This paper contributes to Rodney Turner's initiative to develop a theory of project management from practice. Organizational scholars studying strategy suggest that more attention needs to be paid to practices involved in organizing, as well as the institutional contexts in which these practices are embedded. Taking a cue from strategy-in-practice approaches, it is proposed that institutional theories can be used to address some questions that have not been answered adequately regarding megaprojects. Institutional theories also seem to be gaining the attention of scholars investigating large, global, infrastructure projects as reported in engineering, management and construction journals. Increasingly, it is evident that the problem areas attached to these projects stretch beyond technical issues: they must be considered as socio-technical endeavours embedded in complex institutional frames. The authors suggest that studying how to deal with institutional differences in the environment of megaprojects has both theoretical and practical implications.

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Global construction projects that involve collaboration between participants from multiple countries often result in unique challenges, and costs due to cross-national interactions. Case studies performed to investigate the cross-national interactions and tensions present on global projects suggest that institutional differences-differences in workplace norms, legal regulations, and cultural valuescontribute to these costs. We demonstrate how institutional theory-a branch of organizational theory-can comprehensively describe the cross-national challenges on global projects. We show how this theory can help practitioners to more accurately classify the cross-national issues they encounter, determine the causes behind the conflicts, and judge the relative ease with which each type of conflict can be resolved. However, there are gaps in the extant application of institutional theory that prevent us from predicting institutional conflicts on global projects and devising solution strategies. These gaps are identified and a research trajectory to understand them is proposed. This paper is aimed at starting a much-needed dialogue on the mitigation of cross-national issues on global projects, and not as a demonstration of methods to eliminate all cross-national conflicts.