Governing Project-based Firms: Promoting Market-like Processes within Hierarchies

Inside service-intensive projects: Analyzing inbuilt tensions

“…Thus, it makes a difference whether the project participants are embedded in certain departments or business units with established structures or whether they are part of a project-based organization supplying all their products and services through temporary projects. In the latter case, the participants are more receptive to institutionalized structures external to the organization and may 'attach' (Sahlin- Anderson and Söderholm, 2002: 19) or 'couple' (Lindkvist, 2004;Orton and Weick, 1990) a project to their background. Project businesses require interorganizational interactions that increase the likelihood of coexisting and possibly contradictory institutional logics; even a supplier organized as a genuine 'project-based enterprise' (DeFillippi and Arthur, 1998) will inevitably interact with more functionally structured (e.g., Hobday, 2000) counterparts (customers, suppliers, etc.).…”

Organizational context and collaboration on international projects: The case of a professional service firm

“…A case in point in this study is the strengthening of networks through the formal AREA integration that increased opportunities for international networking. Like Ferner, also Lindkvist (2004) mentioned this direction of the formal-informal relationship only parenthetically, whereas this study makes it a main point of investigation and shows cases where it applies and how it plays out in practice.…”

“…Recent research has increasingly highlighted the importance of the context into which projects are embedded (Engwall, 2003;Grabher, 2002Grabher, , 2004Lindkvist, 2004;Manning, 2008;Sydow et al, 2004). In the literature on collaboration on projects, however, the importance of organizational context has hardly been systematically recognized yet.…”

Bureaucratic versus Non-bureaucratic Organization: Explaining Form, Function, and Change in New Forms of Organizing

“…The implication to organizational novelty here is that the knowledge acquired at the level of the project is not retained or absorbed into a larger and more permanent organizational structure. Lindkvist (2004) proposed another gauge on novelty in PBFs that divorces the form altogether from the confines of functional organization. The proposal is to measure the extent to which structure and process in projects organize around project and not functional dimensions linking novelty to roles and identities around which temporary organization is established.…”