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Abstract

The theory of the temporary organization is paradigmatic in project organizing research but has had relatively little influence in organization research more generally. We argue that this theory needs to be developed to address why projects exist in addition to what they are. We make this argument by drawing on Cyert and March’s behavioral theory of the firm in shaping organization theory and pose an action theory of the project as its dynamic complement. This theoretical advance draws on Schütz’ distinction between action and behavior to bridge the theory of the temporary organization and the behavioral theory of the firm.

Keywords

action theory of the project project organization theory theory of the temporary organization behavioral theory of the firm future-perfect thinking

Introduction

Development of theory in project organizing research has reached new levels of sophistication in recent years. At the heart of these contributions is the concept of the project as a temporary organization. The classic theoretical statement of this concept (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995) elegantly synthesized earlier research on temporary organizations (Bryman et al., 1987; Goodman & Goodman, 1976) with that on project life cycles (King & Cleland, 1983; Morris, 1994) to provide a persuasive statement of project organization as temporary organization. Subsequent reviews and contributions (Bakker, 2010; Bakker et al., 2016; Burke & Morley, 2016; Jacobsson et al., 2015; Söderlund, 2004, 2011; Turner & Müller, 2003) have reinforced this perspective and it has been widely influential in shaping the research agenda.

However, this impressive theoretical advance has had relatively little impact outside the research field of project studies (Kwak & Anbari, 2009; Locatelli et al., 2023). This lack of impact is particularly noticeable in the important new field of transition studies, where a recent systematic review of sustainability transition projects (Terenzi et al., 2024) found little reference to the project organizing literature, and a recent agenda-setting review did not include projects in that research agenda (Köhler et al., 2019). Whether broader socioeconomic developments are articulated in terms of the project economy (Nieto-Rodriguez, 2021) or the project society (Lundin et al., 2015) is a matter of live debate but either way project organizations form increasingly numerous features of the wider organizational landscape. So this lack of attention in mainstream organization studies to the theory of the temporary project organization is puzzling. Yet, adjacent disciplines do indeed fail to learn from each other, and one important reason for this is the lack of bridging concepts (Davies et al., 2018). We propose the action theory of the project in complement to the behavioral theory of the firm as one such bridging concept with the aspiration of moving forward research in both project and firm organization by bridging between them with the concept of future-perfect thinking (Schütz, 1967). Our aspiration, therefore, is to develop an action theory of the project that can stand in distinction and complement to the behavioral theory of the firm and thereby advance both fields in mutual interaction.

Presently, the concept of the temporary organization has an important limitation in its potential role as a bridging concept. While it captures succinctly what a temporary project organization is (Jacobsson et al., 2015), it tells us less about why it exists and how it interfaces with the permanent organizations that provide it with the resources required to deliver on its mission. The aim of this contribution to the special issue in honor of Christophe Midler is, therefore, to develop a more comprehensive theory of why temporary project organizations exist and how they interact with the permanent firms that resource them with finance (from project owners) and human and material resources (from project suppliers). This is important because it then allows us to bridge between the field of project organization research and the field of organization research more generally with the aspiration to enrich both.

After a brief note positioning this contribution with other theories of project organization, our argument will start with a review of the theory of the temporary organization (TTO) and its limitations for engaging with mainstream organization theory. We then move onto the behavioral theory of the firm (BTF), originally published in 1963 (Cyert & March, 1993), which was selected for two reasons. First, BTF is one of the most important contributions to organization theory over the last 70 years (Gavetti et al., 2012; Gavetti et al., 2007) and was influential on many other theories of organization of the firm. Second, leading contributions to the development of research in project organization (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Midler, 1995) have used it to sharpen their own arguments. The article will then move on to critique the BTF with its focus on short-term satisficing and hence lack of attention to innovation and longer-term transformation and thereby identify the opportunity for a bridging concept (Davies et al., 2018) between the established theories of the temporary and the permanent organization. We will build this bridge by deploying the distinction (Schütz, 1967) between behavior as current-focused satisficing and action as future-oriented projecting. From these solid theoretical bases, the article will propose the axioms of an action theory of the project as the principal means by which organizations and, therefore, societies conceive and achieve desirable future states, thereby answering the question of why they exist. Theoretical implications, research themes suggested by the theory, and conclusions follow.

