NEW POSSIBILITIES FOR PROJECT MANAGEMENT THEORY: A CRITICAL ENGAGEMENT

Introduction

"Concepts developed by the academic community... must be recovered from operational and textbook definitions and reconnected to ways of seeing and thinking about the world. In the dialectics of the situation and the talk of individuals with different perspectives, the emergence

Several prominent authors (Koskela & Howell, 2002; Maylor, 2001; Morris, 2004; Morris, Patel, & Wearne, 2000; Winch, 1996) have raised the need to introduce alternative theoretical approaches to the study of projects, and to identify the implications that they may have for how we organise and manage projects. The purpose of this paper is to address this need, by identifying space outside of the tightly-defined and densely populated conceptual landscape of mainstream project management where other perspectives, other concerns, and other agenda may be articulated and explored1. Extant project management literature, we would argue, tends to rely upon the language of design, regularity and control to propose models and prescriptions as a route to increasing the ability of humans to control complex worlds (Stacey, 2001; Wood, 2002), to the exclusion of other approaches or ways of reasoning. As a whole, research into projects and project management remains heavily reliant on a functionalist, instrumental view of projects and organisations, where the function of project management is taken to be the accomplishment of some finite piece of work in a specified period of time, within a certain budget, and to agreed specifications. Most textbooks and professional associations for project management promote this normative view of the field as practiced, which can be summarised as the application of knowledge, skills, tools, and techniques to project activities to meet project requirements. Governed by the tradition of "natural sciences" (e.g., systems theory), the project management body of knowledge emphasises the role of project actors and managers as "implementers" narrowing their role to the issues of control (time and cost) and content (planned scope of work), marginalising their wider potential role as competent social and political actors in complex project-labelled arrangements. Dissemination of "best practice" carries a message about the possibility of the progressive rationalisation of action and a belief in the progressive and cumulative character of knowledge. This typically assumes rationality, universality, objectivity, and value-free decision-making, and the possibility of generating law-like predictions in knowledge.