TY  - CHAP
AB  - Competitions celebrate meritocratic values. Letting the best man or woman win leaves little room for human choice, since presumably the result follows from ascertaining the fact that someone did better than the rest. But in architectural competitions, appointing a winner involves human choice. An in-depth empirical investigation demonstrates that such human choice has the character of intuition and judgment. The choice of the winner preceded the process by which the winning design proposal was established as being better than the other proposals. We discuss the role of intuitive choices in architectural competitions and claim that they reflect necessity more than vice. They are ways around the fundamental incommensurability of the alternative design proposals. The garbage can model is used as a framework for making sense of the observed counterintuitive ways of decision making. Its attempt to theorize alternative forms of orderliness proves helpful, but on certain points our observations also suggest modifications to the model.
VL  - 36
SN  - 978-1-78052-713-0, 978-1-78052-712-3/0733-558X
DO  - 10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000036018
UR  - https://doi.org/10.1108/S0733-558X(2012)0000036018
AU  - Kreiner Kristian
ED  - Alessandro Lomi
ED  - J. Richard Harrison
PY  - 2012
Y1  - 2012/01/01
TI  - Organizational Decision Mechanisms in an Architectural Competition
T2  - The Garbage Can Model of Organizational Choice: Looking Forward at Forty
T3  - Research in the Sociology of Organizations
PB  - Emerald Group Publishing Limited
SP  - 399
EP  - 429
Y2  - 2024/04/19
ER  -