Enabling, forcing and impeding resource integration: the impact of institutional logics on resource integration practice in creative projects

Creative projects thrive on collaboration, generating new solutions that address client needs, enhance reputations, maintain competitive advantages, and create value for project stakeholders. Despite its critical importance, the collaborative dynamics of creative projects remain under-theorised, with existing literature predominantly focussing on creative professionals or a specific role, while marginalising the contributions of diverse non-creative counterparts. This narrow focus overlooks the complex dynamics of multi-professional collaboration, leaving our understanding of creative project collaboration incomplete.

My study examines how multiple professions, and their associated institutional logics influence collaboration and resource integration processes in creative projects, drawing on Institutional Logic Perspective and Service-Dominant (S-D) logic theories. Through a qualitative analysis of four creative projects in a healthcare advertising agency, this research provides three key contributions to creative project literature and two contributions to S-D logic theory.

In the creative project literature, I first challenge the prevailing narrative that often portrays non-creative professionals as constraints, demonstrating instead that they act as enablers in creative project collaboration. Secondly, I extend our understanding of broker roles by detailing their defining characteristics and identifying five new actor roles in creative projects, showing that we must examine all participants beyond dyadic perspective or a focus on singular profession. Thirdly, while previous research has focussed on tensions between creative demands and management's profit objectives, I uncover additional professional demands that influence project collaboration and outcomes.

In the S-D logic literature, this dissertation advances S-D logic theory by revealing the institutional mechanisms through which value is created and destroyed based on actor and institutional dynamics. I redefine S-D logic's conceptualisation of institutional arrangements and demonstrate how different arrangements affect actors' resource integration processes. Additionally, I introduce the concept of partial value creation, advancing both S-D logic and value destruction theories.