During the last couple of decades, we have witnessed a proliferation of the project as an organizational solution in sectors as diverse as IT, housing, social services, education and culture. Despite ...a growing interest in the phenomenon, we know surprisingly little of how processes of public sector projectification unfold in practice, especially at local government level. This article uses an institutional logic perspective to illustrate and argue that public sector projectification can be understood and conceptualized as the enactment of multiple, co-existing institutional logics, but where one particular logic is of growing importance - the project logic. It is argued that even though the project form is often perceived as more flexible than that of the bureaucracy, the practical outcome seldom represents a radical break with traditional, bureaucratic management models. Rather, it appears to aid a rediscovery and reuse of central bureaucratic practices and procedures such as reporting, documentation and standardization.
This article studies trade union revitalization within broader trends of projectification that marks a shift towards project work and its temporary organization. It accordingly compares instances of ...project-based organizational restructuring in post-crisis Estonia and Slovenia in order to identify their drivers, power resources employed and their outcomes and wider impact. In both countries, project-based organizational restructuring was driven by proactive activists capable of innovatively utilizing available power resources and new opportunity structures that had opened up with EU integration. While Slovenian unions utilized a more diverse set of power resources and revitalization strategies, activists in both countries stimulated trade union project-based organizational restructuring in order to initiate and sustain their main, context specific, revitalization strategies. Findings also show that project-based organizational restructuring can be an interim phase for unions to increase their resources and use them to turn their revitalization strategies into more permanent ones.
Purpose
– The purpose of this paper is to establish an understanding of what projectification means, how projectification is driven forward, as well as what the consequences of projectification are ...in an European Union (EU) context, and in the public sector in general.
Design/methodology/approach
– The research methods consist of a literature review as well as a meta-analysis of key EU policy documents related to the functioning of regional development and projects. The paper shows that structural developments brought forth by a projectification in a public sector context have significant consequences.
Findings
– Without contextually sensitive interlinking mechanisms between temporary and permanent structures projects risk losing their flexible and innovative qualities, and may fragment the ability of permanent organisations for maintaining coordination and continuity. The findings suggests that the proximity of permanent organisations, the discretion of entrepreneurship, the political priority of the task, the inclusion of competencies and interests, and the quality of transfer mechanisms are essential variables in explaining the outcome of temporary organisations in a politico-administrative context.
Research limitations/implications
– The paper contributes to the literature on projects in a public sector context and suggests that comparative research on the drivers and consequences of public sector projectification in supranational as well as national contexts is needed.
Practical implications
– The increasing requirements for applied project management skills and methods as criteria for project selection in the public sector highlight the importance of a broader theoretical and practical understanding of projectification.
Originality/value
– The paper adds a new dimension to the projectification debate by presenting a descriptive and conceptual discussion about the consequences of public sector projectification in an EU context. It complements an existing theory of the temporary organisation and takes the first steps towards a theory applicable to projectification in a public context.
The study of short-term projects in policy implementation has lately gained ground among scholars of environmental governance and public administration. The increasing reliance on and prevalence of ...projects, or 'projectification', has spurred critical debates on the ability of projects to contribute to long-term goals, including sustainability, as well as institutional change. Yet, the literature on projectification lacks specificity in terms of how projects are understood, how the relationship between projects and permanent organizations looks like, and how projects can influence institutional orders. The aim of this paper is to systematize the literature in order to uncover the processes of transforming project outputs into institutional change. Three models of projectified governance - mechanistic, organic, and adaptive - is presented, providing a conceptual apparatus that advances the study of projects in environmental policy and governance. The paper argues that the adaptive model, with its reliance on multi-scalar networks for the coordination of project activities and knowledge, shows most promise in achieving institutional change to address complex environmental problems.
The projectified self is suggested in this article as a way to advance emancipatory project studies toward improved understandings of how individuals in contemporary neoliberal societies are urged to ...become self-controlling, self-improving, self-commercializing, life-compartmentalizing, and deadline driven. We propose (1) a developed theoretical foundation for studies of the projectified self, based on recent writings on enterprising selves, and (2) the notion of prosumption as a concept for how the worthiness of this projectified self is constructed in a simultaneous process of project-based production and consumption. This is discussed in relation to the on-going studies of social media entrepreneurs.
This article discusses the effects of two trends in contemporary biomedicine that have so far been largely addressed separately: the steering of fields through programmatic “buzzwords” and the ...projectified nature of contemporary health research, care, and promotion. Drawing on a case study of an Austrian diversity-sensitive health promotion project related to obesity prevention, we show how the articulation of these trends—governance by buzzwords and projectification—often leads to not unproblematic and often paradoxical outcomes. Buzzwords such as “diversity” become especially important in an innovation-driven environment encouraging a promissory rhetoric. At the same time, the project form shapes and restricts how buzzwords (as typically vague terms that need to be fleshed out) are articulated and translated into a specific project design. In our case study of an obesity prevention program, the need to translate diversity into a “doable” project encouraged the identification of seemingly clearly delineated target groups and thus promoted a rather narrow understanding of diversity, which stands in tension with much more fluid and context-sensitive ways of performing “diversity.” We show how actors grapple with these paradoxes. This restricts the full power a buzzword such as diversity could achieve in terms of social justice.
Global health development projects are inherently governed by bounded, temporal and linear time frames: the initiation, implementation and ending of time-limited interventions. This projectification ...of global health programmes has wide-reaching consequences as global health projects, often unsustainable and produces both new life possibilities and uncertain futures. This article highlights the temporal effects of the global health agenda on the primary health system rebuilding efforts in Sierra Leone. Attention is paid to how the projectification of public health programmes affected the primary healthcare management in a district in the southern region of Sierra Leone. Throughout this article, I develop the theoretical concept of chronicity of disruptive project rhythms where local public healthcare actors encounter project disruptions on a continuum of chronic lack. I base this concept on Manderson and Smith-Morris’s definition of chronicity of illness experience, which is marked by punctuated episodes of acute sickness, where chronic patients are temporally transmuted into acute patients, while at the same time continuing to suffer from their ongoing chronic ailments. Drawing on 14 months of ethnographic research, I show how a district health management team (DHMT) contested the bounded time frames of public health funding; how waiting time for funding impacted the operation of the DHMT and, by extension, the district health system as a whole and how DHMT employees and other actors within the health system employed time-tricking strategies to resist this project time.
Conceptualizations of time and work in the higher education context are increasingly atomized, as time is seen as measurable, quantifiable, and limited. This growing phenomenon, seen through the lens ...of projectification, has the power to reconceptualize how university leaders and the academic workforce consider and utilize their time and work, leading to significant consequences in daily university life. In this article, I will introduce and discuss this dominant and yet infrequently studied lens of projectified time and highlight how it has come to shape academic teaching practices, curriculum design, and university culture. In the second part of the article, I will offer an alternative lens that contests assumptions found within projectification such as that all work can be compartmentalized into specific projects. To exemplify this alternate lens further, I will also use a fictional narrative approach to showcase how an academic may rebuff projectified time in daily work.
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