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Project management is a rapidly expanding subfield of management and organization studies. This paper seeks to make sense of this development and the current state of project management research. It reviews the literature published over the last five decades in 30 leading management and organization journals. In total, 305 articles were included in the data set. The paper proposes a categorization of the published articles into seven 'schools of thought': Optimization School, Factor School, Contingency School, Behaviour School, Governance School, Relationship School and Decision School. The schools vary in terms of their main focus and use of the project concept, major research questions, methodological approaches and type of theorizing. It is suggested that a better awareness on how to make use of the schools and the identified perspectives would stimulate cross-fertilization, unification and thus enhance a pluralistic understanding of projects and project management at the same time as it would prepare research to frame more accurately the problems of contemporary projects. In that respect, the paper offers ideas on how to navigate at the crossroads between specialization and fragmentation, between the search for novel topics and improvements of existing knowledge.

Product development in high-technology industries is often carried out in projects. Managing such projects is a matter of both promoting creative knowledge generation processes and controlling progress towards global goals and time limits. From such a dual perspective, we discuss the meaning and suitability of organizing product development projects in a concurrent rather than a sequential fashion and the use of deadlines as control mechanisms. The empirical case is about the breakthrough in Japan for the Swedish company Ericsson. The system was to be fully operative in 1994. This project forced management to reconsider their traditional way of working with projects and to try a new one instead — labelled the 'fountain model' — which relied more on concurrent work and inter-functional cooperation. As a result, they managed to shorten development time quite considerably and deliver the system on time. The fountain model of project organization is interpreted as expressing a 'coupling logic' suitable for error detection in a systemic complexity context. We also suggest a model, identifying four different project organization logics, that may be used contingent upon the type of error problematic and complexity involved. Using the garbage-can metaphor, we also discuss how deadlines and other time-based controls may support the fountain model by promoting inter-functional responsiveness and 'global' reflection.

This paper explores liminality, a concept receiving increased attention in management and organization studies and gaining prominence because of its capacity to capture the interstitial and temporary elements of organizing and work. The authors present a systematic review of the literature on liminality, covering 61 published papers, and undertake a critical analysis of how the concept of liminality has been used in prior research. This review reveals associations with three main themes: process; position; and place. For each theme, the authors identify the central research questions posed, while comparing individual and collective levels of analysis. During this process, the authors revisit several ideas central to the original, anthropological research on liminality, a perspective from which they suggest a rejuvenation of liminality research in management and organization studies. This paper argues for a greater focus on the liminal experience itself – especially its ritual and temporal dimensions – and for improving the comparative analysis of liminality following the three themes identified in this paper. The authors suggest that revising the agenda for liminality research along these lines could facilitate more informed responses to the challenges of an increasingly temporary and dynamic work life.

Project organising is a growing field of scholarly inquiry and management practice. In recent years, two important developments have influenced this field: (1) the study and practice of projects have extended their level of analysis from mainly focussing on individual projects to focussing on micro-as well as macro-level concerns around projects; and (2) there has been a greater interest in different kinds of scholarly inquiry. Taken together, these two developments call for closer scrutiny of how the levels of analysis and the types of inquiry are related and benefit each other, and the explanations of project practices they could offer. To discuss avenues for future research on projects and project practice, this paper suggests the notion of project studies to better grasp the status of our field. We combine these two sets of ideas to analyse the status and future options for advancing project research: (1) levels of analysis; and (2) type of research. Analysing recent developments within project studies, we observe the emergence of what we refer to as type 3 research, which reconciles the need for theoretical development, practice engagement and pragmatic avenues to move away from accepted yet unhelpful assumptions about projects and project organising. The paper ends with suggestions for an agenda for future research, which offer project scholars a variety of options to position themselves in the field of project studies, and to explore opportunities in the crossroads between levels of analysis and types of research.