Professor Naomi Stead receives a major fund from ARC Linkage Projects Scheme!
Wednesday, May 27, 2020
The AASA is delighted to announce that Professor Naomi Stead at Monash University has been awarded the ARC Linkage Projects Scheme for her research project, titled ‘Architectural Work Cultures: professional identity, education and wellbeing.’
This significant research project looks to examine and support the work-related well-being of architects and architecture students.
The project will be an interdisciplinary collaboration between researchers in the Monash University Department of Architecture (Faculty of Art, Design and Architecture) and Department of Management (Faculty of Business and Economics). Team members include Professor Julie Wolfram-Cox, Associate Professor Maryam Gusheh, Dr Brian Cooper, and as a Partner Investigator Dr Kirsten Orr, the Registrar of the NSW Architects Registration Board.
It will be the first major study to use interdisciplinary, qualitative and quantitative methods to address how workplace cultures and professional identity affect subjective wellbeing in architecture – and lay the foundations for practical improvements in the future.
The project has a large number of industry-based research partners, including regulatory bodies such as the NSW Architects Registration Board, peak industry groups such as the Australian Institute of Architects and Association of Consulting Architects (ACA), as well as the peak body representing architecture schools – the Association of Australasia Schools of Architecture (AASA). In addition, the project has six practices as research partners – architectural offices committed to improving employee wellbeing in relation to culture and community. They are (in alphabetic order): BVN, designing, Elenberg Fraser, The Fulcrum Agency, Hassell, and SJB.
The research will be undertaken in and with these partners and expand outward to involve the full spectrum of Australian architectural education and practice. With the ambition to cover all stages of the career continuum from the first day of architecture school until the day of retirement, it will also attempt to capture the experiences of workers in small, medium, and large practice.
The project will include a postdoctoral research fellow, Byron Kinnaird, co-appointed between Monash and the NSWARB. It will include two PhD scholarships, looking at the education and practice contexts, respectively. The project will also collaborate with Justine Clark, building upon Stead’s earlier and longstanding work with Clark on Parlour, an award-winning advocacy group working towards greater gender equity and improved working conditions in architecture, which emerged from a previous Linkage research project funded ten years earlier. The Parlour project provides a model of research-based advocacy leading to major cultural change in the profession, nationally and internationally, through knowledge-sharing, policy and community-building. It is hoped that this project may have some of the same impacts, this time with the focus on work-related wellbeing.
The research aims to determine exactly what effects – both positive and negative – result from work cultures and professional identity in architecture. More than this, it will go beyond knowledge to action in the profession towards cultural change.
The project builds upon an earlier literature review on ‘Architects and Mental Health,’ commissioned by the NSW Architects Registration Board under the leadership of then-Registrar Tim Horton in 2016. It also builds upon international research, which argues that aspects of architectural work culture can negatively affect the well-being of students and practitioners. While there is a strong and widespread perception of similar problems in Australia, there has so far been insufficient applied research to definitively prove that is the case.
Ultimately, the project proposes a series of events, forums, discussions, actions, and interventions to improve architects and architecture students' work- and study-related wellbeing. It will produce two toolkits to assist the profession in supporting cultural change across the educational, workplace and institutional settings. In this way, it hopes to produce better outcomes for all members of this unusual and strongly-identified cohort, which stands at the intersection of the creative and construction industries as both a cultural and technical practice.
Professor Stead noted that: “the interdisciplinary collaboration between scholars in Architecture and Management is significant because, as a profession, architects don’t always make great business-people.”
“It’s an unfortunate fact that many practices operate on the very edge of financial viability, and the discipline of architecture looks to the arts and humanities, as well as engineering and the STEM disciplines, much more than it does to business and economics.
“We would argue that if architecture practices are run as sound and profitable businesses, they will also be better workplaces, support the wellbeing of their staff, and be better able to produce beautiful, quality buildings which contribute to the common good.”
Congratulations to Naomi and her team for receiving the ARC Grant! The AASA is looking forward to collaborating with Monash University on this landmark study on architectural work culture!