Theories of Project Organization

The field of organization research is replete with multiple theories purporting to explain various aspects of organization. These theories are rarely of the refutable Popperian kind (Shapira, 2011) in which formal hypotheses are tested to destruction, and only rarely are they formal models and simulations. Typically, they are more akin to a conceptual framework that “(1) provides a structure to organize observations, and (2) describes the structure in a clear and precise manner (Shapira, 2011, p. 1314).” They are typically the result of disciplined imagination (Weick, 1989). A major issue with many theories of organization is their focus on particular aspects of organization whereby they lose focus on the organization itself as a socioeconomic actor (Elder-Vass, 2010; King et al., 2010) and thereby vitiate their distinctive claim to be a theory of organization.

Project studies is similarly replete with multiple theories of organization that can usefully be grouped into schools (Söderlund, 2004, 2011; Turner et al., 2013) providing multiple conceptual frameworks from which the researcher can choose. Many of these, too, tend to lose the focus on the project organization as the unit of analysis in favor of addressing aspects of project organizing without systematic reference back to the central entity at the heart of the research field—the temporary project organization. Our focus is therefore on the meso-level of project studies (Geraldi & Söderlund, 2018), and we will show in the discussion how our focus on this level of temporary organizing benefits the research field as a whole. In particular, we will show how this conceptual framework allows us to move beyond what a project is to how it interfaces with permanent organizations and why it exists analogously to the theory of the firm.

The article will proceed as follows. We first review the development of the theory of the temporary project organization, stressing an aspect of that theory that has been largely overlooked in later research, which is the importance of action-based entrepreneurialism (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). Next, we turn to a matching review of the theory of the (implicitly) permanent organization, the theory of the firm, with a particular emphasis upon the behavioral theory of the firm, which has shaped significantly the theory of organizations over the last 70 years (Cyert & March, 1963; Gavetti et al., 2012). On these two foundations we construct the bridge between them by drawing on the profound distinction between action and behavior (Schütz, 1967) and its contemporary influence on the sociological theory of agency (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998). We conceptualize this bridge as the action theory of the project as an essential complement to the behavioral theory of the firm. In the remainder of the article, we draw out some of the wider theoretical implications of our argument and suggest a future research agenda. We thereby address our research questions of why project organizations exist and how they relate to the permanent organizations that resource them by providing a bridging theory between the two main types of organization—permanent and temporary—that populate our socioeconomic landscape.

A Theory of the Temporary Organization (TTO)

Recent theorizing on project organizations has focused on projects as temporary organizations (Bakker, 2010; Burke & Morley, 2016; Turner & Müller, 2003). In the classic statement (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995), the temporary organization is action-based about “getting things done.” The underpinning concepts are firstly time, because the temporary organization is determinate (Winch, 2014) with a preplanned termination date in contrast to the permanent organization’s indeterminacy. Thus, temporality is a central concept in project organizing (Vaagaasar et al., 2023). Second, task, because the project is orientated toward a specified goal to get a particular thing done (Morris, 1994). Third, team, because projects are done by people working in teams through teamwork on the fly (Edmondson, 2012), or more frequently teams of teams in distributed network organizations (Carter & DeChurch, 2014). Finally, transition because at termination of the project something exists that did not exist before. In order to go through this transition and deliver the intended outcomes, the project goes through a phased life cycle, starting with action-based entrepreneurialism, underpinned by a microfoundation of homo projecticus (Jacobsson & Söderholm, 2022), and the progressive fragmentation and reintegration of the project organization. Thus, the project organization can be defined as a “création collective, organiseé dans le temps et l’espace, en vue d’une demande” (Giard & Midler, 1993, p. 18) (“a collective enterprise, organized in time and space, oriented towards a purpose”).

As a description of what a temporary organization is and the dynamics of its life cycle, the theory of the temporary organization is persuasive, but as a theory of project organization it has a serious limitation. This was already apparent in a contemporary contribution to project organizing theory on the projectification of the firm (Midler, 1995), which captured succinctly a body of research in the transformation of manufacturing firms in the latter part of the 20th century. Major contributions to this body of research include new product development in the auto industry (Clark & Fujimoto, 1990; Cusumano & Nobeoka, 1998), pharmaceuticals (Pisano, 1997), and manufacturing more widely (Bowen, 1994; Giard & Midler, 1993; Winch, 1994). As is well illustrated by the Twingo case (Midler, 1993), projectification is a process of change within the permanent firm, not the temporary project. Further research in the theory of the temporary organization (Bakker et al., 2016; Jacobsson et al., 2013) found that its interfaces with the permanent organization were crucial elements missing from the original conceptualization because no project is an island (Engwall, 2003; Winch, 2014). The fundamental reason for this is that the project, unlike the firm, is not an autonomous actor but dependent upon resources from permanent organizations to exist. In particular, it draws on both project owner organizations (whether public or private) for financial resources and project-based firms supplying the human and technical resources that allow it to act. Temporary project organizations are, therefore, both determinate and dependent on permanent project organizations (Winch et al., 2022).

