A recent article talked about how Indian architects were facing competition from foreign architects who were being contracted to produce designs for the Indian environment. However, rather than highlighting the potential issues that occur due to cross-national institutional differences when firms operate in a foreign context, this article chose to take an optimistic and interesting view point.

Several Indian firms, particularly in the booming IT sector seem to favor foreign architecture firms, presumably because they envision having corporate campuses that look like those of their American, European or Singaporean counterparts (to name a few). As some studies have shown, there are several differences with respect to legal regulations, aesthetic values and norms relating to how buildings are designed and constructed, that often add an extra 'institutional transactions' cost on to projects involving foreign architects designing buildings in the local environment.

However, as this article indicates, there seem to be many positives that have resulted due to global collaboration in the architectural design phase. Some salient benefits are:

1. As a result of globalization, new materials are available in the Indian construction market, and foreign firms are best suited to, and experienced, in utilizing these materials.
2. Foreign firms have brought in good management practices in terms of schedule, cost and quality management, that Indian firms can learn from and adopt.

While one might look at point 2 above and note that the imposition of foreign management ideas on the local Indian context can lead to conflicts, the article notes that:

a. Most foreign architects working in India have done a lot of homework and have been super-sensitive to local design and management needs.
b. In several cases, they minimize cultural and institutional conflict by teaming up with local architects to select local contractors and so on.

The overall verdict seems to be that bringing foreign architects into the Indian facilities construction industry has been very beneficial, both to the clients who hire these architects, and to the industry as a whole. While institutional conflicts cannot be completely eliminated, the Indian example shows that a combination of being sensitive to local demands, using the help of local intermediaries, and bringing in foreign ideas that fit alongside these constraints could lead to successful, beneficial and innovative global projects.

Posted by ashwin at April 9, 2006 11:26 PM