The concept of sustainability continues to rapidly grow in interest from disparate academic and industrial fields. This research aims to elucidate further the implications of the sustainability drivers upon project management methodological approaches specifically in the manufacturing industry. This paper studies the three prevalent dialogues in the field of sustainability, relevant to the environmental and social aspects of the Triple Bottom Line, and utilises Institutional Theory to propose organisational pressures as affecting sustainability efforts in industrial manufacturing project management. Furthermore, the literature bodies of Lean and Life Cycle Analysis in manufacturing project management guided our reflection that the various drivers of sustainability put forward that do not consider the distinctive organisational pressures fail to address institutional and systemic project management issues holistically. The authors further conduct and draw on a systematic literature review on the constructs of sustainability in the manufacturing industry and their adopted methodologies, evaluating academic articles published from the year 2001 to 2017. The findings indicate that normative pressures prevail over coercive and mimetic pressures and are seen as the main drivers of sustainability in the manufacturing industry. In an incremental reductionist approach, project management knowledge areas are analysed, and the study posits that Stakeholder and Communications Management are two of the knowledge areas that need to integrate the above pressures to achieve cohesive sustainable industrial results. The principle contribution is to offer a new conceptual perspective on integrating project management knowledge areas with Institutional Theory pressures for more sustainable project management methodologies.

PurposeTo examine enterprise resource planning (ERP) adoption in Greek companies, and explore the effects of uncertainty on the performance of these systems and the methods used to cope with uncertainty.Design/methodology/approachThis research was exploratory and six case studies were generated. This work was part of a larger project on the adoption, implementation and integration of ERP systems in Greek enterprises. A taxonomy of ERP adoption research was developed from the literature review and used to underpin the issues investigated in these cases. The results were compared with the literature on ERP adoption in the USA and UK.FindingsThere were major differences between ERP adoption in Greek companies and companies in other countries. The adoption, implementation and integration of ERP systems were fragmented in Greek companies. This fragmentation demonstrated that the internal enterprise's culture, resources available, skills of employees, and the way ERP systems are perceived, treated and integrated within the business and in the supply chain, play critical roles in determining the success/failure of ERP systems adoption. A warehouse management system was adopted by some Greek enterprises to cope with uncertainty.Research limitations/implicationsA comparison of ERP adoption was made between the USA, UK and Greece, and may limit its usefulness elsewhere.Practical implicationsPractical advice is offered to managers contemplating adopting ERP.Originality/valueA new taxonomy of ERP adoption research was developed, which refocused the ERP implementation and integration into related critical success/failure factors and total integration issues, thus providing a more holistic ERP adoption framework.

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From the project management perspective, the study purports to examine how sustainability can be integrated into different areas, including project management and manufacturing, by referring to knowledge and concepts established by previous academic contributions and how interdependencies between the three realms mentioned above can, therefore, be identified. The Preferred Reporting Items for Systematic Reviews and Meta-Analyses (PRISMA) methodology is used in this study to filter appropriate papers, which are found by the pre-determined combinations of keywords-the pertinent wordings relevant to this study (e.g., sustainable, Triple Bottom Line (TBL), etc.)-for systematic literature review. The study results show the correlation between three types of isomorphism pressure by which social constructionism is shaped. Besides this, the normative pressure is the overall mean (i.e., standards, indices, indicators, etc.) to advance sustainability ideology nowadays. The statistics derived from selected papers accord with the noted context, showing that the International Standardisation Organisation (ISO) standard is the widely accepted method for sustainable development. This reveals that either practitioners or organisations can effectively adopt sustainable practices by referring to such standardised norms with other measures mentioned in this study, such as lean thinking, green supplier selection, project governance etc. Finally, it is concluded that as the component operated within organisations, the achievement of projects is directly affected by the environment in which it is managed; in brief, the more substantial conducting environment where a project is undertaken, the more sustainably attainable outcomes can be derived from a project. In a nutshell, instead of devising a new theory, this study provides some basic knowledge concerning the sustainability of the project management point of view.

Research on sustainability in the construction industry is common in construction journals addressing the potential adverse effects conventional practices have in the construction community. Sustainability is addressed through the environmental, social and economic impacts in literature and researchers and practitioners always drive the need for an equal attention on these three dimensions, but not so successfully at present. Sustainability covers a broad content with various suggested approaches arising from different countries all over the world. Previous studies have investigated sustainable construction issues as a global concept and in individual developed countries such as the US, Australia, and China. The aim of this research is to investigate the extent of coverage, by academia, of the sustainability concept in UK construction industry, with a focus on the environmental and social aspects of sustainability, based on the Triple Bottom Line framework. The researchers conducted a systematic literature review, searching relevant articles with predefined criteria in two major bibliographical databases, which offer great coverage of the existing academic journals in social sciences. The study utilised the PRISMA reporting approach and the search resulted in thirty-one suitable articles. The findings revealed that environmental sustainability receives much more attention than social sustainability. Added emphasis is given to green buildings and materials used. Government regulations seem to be the leading driver for adopting sustainable practices, while lack of knowledge/awareness of sustainable best practices is the leading challenge.