Design Management in Luxury Automotive Organisations: An Integrative Review of Process, Governance, and Capability

This review integrated scholarship across six domains that have developed with limited contact. The synthesis found a substantial body of relevant theory and a set of disagreements the literature has not settled: whether design value originates in user understanding or in interpretation away from users; whether structured development processes help or harm work of high aesthetic novelty; whether integration mechanisms established in volume manufacturing transfer to small design organisations; and where the boundary sits between design elements a brand may change and those it may not. Senior design leadership emerged as the clearest absence. Upper echelon theory predicts strong leader effects where decisions rest on judgment resistant to codification, and aesthetic judgment under brand constraint is such a decision class. No empirical study located here examines how the role combines its functions or how variation in it relates to outcomes. Closing that gap requires access to senior design practitioners and a method suited to eliciting tacit judgment, which sets the agenda for the interview study proposed in Section 5.3.

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