Project and strategic management scholarship recognises the importance of project capabilities that allow firms to deliver projects. Although work on project capabilities is a fast-growing line of ...inquiry, little is still known about how clients assemble project capabilities to achieve operational outcomes in inter-organisational settings. This study seeks to apply theoretical work on project capabilities to the domain of infrastructure project delivery in order to understand how the assembly of project capabilities in temporary inter-organisational settings contributes to the delivery of operational outcomes. The empirical enquiry takes place in the context of the delivery of London Heathrow Terminal 2. Through an inductive theory building approach drawing upon semi-structured interviews with client-side project leadership, internal documents, publicly available data and ongoing engagement with the field, we identified three key capability-enabling mechanisms that help explain the genesis of project capabilities in inter-organisational settings: (1) reconfiguring project capabilities, (2) adapting project capabilities and (3) maintaining project capabilities. We discuss and expand these findings by engaging with theoretical ideas from project studies, and mainstream strategy, organisation, and management research to induce a dynamic model that can be helpful to guide future research, policy and management practices relating to the client side management of project capabilities.
•Paper focuses on project capabilities (PCs) for operational outcomes in inter-organisational settings.•Paper presents an inductive qualitative study of the delivery of London Heathrow Terminal 2.•Findings suggest three key capability-enabling mechanisms in the case project.•Findings are used to develop a dynamic PC model for operational outcomes in inter-organisational settings.•Paper concludes with theoretical contributions for project and strategic management scholarship.
Amidst epidemics of youth alienation and cultural polarization, community-based artistic practices are sprouting up around the world as antidotes to policies of austerity and social exclusion. ...Rejecting the radical individualism of the neoliberal era, many artistic projects promote collectivity and togetherness in navigating challenges and constructing shared futures. The Art of Collectivity is about how one such creative social program deployed this approach in service of a post-neoliberal vision. Focusing on a national social circus initiative launched by a newly elected Ecuadorean government to help actualize its “citizens' revolution," the book explores the intersection between global cultural politics, participatory arts, collective health, and social transformation. The authors include scholars and practitioners of community arts, humanities, social sciences, and health sciences from the Global North and Global South. Sensitive to hierarchical binaries such as research/practice, north/south, and art/science, they work together to provide a multifaceted analysis of the way cultural politics shape policy, pedagogy, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as their socio-cultural and health-related effects. The largest study of social circus to date, combining detailed quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, The Art of Collectivity is a timely contribution to the study of cultural policies, critical pedagogies, collective art-making, and community development.Amidst epidemics of youth alienation and cultural polarization, community-based artistic practices are sprouting up around the world as antidotes to policies of austerity and social exclusion. Rejecting the radical individualism of the neoliberal era, many artistic projects promote collectivity and togetherness in navigating challenges and constructing shared futures. The Art of Collectivity is about how one such creative social program deployed this approach in service of a post-neoliberal vision. Focusing on a national social circus initiative launched by a newly elected Ecuadorean government to help actualize its “citizens' revolution," the book explores the intersection between global cultural politics, participatory arts, collective health, and social transformation. The authors include scholars and practitioners of community arts, humanities, social sciences, and health sciences from the Global North and Global South. Sensitive to hierarchical binaries such as research/practice, north/south, and art/science, they work together to provide a multifaceted analysis of the way cultural politics shape policy, pedagogy, and aesthetic sensibilities, as well as their socio-cultural and health-related effects. The largest study of social circus to date, combining detailed quantitative, qualitative, and arts-based research, The Art of Collectivity is a timely contribution to the study of cultural policies, critical pedagogies, collective art-making, and community development.
•Large-scale projects extend over and operate in highly complex and dynamic institutional fields.•Large-scale projects influence and are influenced by their institutional fields in a recursive ...process.•Institutional influence is fundamentally reflected under cultural-cognitive elements and the vertical dimensions – the industry – that entails various types of authorities.•Managing these projects encompasses temporary adjustments, symbolic legitimation in response to the institutional field's complexity.
