and we were focused on trying to analyze and understand those differences.
One of the big aha moments was when we decided to focus more on the client as the source of the status problem that these architects were having. It was in the first version of the paper, but it became a lot more salient as we went through the review process, and we were being encouraged by the review team to focus more on power and status and how those things were intertwined with who these clients are, who these architects are, and the interaction between the two. So I do think the review process played a big role in the paper development.
Lakshmi: Over the course of the paper, there were several aha moments. When I first started the paper, I was generally interested in the multiplicity of identity, and gender was a particular angle. In the initial period, even when we had the non-traditional context data, most of those initial interviewees were women. And then we added men to that before initial submission. And in doing that, we realized that one of the nuggets was the way people were talking about the difference between the profession and the social good. So our original framing was social good versus expertise at the level of the profession. By comparing the traditional private firms and non-traditional, more social sector contexts, we could see that one was really prioritizing professional expertise, while the other was putting forward the notion that the social good was central. I think this bifurcation was particularly interesting in the early stages.
Then, to Julie’s point, in the revision process we were really encouraged to go deeper. So was this just a contextual issue or was there more variability there? And so when we dug deeper into the variability, there was this point around the differences among clients that the review team raised that was very helpful.
And then there was this one moment, as we were going back through the data for the nth time, when we realized people were drawing distinctions between who they are, asking questions like, “Do I want to be a capital-A Architect?” or “Am I a real architect?” We were organizing post-its with data excerpts on the floor. It was really old school. I do think that was a moment of crystallization: Oh, the way people were describing themselves really depended on how they saw their clients.
“I do think that was a moment of crystallization: Oh, the way people were describing themselves really depended on how they saw their clients.”
Turning to methods: the project spans multiple waves and evolving data collection strategies, yet yields a remarkably balanced sample. How did you navigate that process and its challenges? Did you encounter any pushback, and are there any memorable fieldwork moments you might share?
Julie: That’s a great question. As you mentioned, the sample is quite balanced and part of the impetus for the second round of interviews, when I joined the project, was exactly that. Much of the initial data collection had focused on women in non-traditional contexts, where they are more numerically dominant. So we quite purposefully sampled men. I also remember doing a lot of snowball sampling, which was very helpful given that it’s a small field. But there was also quite a bit of what you might call “internet sleuthing”: looking at lists of people who had won awards, then tracing connections, like “this architect worked with that architect.” We also did quite a bit of cold outreach, to make sure we were reaching people across different geographies and parts of the profession. So part of it was really just being creative in how we identified participants. And to your question about pushback, we had also interviewed some people who were a bit less attached to the architecture profession. One issue that came up during the review process was whether these individuals were really all architects in the same way. So we ended up dropping some cases, because they didn’t have the level of formal architectural education and background that we felt we needed to say, with confidence, that these were fully trained, licensed architects. So that was also part of the evolution: we did collect some data that we didn’t end up using.
Lakshmi: The other thing your question brings to mind is how much we relied on publicly available data to identify participants. We were really scouring different sources. For example, Julie came across a large podcast with interviews, and we followed those leads, as well as magazines and other materials. We were trying to identify people who would be recognized in the field as doing creative work and trying to live out these principles. And I do remember that, across each wave of iteration, we kept asking how we could get to the more balanced picture you’re describing. I will also say that I really loved talking to the architects. Many have this combination of intellectual abstraction, creativity, and an ability to verbalize what they’re thinking. They bring a lot of color, imagery, and metaphors, so they were genuinely fun to interview. And the stories were often very impactful. One that comes to mind is someone who had been working for a long time in a neighborhood in Boston, trying to redevelop areas while also making sure that families could continue to stay there, thinking through what that actually means in practice. We also spoke with people working in New Orleans after Hurricane Katrina…participants sharing those kinds of experiences really stay with you.
Could you share a bit more about what you did in different rounds of review that helped refine or redirect the paper?
Lakshmi: I am so grateful for the review process. For instance, the focus on power and clients came through the review process. There was not much about power in the first submission. This is one of those examples where the review process really made our thinking and the paper better. Forrest was our editor, and he was very straightforward and encouraging. The reviewers gave us these insights and ideas related to clients, status, and power, that helped us go back to the data and think about it in a different way.
