Pluralism in Project Management: Navigating the Crossroads of Specialization and Fragmentation

Abstract

Project management is a rapidly expanding subfield of management and organization studies. This paper seeks to make sense of this development and the current state of project management research. It reviews the literature published over the last five decades in 30 leading management and organization journals. In total, 305 articles were included in the data set. The paper proposes a categorization of the published articles into seven 'schools of thought': Optimization School, Factor School, Contingency School, Behaviour School, Governance School, Relationship School and Decision School. The schools vary in terms of their main focus and use of the project concept, major research questions, methodological approaches and type of theorizing. It is suggested that a better awareness on how to make use of the schools and the identified perspectives would stimulate cross-fertilization, unification and thus enhance a pluralistic understanding of projects and project management at the same time as it would prepare research to frame more accurately the problems of contemporary projects. In that respect, the paper offers ideas on how to navigate at the crossroads between specialization and fragmentation, between the search for novel topics and improvements of existing knowledge.

A critical argument in favor of theoretical pluralism: Project failure and the many and varied limitations of project management

“…Positivist research on generalized critical failure factors (CFFs) in the so-called Factors Schools of project management (Söderlund, 2011), also speaks to this point, suggesting how communication of project goals is a significant CFF. Other established CFFs in construction projects include, inter alia, strategic fit, buildability of design, communication, hostile socioeconomic conditions, client politics and trust (Jha and Iyer, 2007;Morris and Hough, 1987).…”

“…Whilst project failures can and do result in lost share prices, or football matches, their effects can also include lost public funds, safety, homes, communities, health, and even life itself. While the "projectificaiton of society" (Lundin and Soderholm, 1998), and the proliferation of project management (PM), has been subject to mounting critical interrogation (Bresnen, 2007;Cicmil et al 2009;Clegg and Courpasson, 2004;Hodgson, 2002;Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006;2007a;2007b;Packendorff, 2006, 2007;Styhre, 2006;Sage et al, 2010a), as reviews by both Söderlund (2011) and Turner et al, (2013) indicate, the phenomena of "project failure" (and "success") continues to be understood largely from within a narrowly functionalist-positive/managerial perspective (for some exceptions see Fincham, 2002;Lindahl and Rehn, 2007;Sage et al, 2013).…”

Inside service-intensive projects: Analyzing inbuilt tensions

“…Until recently, project management research has been keen to describe project management tasks during project planning and implementation (Engwall, 2003;Söderlund, 2004) while project marketing research has been focused mainly on the project sales phase (Cova and Holstius, 1993;Cova et al, 1994;Söderlund, 2011b). Only recently has the post-project stage appeared in the limelight, as the concepts of project afterlife (Söderlund, 2011a) and project endings (Havila and Salmi, 2009) gained in popularity.…”

Value of Uncertainty: The Lost Opportunities in Large Projects

“…The first project management theory presented for what today are called projects was designed to gain control over a large complex and dynamic construction problem that had high internal and contextual uncertainty [2,5] The initial answer to the question of how to handle uncertainty and the problem of coordinating many people in order to deliver on time and cost was to standardize work breakdown, develop standard methods for time planning (e.g., the critical path method (CPM) and PERT) and focus on optimization [2,3,[5][6][7] Morris 2013). Over the following 30-40 years, the project management society developed universal methods that would fit most projects most of the time [2,6,8,9].…”