Last few years have seen a huge increase of publications at the intersection of project management and sustainability. Nevertheless, this field has become increasingly fragmented undermining a steady and consistent development. Aiming at balancing tensions between authors' attempts for more 'integration' and the trajectories toward 'fragmentation, we employed an extensive, systematic literature review of 770 publications from the period 1993 to 2017. Therefore, this review offers guidance to scholars less familiar with this concept who encounter SPM in their research.We suggest that the SPM literature can be understood by answering the following questions:(1) Why adopt sustainable business practices into projects? (2) What is the impact of sustainability on traditional project management practices? And (3) how is sustainability embedded in project practices?The three narrative themes illustrate the diverse views on the different aspects of SPM, allowing divergences, such as different philosophical underpinnings or levels of analysis, to flourish without eroding the clarity of the field.

Professions are undergoing a significant change in how they integrate environmental and social objectives into their core values. This article examines the situation in which those working in the project management profession are expected to work under contradictory sustainability constraints. In this article, we investigate the tensions project managers experience when addressing sustainable objectives. Results show that when tensions arise over sustainable objectives (temporality of objectives, organizational barriers, and lack of control), they are addressed only when anchored to an economic one in the form of a business case for sustainability. We also find that when matching traditional project objectives with sustainable ones is not possible, practitioners enact a set of reactions characterized as greenwashing, it can’t be one person, no space for sustainability in my job, other actors involved, or pushing back, depending on the specific project context. Adopting the paradox theory lens, we provide an alternative approach to the business case for sustainability. The practical contribution of this article lies in suggesting the need to find strategies to embrace paradoxical situations and we provide some suggestions to illustrate this.

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Purpose -The professionalization of project management profession has developed differently according to the different environments in which it has been introduced. The objective in this work has been to examine an example of this professional project (Italy) with this research question: "what have been the professionalization strategies of project management professional associations within Italian field?".Design/methodology/approach -We develop a qualitative case study made up of semi-structured interviews and archival data.Findings -Our analysis demonstrate how project management in Italy has embarked on a clear upward trajectory in terms of its occupational size, economic significance and institutional development. However, the development of project management in Italy considerably lags behind Anglo-Saxon countries. We also identify three main strategies through which this professionalization project is being accomplished: corporate engagement, expanding membership and institutional recognition. Research limitations/implications -The study reviews the professionalization of project management in Italy. This is not a comparative study, but rather highlights Italian project management professionalization. Moreover, we expect significant findings could be reached with a comparable research across different national contexts.Originality/value -This work constitutes the first detailed and comprehensive study in the field of project management within the Italian context.