The other side of projects: the case for critical project studies

International Journal of Project Management

2010

This paper offers a theoretical commentary on some of the new directions in project management theory offered by the critical projects movement. Specifically it examines the implications of a specific approach to knowledge -dialectics -that is implicitly mobilized within this movement.It examines the dialectic provenance of much of this thinking: dialectics is afforded an implicit importance within critical project management as it offers a more reflexive approach to both understand and manage projects. In pursuing this examination, this paper positions the critical projects movement within a broader set of critical studies of reflexive management. We examine how these understandings of reflexivity might inform project management itself and help shed light on some important assumptions that critical project thinkers will need to address whilst using dialectic thinking. The aim is to open up new debates within these modes of thinking, and to encourage further explorations of their implications for understandings of practice amongst those interested in more reflexive approaches to project management practice and research.

Section: Concluding Commentsmentioning

confidence: 70%

A consideration of reflexive practice within the critical projects movement

International Journal of Project Management

2010

“…Hence the Project File can, on occasion, provide an exceptional conduit through which to exact stress, de-motivation, blame, longer-hours, oppression and alienation over practitioners whose projects fail to perform -exactly the pernicious consequences of project work criticized by Hodgson and Cicmil (2008) and Cicmil et al (2009a). The agency of the BPIM, and the audit, is constructed through the obdurate incoherence that the project file enacts.…”

Section: The Project File As Fractionally Coherentmentioning

confidence: 99%

Who reads the project file? Exploring the power effects of knowledge tools in construction project management

Construction Management and Economics

2010

Various critical authors have questioned the salience, efficacy and power effects of formal project management bodies of knowledge (PMBoKs). As a result project management knowledge tools are increasingly being conceptualized along more flexible, adaptable, reflexive, democratic and informal terms. A central driver for this shift is that PM knowledge will be more relevant and useful for practitioners if it can be reflexively tailored to fit local project scenarios, emergent problems and different communities of practice, rather than projects being structured to fit generic "best practice" ideals. Hence new knowledge tools increasingly would appear critical to alleviate various detrimental power effects associated with bureaucratic knowledge practices within project-based industries, not least construction. This assumption is examined through a study of a formal and codified project management knowledge tool -a project file -within a small team of project practitioners in a large civil engineering consultancy. Various concepts of power related to Actor Network Theory (ANT) are mobilised to understand how nonhuman artefacts can enact power and knowledge in nuanced ways within organizations. This theoretically informed study will aid both researchers and practitioners interested in the consequences of developing prescriptive or reflexive project management knowledge within construction contexts and beyond.

“…Despite important critiques of seemingly politically passive technologies, artefacts and knowledges (e.g., Foucault, 1975;1980;Habermas, 1987) there remains, as Hodgson and Cicmil (2007a) acknowledge, a deficiency of critically minded empirical studies of formal processes within project-based organisations. Such work is important because it can help explore the power and potential of formal knowledge to shape rather than merely describe organisational realities.…”

Section: Introductionmentioning

confidence: 98%

'Blank figures' and the material organisation of knowledge: experiences of a 'project file'

2011

IJMCP

In this paper, we seek to develop an understanding of the material organisation of knowledge through the milieu of a construction project and the artefact of a 'project file'. We draw upon two concepts developed within science and technology studies (STS) to try and account for its life:1 mutable mobiles 2 boundary objects.An element of the power and potential of the project file can be captured by each of these concepts, yet each is shown here to be insufficient to fully articulate the multiple organisational realities that the project file helps act out. This leads us to conclude that this object might be better understood through the concept of the 'blank figure': an object whose autonomous under-determined material form is crucial to the performance of broader processes of organisational stasis and change, as well as knowledge of similarity and difference.