This critique suggests we need a development of the theory of the temporary organization that is aligned more clearly with the theory of the firm as a permanent organization—a theory of projects and firms in mutual interaction (Giard & Midler, 1993). Both the principal contributions to the theory of the temporary organization position themselves as critiquing BTF and moving on to an action theory that does not place decision-making as central (Jacobsson et al., 2013; Lundin & Söderholm, 1995) or focusing more on the singularities associated with new product development (Midler, 1995). So, it is to a closer examination of BTF that we now turn as one of the most influential theories of firm organization over the last 70 years and one against which arguments for both the temporary organization and projectification were sharpened.

A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTF)

The theory of the firm lies at the core of microeconomic explanations of how the capitalist economy works and evolves, yet it has typically treated the organization of the firm as something of a black box production function that minimizes inputs and maximizes outputs to make a profit (Jensen & Meckling, 1976). BTF provided considerable empirical and theoretical insight into that black box, and thereby made major contributions to the subsequent development of both organization studies and strategic management (Gavetti et al., 2012). Its theoretical perspective drew on the pragmatist stream in organization studies associated with the Carnegie School (Gavetti et al., 2007).

BTF set out to provide a behavioral perspective on the organization of the firm, drawing on the current state of research at the time in both economics (Cyert’s specialism) and organization studies (March’s specialism). It worked through how organizational goals shaped organizational expectations and hence the choices that organizations make to achieve those goals. It viewed the organization as a coalition of interests that made these decisions by trading off alternatives that achieved the interests of the members of that coalition through standard operating procedures.

Its central tenets can be summarized thus:

The firm is an appropriate unit for research enquiry;

The central process within the firm is decision-making;

Those decisions are made under uncertainty and hence bounded rationality, and are therefore satisficed rather than optimized; and

The firm’s goals at any point in time are constituted by a temporary coalition of interests.

These tenets imply a focus on particular behavioral insights:

Conflict around goals is amenable to quasi-resolution;

Standard operating procedures are the principal means of uncertainty avoidance;

Organizational search is orientated toward problem-solving; and

Organizational learning is central.

Overall,

Once organizational objectives and decision strategies are determined, the organization can be viewed as an information-processing and decision-rendering system (Cyert & March, 1993, p. 21).

There are, however, significant limitations to BTF from a contemporary perspective. Perhaps most notably from our concerns here, these are that:

Perhaps because of … [BTF’s] opposition against the rationality assumptions of standard economics, the anticipation of distant futures, or of the consequences of distant courses of action, is largely absent (Gavetti et al., 2012, p. 9).

Decision makers in BTF are focused on short-term problem-solving searches for solutions that satisfice against largely static organizational goals rather than longer-term problem-framing that supports longer-term organizational aspirations for the future. Or, more bluntly, BTF contains no theory of innovation and change, a charge that the authors admit is fair (Cyert & March, 1993, p. 189). We now turn to addressing that issue.

However, before we do that, a brief note on the philosophy of science underpinning our approach is useful. Perspectives on project organization—as in organization theory more generally—can be classified on two dimensions: a nominalist to realist dimension and an agency to structure dimension (Burrell & Morgan, 1979; Winch et al., 2023). We here move beyond the nominalist to realist dimension by adopting a critical realist philosophy of science (Bhaskar, 2008) in which our epistemological knowledge of an ontologically real world is inherently limited. We move beyond the agency/structure dimension by adopting a morphogenetic approach (Archer, 1995) that holds them as most mutually constituted and ontologically distinct in a dualism, which requires that structure and agency are analyzed both separately and in interaction through time (Archer, 1993). On this basis, Archer (1995) cautions against the downwards conflationism of positivist approaches, the upwards conflationism of constructivist approaches, and the central conflationism of practice approaches.

