Process Studies of Project Organizing

A central issue in project-based organizations (PBOs) is how to balance the need for flexibly responding to changing customer demands and creating consistent performance in the organization at large. This article discusses the relevance of a routine dynamics lens for understanding this dilemma. We show how routine dynamics might help to understand how and under what conditions routines—with their dual capacity for stability and change—produce a variety of performances, some stable and some varying, in the PBO. As such, we contribute to the stream of research that seeks to explain how PBOs build capabilities and how they work.

Section: Concluding Remarks and Implications For Future Project Studiessupporting

confidence: 75%

Section: Concluding Remarks and Implications For Future Project Studiesmentioning

confidence: 99%

A Routine Dynamics Lens on the Stability-Change Dilemma in Project-Based Organizations

Bygballe

Swärd

Vaagaasar

2021

“…There is more life and strife in the edifice of project management than we have suggested in this essay, and Hirschman is also far from the only one chiseling cracks in its walls (e.g., Drouin et al, 2013;Geraldi & Söderlund, 2018;Hodgson & Cicmil, 2006;Lundin & Hällgreen, 2014, Lundin & Midler, 1998Sergi et al, 2020). There are more nuances to both Flyvbjerg's and Hirschman's positions than we have covered.…”

Section: Discussionmentioning

confidence: 77%

Conflicting Notions of a Project: The Battle Between Albert O. Hirschman and Bent Flyvbjerg

Kreiner

2020

The field of project management has erected an impressive edifice of knowledge that apparently hinders us in learning anything from experience except what we already know. We will use the recent controversy between Hirschman and Flyvbjerg to trace this academic imposition to a narrow notion of a project and to find inspiration in a radically different notion for opening the field to new types of issues and lessons.

“…The authors explore how people in projects experience and relate to time, and they offer a dynamic view of project duration as the time that is left and the time that has passed. In addition, they offer a situated temporal view on projects, bringing the strong process view (e.g., Hernes, 2007; Jarzabkowski et al, 2017) into the study of temporality in temporary organizations and thereby addressing a recent call for more process studies (Sergi et al, 2020) in project research.…”

Section: Mapping the Debate And Theorizing Across The Two Special Issuesmentioning

confidence: 99%

Bright and Dark Spots in Project Studies: Continuing Efforts to Advance Theory Development and Debate

Geraldi

Söderlund

Marrewijk

2021

In this special issue, we encouraged project scholars to be bold and construct their voices. We now reflect on the results, which include the bright spots in four areas: project organizing (organizing and collaborating in and between projects), project value (organizing value in and through projects), project citizenship (living in and through projects), and project scholarship (reflecting on project theorizing and scholarship). We then dared to voice our views on three dark spots: a lack of diversity in the project scholars’ ethnicities, geographies, and genders; in disciplines that extend beyond management and organization studies; and in modes of reflexivity.