Heeding recent calls for more studies on the relationship between projects and institutions, this paper reports on a collaborative case study to shed light on the recursive relations of large-scale projects and their institutional fields. Given the industry as the field-level institution, this study explores how two project organizations experienced the industry changes, its influence on the arrangement of large-scale projects, and the management response used to legitimize these arrangements. The qualitative secondary data analysis of two High-Speed rail projects in Spain and The Netherlands is based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. This paper provides the institutional fields’ contextual detail and deepens our understanding of temporal institutional complexity that bound large-scale project arrangements. The findings suggest that in both cases the management responses altered across time and evolved depending on the salience of the institutional pressure, through the interplay with 1) regulative, 2) normative, and 3) dynamic cultural-cognitive forces, resulting in cycles of project legitimacy.
Political corruption is especially relevant for large-scale projects because of their popularity among politicians and citizens alike, as well as their inherent qualities. The goal of this study is ...to find out about the causes, methods, occurrences, and effects of political corruption in large-scale infrastructure projects in Nigeria. The investigation uses a case analysis of Lagos-Ibadan Highway and was divided into two stages: the 1999–2009 political era and the 2010–2019 political era. The information was gathered through document and report analysis. The symptomatic investigation of the political corruption of the Lagos-Ibadan Highway was guided by a conceptual model based on symptoms. Within-case and cross-case comparative theme analysis were performed on the dataset. The investigation indicated how the occurrence of patronage, influence peddling, embezzlement, and biased law enforcement can explain political corruption in the highway project. The investigation resulted in a better understanding of the reasons for the project's failure and abandonment. The knowledge can be used to prevent political corruption in public projects and to lay the groundwork for long-term infrastructure development. This study was limited because it was unable to provide unambiguous evidence to prove that political corruption occurred in the case study.
Contesting Development Barron, Patrick; Woolcock, Michael; Diprose, Rachael
02/2011
eBook
This pathbreaking book analyzes a highly successful participatory development program in Indonesia, exploring its distinctive origins and design principles and its impacts on local conflict dynamics ...and social institutions.
Governments throughout the developing world have witnessed a proliferation of non-governmental, non-profit organizations (NGOs) providing services like education, healthcare and piped drinking water ...in their territory. In Allies or Adversaries, Jennifer N. Brass explains how these NGOs have changed the nature of service provision, governance, and state development in the early twenty-first century. Analyzing original surveys alongside interviews with public officials, NGOs and citizens, Brass traces street-level government-NGO and state-society relations in rural, town and city settings of Kenya. She examines several case studies of NGOs within Africa in order to demonstrate how the boundary between purely state and non-state actors blurs, resulting in a very slow turn toward more accountable and democratic public service administration. Ideal for scholars, international development practitioners, and students interested in global or international affairs, this detailed analysis provides rich data about NGO-government and citizen-state interactions in an accessible and original manner.
With larger projects it makes sense to involve a project controller who will competently secure the client's interests and effectively ensure that the client's objectives are met throughout the ...project. To achieve this, it is not sufficient to be experienced in the design and execution of construction projects. Specialist project management skills are a mandatory requirement for the success of a project. The project controller is pivotal to the success of the project; together with the client he will define the objectives of the project, develop organizational structures, and be instrumental in appointing project participants. He will assist with the proper fulfilment of contracts and with the documentation of design decisions. The Basics Project Control volume presents, in a practical way, all duties and services involved in project management.
Large-scale projects have grown in size, quantity, and complexity; thus, measuring project complexity has become an integral part of project management. This study used the task and organization (TO) ...perspective to propose a measurement model of project complexity through hidden work that reflected the dynamic “emerging” effect of influencing factors on project complexity. TO measures were identified and mapped with attribute settings of ProjectSim software. The proposed TO measurement method was then expressed as hidden workload divided by direct workload. Overall, 12 hypotheses on the relationship between TO measures and hidden workload were put forth. The Shanghai World Expo construction project was chosen to test the synchronous relationship between hidden workload and project complexity as well as to validate the proposed method. The measurement method could truly reflect the project complexity and therefore can be used to manage the complexity of large-scale projects.
•We explore a reasonable measurement model from the task and organizational (TO) perspective.•The model can reflect the dynamic “emerging” effect of micro-factors on project complexity.•This model measures project complexity effectively from the perspective of hidden workload.
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