Projects as a focus for historical analysis: surveying the landscape

Click to increase image sizeClick to decrease image size

Notes

1. Defoe, “An Essay upon Projects,” 38.

2. Bredillet, “Blowing Hot and Cold,” 4. Interestingly, the World Bank’s website, which lists hundreds of its own projects, does not provide a working definition of ‘project.’

3. de Block, “Designing the Nation: The Belgian Railway Project.”

4. Brown, “Not the Eads Bridge,” 536.

5. Tomory, “Building the First Gas Network,” 77, 83–84.

6. Scranton, “Le management du projet.”

7. This work materialized in a two-phase conference, “Getting It Organized,” held at the Wharton School, University of Pennsylvania in Fall 2012 and Spring 2013. A set of revised essays are being evaluated for publication by a university press, at this writing. GIO derives from our close reading and reflection on fundamental texts in organizational studies and evolutionary economics, particularly Nelson and Winter, An Evolutionary Theory of Economic Change, and earlier, Cyert and March, A Behavioral Theory of the Firm. See also March, “Exploration and Exploitation.”

8. Boutinet, Anthropologie du Projet, 82, 88–120. For another helpful effort at conceptualizing projects, see Cova and Salle, “Project Marketing and Project Management.”

9. Defoe, Essay, 31.

10. Ibid., 33.

11. Those familiar with British history will recollect that only a few of Defoe’s projects emerged in the eighteenth century, for example multiple varieties of insurance. His prescience about roads, academies, pensions and the like remains noteworthy.

12. These terms are central to Karl Weick’s broad-ranging studies of management as social practice, viz., Sensemaking in Organizations, and Making Sense of the Organization.

13. See Latour and Woolgar, Laboratory Life; Latour, Science in Action; ----, Aramis; ---- and Peter Weibl, eds., Making Things Public; and the remarkable Laboratorium, the catalog of a multi-media exhibition on laboratories in which Latour was involved.

14. Lundin and Soderholm, “A Theory of the Temporary Organization,” 438; Cohen et al., “Garbage Can Model”; Turner and Muller, “On the nature of the project as a temporary organization”; Sahlin-Andersson and Soderholm, Beyond Project Management, 20.

15. Lundin and Soderholm, “Theory,” 438–444.

16. This suggests that a project has not an enterprise’s presumed autonomy. In practice, there are enterprises which live on/for projects, however, and these will have to have a place in any schematic. See Hobday, “The project-based organization.”

17. See Borneman, Rival Rails; and Brown-West, From Dream to Reality.

18. “Task” is the second T-item that Lundin and Soderholm adopted, but for my purposes it implies too concrete a focus and too much knowledge ability by planners and actors. Auditing accounts or reducing a product’s manufacturing cost are tasks (well-known methodology, standard referents, etc.); creating a successful New York play or musical is a target (lots of e.g. large numbers of soft variables, multiple unknowns), viz. “The Producers” (see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Producers_%28musical%29).

19. The players notion draws inspiration from actor-network theory, for which see Law and Hassard, Actor Network Theory and After.

20. I have avoided using the term “projects” when sketching temporary organizations, because while I believe that all business and technical projects are TOs, it is hardly clear that all TOs are business or technical projects. Consider a jury, a Boy Scout troop, a bowling league: all are intentional organizations with targets, differing memberships and life spans, teams, et al.

21. March, “The Study of Organizations and Organizing Since 1945”.

22. These are Project Management Journal (PMJ) and the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM).

23. This makes sense, because few operations or transactions managers need to know anything about projects, or at least imagine so. What wasn’t workable was project management writers’ 1970s/1980s thirst for scientistic, positivistic theories/models which, in essence, aimed to transform projects into tasks and functions transparent to line managers and executives. Projects reluctance to conform demonstrated their persistent elusiveness and viability. As Bruno Latour has noted: “Projects drift. That’s why we call them research projects.” [Aramis, 92.]

