The relationship between the temporary and the permanent is a central issue in studies of temporary organizing. Recent research highlights that projects, as key forms of temporary organizations, both constitute and are constituted by their wider institutional contexts. However, there is still a lack of more detailed understanding of the actors and their activities through which projects produce and advance institutional change. To address this issue, we draw on extensive fieldwork to study the activities that constitute establishment of the Innovation University. This endeavour gained the status of a spearhead project and advanced nationwide university reform in one northern European country. Our central contribution is two-fold. We sediment a more robust approach to institutions within project literature by defining them as widely shared beliefs and practices that actors enact and (re)produce through their various activities. On this basis, we develop a model of an institutional project for regulative change and show that it is more parallel and multiplex and less sequential in nature than existing studies might convey. Our model also creates new understanding of the role of the ‘lock-ins’ shaped by projects to promote regulative change and casts light on the temporal linkages and temporal boundary objects in institutional projects. In closing, we discuss several future avenues for research in both project literature and institutional theory.

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Purpose -The purpose of this paper is to examine the sensemaking processes leading to project managers' responses to an unexpected event in an international project setting. High uncertainty and unexpected events are prevalent in international projects conducted in challenging and complex environments. The paper analyzes how an unexpected event and the ways to cope with it were made sense of by a Finnish and a Chinese project manager in a system supplier's delivery project in China. Design/methodology/approach -This paper builds on a qualitative case study of the two project managers' sensemaking processes in the face of a single unexpected event. Narrative interviews were used as the method for data collection. The actantial framework by Greimas was used in analyzing the interview narratives. Findings -The paper shows how the project managers' sensemaking processes, even within the same project management team, are highly subjective, leading to the coexistence of multiple, and highly divergent responses to the unexpected event. The paper also highlights how these sensemaking processes create the coexistence of multiple, divergent systems of project structures and boundaries for coping with the unexpected event.Originality/value -While the existing project management literature has distinguished various tactics used by project managers for responding to unexpected events, of lesser attention have been the actual sensemaking processes underlying and producing these responses. The paper especially stresses how the sensemaking processes between project managers coming from culturally different backgrounds can yield highly contrasting interpretations and responses to the same event.

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Purpose The paper advances research on the heterogeneity of client behavior and the understanding of “the client” as a key topic in the research of management consulting. First, this issue is addressed by summarizing the clients’ reasons for acquiring and utilizing management consulting services. Second, the purpose of this paper is to examine the ways in which these reasons vary in four key client groups. Design/methodology/approach Building on 1,127 responses to a survey questionnaire, the clients’ motives for acquiring and using management consulting are examined in four different client groups. Principal component analysis with an eigenvalue greater than one and varimax rotation method was used to discern the motives for acquiring and using consulting. Findings The analysis identifies two co-existing factors as key reasons for acquiring and utilizing management consulting: “Impact” and “Significance.” This typology is used to show that the reasons for acquiring management consulting services are dependent on the hierarchical level of the client. While reasons related to “Impact” are consistently emphasized in the four examined client groups, reasons related to “Significance” show greater variance and are emphasized less higher up in the organizational hierarchy. Research limitations/implications The paper argues for the need to reconsider the conventionally marginal and subordinate position of subjective motivations in the management consulting literature. The paper creates bridges between previously contending paradigms by developing a holistic and comprehensive framework of the client motives for utilizing management consulting. Practical implications For practitioners, the results complement prior understandings of client purchase decision making. More fundamentally, this paper provides elements for restructuring the overall discourse on the roles and uses of consultants. Originality/value The paper is the first large-sample examination of client heterogeneity, developing an empirically verified typology of the reasons for utilizing management consulting. More importantly, the paper specifies how these reasons vary among four key client groups. The primary contributions of the paper are: the paper posits a robust typology on the previously multivocal and fragmented reasons for utilizing management consulting. The paper specifies how the reasons vary in four key client groups, developing a more nuanced understanding of the heterogeneity of “the client.”