Projecting Desirable Futures: Future-Perfect Thinking (FPT)

The temporary and the permanent introduce two very different principles of coordination into organizing (Giard & Midler, 1993). We have presented a theory of the temporary organization and a theory of the permanent organization and also indicated their strengths and weaknesses; we now turn to the theoretical insights that will provide the theoretical basis for an action theory of the project that will allow the interfaces between the temporary and the permanent in project organizing to be understood. In doing so, we will also provide a theoretical underpinning for the concept of action-based entrepreneurialism from the theory of the temporary organization, which in the original Lundin and Söderholm paper is merely asserted. Our first step is to distinguish between action and behavior (Schütz, 1951, 1967; 1973; Winch & Sergeeva, 2022). Behavior is essentially reactive to emerging situations, whereas action is orientated toward preconceived goals.

Any conscious experiences arising from spontaneous activity and directed towards another self are, by our definition, social behavior. If this social behavior is antecedently projected, it is social action (Schütz, 1967, p. 146).

Thus, purposive action, as opposed to reactive behavior, has the nature of a protention or a vision of a completed future state, which gives present meaning to the subsequent action that will bring forth that future state. While the protention is cognitive in that it exists as a perceived state in the present, it is qualitatively different from a retention, which is inherently a perception about the past from the point of view of the present. Protensions therefore provide the future-orientated in-order-to motive for an action in the present, whereas retentions provide the past-orientated because motive for action in that same present. However, because the protention, like a retention, is perceived as completed, “the planned act has the temporal character of pastness” (1967, p. 61) and is therefore thought of in the future perfect tense. For example, this is formulated as “I will have completed” in English, “j’aurai terminé” in French, or “Ich werde beendet haben” in German.

Future-perfect thinking (FPT) is distinguished from fantasy by the feasibility of the act:

The possibility of executing the project requires…. that only ends and means believed by me to be within my actual or potential reach may be taken into account by my projecting…. that all the chances and risks have been weighed in accordance with my present knowledge of possible occurrences of this kind in the real world (Schütz, 1951, p. 165).

This conceptual distinction between action and behavior has broad theoretical implications in sociology. The contemporary theory of agency and its inherent temporality (Emirbayer & Mische, 1998) draws on this distinction to argue that human agency is fundamentally temporal with a chordal triad of the iterative, which reflects on the past; the projective, which generates the future; and the evaluative in which experience is contextualized in the present. Within this temporal framework, the projective has a dominant tone of narrative construction. Temporality and its associated anticipations can be conceptualized at three levels (Tavory & Eliasoph, 2013). The first level is the protentions that people experience in daily interactions. The second level is the trajectories that people move through temporally as they make their way in society, which have two elements: narratives and projects. Narratives help people make sense of the future, whereas projects are how they move toward that anticipated future. The final level is the landscapes, which form the structured temporal elements of life such as progression on an annual rhythm through the education system or the structure of the calendar itself.

There are many implications of these theoretical contributions for research on project organizations and, indeed, well beyond. First and foremost, they challenge the idea that projects are fundamentally emergent processes, a perspective that appears to originate with Heidegger’s temporality (Blattner, 2005; Heidegger, 1962, 1971) and his insistence that “projecting has nothing to do with comporting oneself towards a plan that has been thought out (Heidegger, 1962, p. 185). Drawing on Schütz, we can reassert precisely the opposite—that projects have everything to with comporting oneself toward a plan that has been thought out (Lindkvist et al., 1998; Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Pitsis et al., 2003). Second, as the sociology of agency argues, it shows the central importance of narratives in how we think out those plans when projecting desired futures states (Sergeeva & Ninan, 2023; Sergeeva & Winch, 2021), because narratives are how protentions are socialized (Winch & Sergeeva, 2022). Third, it allows us to locate more precisely the conceptual limitations of BTF and thereby to identify the contribution of an action theory of the project to organization theory. From the perspective of Schütz’s theory, the title of BTF is well-chosen—it is fundamentally about organizational behavior and not about organizational action. For instance, the concept of problemistic search in response to immediate problems lies at the heart of BTF. Organizational goals are set by such problems, and satisficed solutions are found as quickly as possible to ensure delivery against those problems, avoiding uncertainty and quasi-resolving conflict along the way. This suggests that the behavioral theory of how the firm sustains itself operationally in the present needs to be complemented by an action theory of how the firm projects itself into the future and thereby achieves innovation and growth. Cyert and March themselves recognized this limitation of BTF in the epilogue to their 1993 second edition. We now turn to drawing these disparate theoretical threads together in some axioms that give our proposed conceptual framework the desired structure and precision.

