Marketing through research: William Caudill and Caudill, Rowlett, Scott (CRS)
The partners of Caudill Rowlett Scott (CRS), a post-Second World War architecture firm in Texas, USA, were especially innovative in their professional and business practices. One of their original contributions was the firm's marketing strategy, which was based on promoting not only design achievements but also the CRS ‘research attitude’ by publishing and distributing studies produced by members of the firm. This strategy, which built on a wide-spread American belief in the fundamental role of science and research in the nation's progress and development, was successful in the first two decades of the firm, but was dissolved in the 1970s with the firm's expansion and transformation into a profit-oriented enterprise. This paper describes the firm's research-based marketing strategy and argues that the success of the marketing strategy relied on the CRS partners' ability first, to integrate marketing into the firm's approach to architecture and design and into cultural norms of the time and secondly, to balance the expectations of both their potential clients and their professional peers. The CRS marketing strategy is an important case study for architects today as they respond creatively to similarly competing demands.
The CRS team and the business of architecture
Since the end of the Second World War, few firms have influenced the practice of architecture as much as Caudill Rowlett Scott, or CRS. From its establishment in the 1940s as a three-man operation above a grocery store in College Station, Texas, CRS evolved into a world leader in programming, construction management, school design, and other dimensions of modern architectural practice. By the 1970s, CRS was a master at organizing complicated architectural undertakings and had earned a global reputation for sharing its insights with practitioners worldwide. This book about CRS will fill an important gap in architectural history. It explores the ways architects of the mid-twentieth century developed methods that allowed professionals to analyze projects systematically rather than relying on the traditional combination of information and intuition. Based on oral histories taken from many leaders and staff members of CRS, the book traces the company's development from its beginnings to its emergence as the largest architecture/engineering firm in the United States by the early 1980s and to its dismemberment in 1994. The main focus is on the period from the 1940s to CRS's merger with the South Carolina_based engineering firm Sirrine in 1983. Interspersed throughout the volume are pithy memos written by the firm's charismatic, intellectual leader, AIA Gold Medal winner Bill Caudill. The book is heavily illustrated with pictures of firm members at work and views of important CRS buildings such as the Jesse H. Jones Hall for the Performing Arts in Houston. The interviews that richly inform this book are set within a narrative that places the firm and its innovations in a broader perspective, connecting the CRS story to contemporary developments in architecture, the economy, and society.
Participation Improves Collective Decisions (When It Involves Deliberation): Experimental Evidence From Kenya
Abstract Citizen participation in decision making has been widely lauded as a method for improving societal outcomes. Deliberative discussion, in particular, is believed to be more transformative than a mere aggregation of individual preferences, leading to more socially optimal decision making and behavior. I report the results from a laboratory experiment with 570 subjects in Nairobi, directly testing the effect of participation in deliberative group decision making on collective outcomes. Participants engage in a group task to earn compensation toward a shared group fund. Randomly assigned treatments vary according to whether decision making over the task to be completed involves: (1) external assignment; (2) non-deliberative majority voting; or (3) consensus through deliberative discussion. I find that deliberation improves collective decision making. Deliberation is also associated with changes in preferences, greater agreement with decision outcomes, and greater perceived fairness. Evidence for behavior change is weaker, but there is some support for further research into the relationship between preference change and behavior change.