Ethical Challenges in Start-Up Architectural Firms: Navigating Commercial Pressure and Professional Integrity in Bahrain

Abstract

This study examines how start-up architectural firms in Bahrain navigate the tension between commercial survival and professional integrity, and whether the Council for Regulating the Practice of Engineering Professions (CRPEP) supports ethical practice at the procedural level. A qualitative reflexive triangulation design combined a five-year practitioner-researcher record from one start-up firm, sixteen semi-structured interviews across owners, staff, and clients, structured firm-record extraction, and a clause-level reading of the Bahraini framework against the Royal Institute of British Architects codes. Inductive coding produced nine patterns across three pressure sources, and the regulatory comparison documented a two-layer void at the individual-licensee and firm levels. Ethical fragility appears as a structural condition rather than a personal failing, and the study proposes four-layer structural change and introduces reflexive triangulation as a portable methodological design.