24. Jonas Soderlund and Sylvain Lenfle announced this issue of IJPM on November 30, 2010. It was published in July 2013 (volume 31).

25. However, such perspectives have arisen in other “neighborhoods.” See e.g. Engwall, “No project is an island”; Lisa Bud-Frierman et al., “Weetman Pearson in Mexico”; Bonaccorsi and Giuri, “When shakeout doesn’t occur”; Kreiner, “In Search of Relevance”; and Midler, “Projectification of the Firm.” One internal commentary is: Lehmann, “Connecting changes to projects.”

26. However, an important reflective study, focused on historical patterns in large construction projects is Morris and Hough, The Anatomy of Major Projects.

27. As I have argued elsewhere, similar silences surrounded innovative specialty manufacturers, supplying stylish consumer or high-specification capital markets, in favor of extensive attention to mass production corporations and transport or insurance giants.

See Scranton, Endless Novelty. For an alternative view of railroads, with fair attention to construction projects, see White, Railroaded.

28. For more on the rising tide of project work, see Lundin and Stablein, “Projectization of global firms,” and Cooke-Davies and Arzymanow, “The maturity of project management.”

29. http://www.economist.com/blogs/freeexchange/2010/03/volcker_recession.

30. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 58. It should be noted that David Harvey has explored this terrain with equal energy and insight, though here I do not rely on his approaches. Key texts include: A Brief History of Neoliberalism; The Enigma of Capital; and Seventeen Contradictions and the End of Capitalism.

31. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 25, 47, 115.

32. Nasaw, Andrew Carnegie, 580–585; Hounshell and Smith, Science and Corporate Strategy.

33. Bauman, Liquid Modernity, 13–14. Here the products referenced are consumer, not capital, goods.

34. Ibid., 150–151.

35. In the US, the late 70s crushing inflation, followed by the Volker recession and an epic credit crunch destabilized an increasingly inflexible production system, validating liquidity as a core competence and triggering spatial dislocations that destroyed much of the nation’s manufacturing, heavy and consumer industries alike. See Cowie, Stayin’ Alive; Judith Stein, Pivotal Decade. For machine tool examples, see Scranton, “A Rocky Road to Globalization.”

36. Bauman, “Liquid Modernity: A Lecture.”

37. Ibid., 6–7 (emphasis added). Though there is not room here to detail the resonances, Bauman’s approach resonates with the wide-ranging analysis of post-1970 management perspectives in Boltanski and Chiapello, The New Spirit of Capitalism. For example, they argue that “Henceforth people will not make a career but will pass from one project to another, their success on a given process allowing them access to different, more interesting projects.” (New Spirit, 93.) It’s not clear this optimism is justified, however.

38. Bauman, Identity.

39. For an analogous, but differently constituted spectrum, see Modig, “A continuum of organizations.”

40. Projects also operate on different spatial scales, ranging from local (inside firms, building sites) and regional (road systems, power grids), to national/international (NASA missions, creating Eurostar trains or the Chunnel) and transnational (drafting/sorting radio frequency spectra or devising European air traffic control), to indeterminate and distanciated (interfirm project teams, online ticketing) and fully placeless (Wikipedia and open source software development). Integrating spatiality with variants of form and scope is a task ahead.

41. Epstein, Torpedo.

42. See, on “The Pill” (oral contraception), Marsh and Ronner, The Fertility Doctor. Here an heir to the McCormick (reaper) family fortune personally funded research no established foundation would touch.

43. Cook, European Air Traffic Management.

44. The issue of exhibitions captures another dimension of organizations focused on projects. To the extent that these performances become routinized (as with Hollywood B movies of the 1930s/40s), they fall on the right-hand end of the project spectrum, being unimaginative, standardized, and repetitive, even though individually they select topics, scripts, audiences, and have budgets, project staff, and space/time allocations from central administrations. The difference independent film-making has made to the “studio” system is profound; a very rough analogy is exemplified by public art/performances and in a more interior way by museums inviting “guest curators” to bring fresh ideas and approaches to their interpretive projects.