Julie: I’m also very grateful. I think the reviewers helped us realize there was more in the data and that we could be more ambitious with the paper. One of the main things I learned from Lakshmi was how to be really thorough in each round of the review process—how to take that relatively limited amount of information in the review letter and take every comment seriously. I learned how to understand where the reviewers are coming from and get in their mindset so you can understand the intent and the bigger picture that they are trying to push you towards.
Another thing is to be thorough in every response to every comment. A lot of it did not end up being in the final version of the paper, but there was a lot of additional analysis which makes the work better because you’re being so thorough for every stage of the review process. That is probably one of my main takeaways as we go from round to round. It’s about attention to detail and depth.
Lakshmi: I have to say I learned that from my advisors during my training too—putting yourself in the mindset of the reviewers and really soaking up their worldview. It’s not just about the specific comments or sentences on the page, but also about understanding the bigger picture across all the comments and the letter as a whole.
Another thing that changed during the process was the level of analysis. In the first round, it was about the tension between social good and expertise, but the way we had framed it was at the level of the profession. Julie and I had read extensively in the literature of professions, largely grounded in OB, OT, and sociology. But as we were reading across reviewers’ comments, we found that their interpretation of what the literature says is more contested than we had painted the literature; we had portrayed the literature as a fairly unified body of work. But there was a glimmer of attention to individual level professional identity and clients in our initial submission, which the reviewers picked up and encouraged us to take more seriously. In the second round we collected more data, we took what reviewers said seriously, and we bumped it down a level to the individual identity—how does this play out within a person and with the client. That is another example where reviewers helped us a ton in the process. So the difference between the first round and the second round was we were actually building on what the reviewers were offering, doing something interesting and novel with their feedback.
We’d love to close by turning to the contribution and its implications. Your study offers a compelling contribution: it shows how professionals hold multiple identities, and how their integration depends crucially on clients, who activate these identities in the first place. This raises an important implication that you briefly gesture to in the paper: professionals with marginalized social identities may disproportionately work with lower-status clients. What would it take to change this?
Julie: I think one way to think about it is to zoom back out to the level of the profession or the organization. In the paper, we identify the strategies individuals use to navigate these institutional contexts and constraints. But for the distribution of who serves which clients to change, one key factor is that work with lower-status clients would need to become more valued and rewarded by the profession. We have many examples in the data where this kind of work is not seen as prestigious, it doesn’t appear in places like Architectural Digest, it doesn’t win many awards, and it’s not considered “high design” because it’s not as expensive or flashy. So part of the issue lies in the reward structures, which would likely need to change at the level of firms, professional associations, and so on. Another piece relates to education. One of our findings is that, to work effectively with lower-status clients, professionals need a broader set of skills and forms of knowledge, which are often not taught in architecture schools. Many of the people in our sample had to acquire these skills on their own, either by pursuing additional training or by learning through practice. So equipping people with these capabilities earlier on, through formal education, could also help. Otherwise, it remains something that individuals have to figure out on their own, often drawing on their personal backgrounds or experiences.
Lakshmi: Yes, this was very much in the background of the project from the beginning. So even as we were collecting the data, part of my interest was precisely in these cross-cutting elements—gender, race, social impact and how they interacted with other aspects of the profession. I think, in some ways, the issue is about complete alignment versus integrating more cross-cutting elements. How can you create more cross-cutting elements within the profession, so that people are not implicitly sorted into categories? Right now, for instance, professionals who work with elite clients don’t really work with lower-status ones, or professionals who do high-end design work don’t often work with communities that lack access to design. The question is how to make the boundaries between types of professionals and types of clients more permeable. So, for example, could serving elite clients become a more open possibility for a broader set of professionals? And conversely, could working with lower-status clients also become something that professionals of all different backgrounds engage in? How could organizations and professions address that? Creating more movement across these categories, rather than reinforcing them, would be one way to address the issue.
Interviewer Bios:
Xian Zhu is a PhD candidate at the Desautels Faculty of Management, McGill University. His research interests center on interprofessional coordination in extreme contexts. He has conducted qualitative fieldwork in Level-1 trauma centers, emergency departments, and emergency call centers.
Lorenzo Maulini is a PhD candidate in Management at the University of Oxford. His research examines the trajectories of innovations from emergence and recognition to decline, and how actors can strategically shape these trajectories to their advantage. Much of his work examines these trajectories in creative industries, using historical-evolutionary and inductive qualitative approaches.
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