This is a repository copy of An island of constancy in a sea of change: rethinking project temporalities with long-term megaprojects.

In recent decades, one of the most notable developments in social policy has been the expansion of active labour market policies (ALMPs): training schemes that aim to speed up unemployed people's return to the labour market. At the same time, academic and political attention has begun to rethink the traditional ways in which social policies like ALMPs should be evaluated: away from typically economic-oriented outcomes towards health and social indicators, such as subjective well-being and social capital. This has led to an emerging argument that ALMPs can be used to improve the health and social environment of unemployment, which decades of research has shown to be associated with a wide range of deleterious outcomes. This paper tests this argument by analysing longitudinal data from the long-running British Household Panel Survey and its successor Understanding Society. The results show that relative to open unemployment, ALMP participation is associated with increased well-being amongst the unemployed, although there is no effect on health or social capital.

If you would like to write for this, or any other Emerald publication, then please use our Emerald for Authors service information about how to choose which publication to write for and submission guidelines are available for all. Please visit www.emeraldinsight.com/authors for more information. About Emerald www.emeraldinsight.comEmerald is a global publisher linking research and practice to the benefit of society. The company manages a portfolio of more than 290 journals and over 2,350 books and book series volumes, as well as providing an extensive range of online products and additional customer resources and services.Emerald is both COUNTER 4 and TRANSFER compliant. The organization is a partner of the Committee on Publication Ethics (COPE) and also works with Portico and the LOCKSS initiative for digital archive preservation. AbstractPurpose -The purpose of this paper is to question why current thinking towards project complexity ignores the role of objects in achieving social order and transformation. An alternative, but complementary, approach to address project complexities, drawing upon actor-network theory (ANT), is offered to redress this concern. Design/methodology/approach -Current thinking towards project complexity is briefly reviewed in the first section to illustrate the reasons why nonhumans are downplayed. An historical case study, the Skye road bridge project, is mobilized to explain, and develop, an ANT perspective on project complexities, and responses to such complexities. Findings -ANT develops accounts of project complexity by highlighting the role of nonhumans in influencing how practitioners register, respond and stabilize project complexities. Front-end planning and stakeholder analysis is shown to be only one narrow element of four moments through which actors apprehend and stabilize project complexities.Research limitations/implications -The empirical case study is developed to suggest some significant ways in which ANT could contribute, and complement, extant theories of project complexity. Alternative approaches to socio-materiality are noted and may yield other important insights. Originality/value -The paper positions ANT to offer a novel theory of project complexity. It is intended to be primarily of use to project management researchers, and theoretically informed practitioners, who are interested in developing fresh insights into notions of project complexities (unintended consequences, emergence and unpredictability). based paradigms that dominate project management research and "best practice" (Cicmil et al., 2009b;Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006). However, instead of simply reviewing the application of complexity thinking to project management (as in Cooke-Davies et al., 2007;Whitty and Maylor, 2009), this paper starts with an important, though often ignored question: why do theories of complex project management favour ways of viewing projects that focus on their social interactions? This question is important because, despite the origins of complexity thinking within the natura...

In project management, failure is often assumed to be evidence of deficient management: a problem that can be overcome by better management. Drawing on qualitative research within UK construction projects we examine how four different theoretical approaches (positivism, structural Marxism, interpretivism and actor-network theory) all challenge this managerial assumption. Each theoretical perspective enables a specific analysis of empirical data that critiques the notion that project failures are easily, simply, or largely, associated with the failure of project management. In so doing, our pluralist analysis reveals the social and political contextualization of performance in project management. We thus conclude by proposing that practitioner and scholarly concerns with project failure (and success), can actively contribute to attempts to reflect upon various matters of political concern as developed within the Making Projects Critical community, and by extension Critical Management Studies. Thus, we propose greater interaction between critical and mainstream project research communities.

Unemployment is associated with a range of health and social problems, such as poor physical health and wellbeing. Welfare state research has recently considered how social policies can ameliorate the harmful effects of unemployment. This article argues that such policy suggestions disregard the role of the work ethic in shaping the experience of unemployment. In societies that glorify employment as a signifier of identity and status, it is unsurprising that those without employment suffer. Previous research supports this view, showing how subscription to the work ethic is associated with wellbeing amongst unemployed people. Original analysis of the European Values Study confirms the importance of the work ethic, showing how unemployed people with weaker work ethics have significantly higher life satisfaction than those with stronger work ethics. The article concludes that the most effective way of dealing with the deleterious effects of unemployment is to challenge the centrality of employment in contemporary societies.