45. Flyvbjerg et al., Megaprojects and Risk. For a creative rethinking of construction projects, see Bertelsen and Koskela, “Construction Beyond Lean.” Crucially these authors argue that “project management must perceive the project as a complex, dynamic phenomenon in a complex, non-linear setting.” (7).

46. See e.g. Keller, Stone and Webster, and Applebaum, Royal Blue, esp. Ch. 1, “The Thousand Yard Pour.” NASA served this general contractor role, as well, as did many US military agencies. For PM perspectives, see van Donk and Molloy, “From organizing as projects to projects as organizations”; and for France, Godier and Tapie, “The Contemporary French Model”.

47. Ramo, The Business of Science, 41–77. See also, Dyer, TRW.

48. Rogers and Larsen, “Winning at the Game: Intel and Silicon Valley Fever”.

49. Lewis, The New New Thing. For the genealogy of the Fairchild Semiconductor spinoffs, see “Fairchild’s Offspring.” For a critique of this dynamic, see Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class.

50. Cassidy, dot.con; J. David Kuo, dot.bomb; and Michael Wolff, Burn Rate.

51. Wright et al., “Serial Entrepreneurs.” See also Paul Gompers et al., “Skill vs. Luck.” The vogue for venture capital support of high-tech startups makes it appear that serial entrepreneurs (regarded as more likely to succeed than novice entrepreneurs) began appearing only in the 1980s. I think this dubious, but have not found research to flesh out that suspicion. Firms as projects are, I think, distinctive from efforts to corner financial markets, but they may be evident in early twentieth century promoters/boosters who created local banks, for example, in newly settled regions, sold out and moved on. For suggestive thoughts, see Petrick, “Parading as Millionaires.”

52. Indeed, an international group of construction history researchers, based in the UK, has sponsored an annual journal (Construction History) for nearly a quarter century. Their interests focus chiefly on architecture and preservation, however. Construction research also can benefit from a broad range of technical and trade journals, which date to the second half of the nineteenth century.

53. Many of these were classified, but have gradually been opened to researchers. All I believe have been microfilmed. See Neufeld, United States Air Force History: A guide, which lists over 1500 studies from the USAF history program.

54. Marschak, “The Role of Project Histories in the Study of R&D,” 3, 15–18. Many classic RAND studies are available for purchase or download at: http://www.rand.org/publications/aboutpub.html.

55. Sapolsky, The Polaris System Development. Given secrecy requirements, Sapolsky identified his military and industry informants only with code numbers.

56. General Electric Company, J79 Project History, Vol. II, ii.

57. An important resource for the dot.com era, however, has been created by David Kirsch at the University of Maryland, with funding from the Sloan Foundation. The Dot.Com Archive gathers business plans, correspondence, personal accounts and other documentation about defunct firms started during the Internet’s first generation. See http://www.businessplanarchive.org/ and http://www.dotcomarchive.org/.

58. A theoretically assertive collection of new perspectives is: Hodgson and Cicmil, eds., Making Projects Critical. See especially the challenging “Afterword” by Peter Morris, 335–347.

59. Soderlund, “Building theories of project management: past research”; Cicmil et al., “Rethinking Project Management.”

60. See Perminova et al., “Defining Uncertainty in Projects”; Geraldi et al., “The Titanic sunk, so what?”; Pich, “On Uncertainty, Ambiguity, and Complexity in Project Management”; Atkinson et al., “Fundamental uncertainties in projects.” For an auto industry-focused assessment, see Lenfle, “Exploration and project management.”

61. Lundin and Soderholm, “Conceptualising a projectified society”; Maylor et al., “From projectification to programmification”; Midler, “Projectification of the firm” (n19).

62. Epstein, Torpedo.

63. As a starting point, see Garel, “Pour une histoire de la gestion de projet”.