A critical analysis of occupational and organisational strategy in UK: architectural and quantity surveying practices

The research study was an analysis of occupational and organisational strategy in UK private architectural and quantity surveying practices. The premise of the study was that the analysis of strategy within a professional context warrants concurrent attention to both the occupational as well as the organisational dimensions of strategy. The occupational aspect of strategy was explored through a framework derived from the concept of professionalism. Professional power was explored with respect to dimensions associated with the knowledge base of a profession and the characteristics of consumers of professional power. The concept of occupational segments was developed to account for the differential distribution of professional power within a profession. Strategic group theory provided the basis to investigate the organisational strategy aspect. A 'strategic group' refers to a set of firms pursuing the same or similar organisational strategies. To operationalise the strategy group concept, a rationale for the selection of the grouping and the external validation dimensions was developed from the competency based strategy and strategic adaptation fields. The integration of the occupational and organisational perspectives permitted an analysis of the effectiveness of different organisational strategies in extracting the potential leverage inherent within the various occupational segments. Data were gathered by survey questionnaire from UK private architectural and quantity surveying practices (n=308) included in the 1994 versions of RIBA Directory of Practices and the RICS Directory of Practices. The main survey was carried out in 1996. The questionnaire was designed to have relevance to both professions and provided data on dimensions that had concurrent validity in both professions. The major contributions of this study are the development of a general framework for formulating, interpreting and validating occupational segments and strategic groups, the analysis of the interactive effects of occupational and organisational strategy dimensions, and the performance implications of segment and group membership. The main conclusion was that the performance of the strategic groups was contingent on the occupational segment and that no general formula may be applied to the power-knowledge translation.