Axioms for an Action Theory of the Project

These discussions give us the basic axioms of an action theory of the project. We take from BTF the four central tenets already identified above:

The project organization through its entire life cycle is the principal level of analysis. This whole-organization level of analysis can, of course, be complemented by higher and lower levels of analysis (Daniel & Daniel, 2023; Geraldi & Söderlund, 2018). At higher levels, projects play a central role in creating our collective future variously as interventions in nature (Whyte & Mottee, 2022), as drivers of sustainability transitions (Sovacool et al., 2022), or as central to economic development (Hirschman, 1967). At lower levels of analysis the lived experience of projects (Cicmil et al., 2006), focusing on what project managers actually do (Laufer et al., 2015; Winch & Kelsey, 2005), remains a crucial area for research, but these contributions need to specify where the unit of analysis is located within the overall project organization and its life cycle. However, just as the theory of the firm plays a central role in research on the way in which firms both drive economic development and shape the lived experience of those that work in them, the project organization level of analysis remains the key one.

Decision-making is at the center of projecting. The focus on decision-making has been rather lost in project organizing research, perhaps based on a perspective that argues that decisions as such do not exist (Weick, 1995), which has also been applied to project organizing research (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). It is on this point that TTO and BTF are incompatible. TTO clearly rejects this concept in favor of action for reasons that are unclear. It may be that it is a reaction to the normative pretensions of the mainstream decision sciences (Schoemaker, 1982) or a more focused reaction to the behavioral critique (Simon, 1955) of that mainstream model that underpins BTF and the concepts of rationality that they both embody. We therefore turn to FPT to adjudicate this point. If we conceptualize decision-making as choosing between alternative courses of action (Schütz, 1951; Vickers, 1965), then we suggest that the two can be reconciled. We therefore suggest that decision-making remains central to project organizing, and there are important differences between decision-making early in the project life cycle during project shaping around which projects to invest in and their overall scope, and later in the life cycle around effective delivery (Giard & Midler, 1993; Winch et al, 2022).

Project decision makers are boundedly rational. That is to say that they do their best with limited information at the time of making the decision for a particular investment. Uncertainty (Winch, 2023b) and its partner concept complexity (Browning, 2023) are core theoretical concepts in project organizing research, but they are only meaningful in the context of a prespecified goal achieved temporally (Winch et al., 2023). An important question here is whether uncertainty is conceived as an epistemological problem amenable to resolution through search (Simon, 1955) or is it an ontological problem that can only be stabilized through narratives (Kay & King, 2020; Winch & Sergeeva, 2022). We adopt the latter definition because, from a realist philosophy of science, the future does not exist yet (Aristotle, 1974) but can only be projected in the imagination.

Project goals result from a temporary coalition of interests at a particular point in time. These coalitions of interest are formed on the owner side around the share of the value generated by the project between different stakeholders (Gil, 2023; Zerjav, 2021). They are also formed on the supplier side across the commercial interface with the owner to form the project coalition that negotiates temporary truces around reimbursement to suppliers for project services rendered to the owner (Merrow, 2023; Winch, 2023a).

From TTO, we also take forward the principal tenets identified above, with a renewed emphasis upon action-based entrepreneurialism:

The importance of action-based entrepreneurialism, later developed into the concept of homo projecticus (Jacobsson & Söderholm, 2022). We emphasize this here because, remarkably in our view, this TTO insight has largely been ignored in subsequent contributions. However, in TTO it is cast as a microfoundational concept in analogy to homo economicus. In line with our commitment outlined above to avoiding conflation —in this case the upwards conflation of methodological individualism—we prefer to capture this entrepreneurialism in terms of a social actor rather than an upwards-conflationary microfoundational concept. We suggest, therefore, the term “projector” (Defoe, 1697; Yamamoto, 2018), where “the Honest Projector is he, who having by fair and plain principles of Sense, Honesty, and Ingenuity, brought any Contrivance to a suitable Perfection, makes out what he pretends to, picks nobody’s pocket, puts his Project in Execution, and contents himself with the real Produce as the profit of his Invention (Defoe, 1697,p. 35).”

The centrality of time, task, teams, and transitions. While time is central to all organizing (Ancona et al., 2001), it is the distinctive future-orientation of project organizing that means that it is such a fascinating and important topic of research that is fundamentally about transitions. However, “task” does not capture well that future-orientation because of its operational overtones and its centrality in the standard project management tools such as the work breakdown structure. We prefer mission as the future-orientated goal of the project in terms of outputs and outcomes (Mazzucato, 2021; Winch et al., 2022) achieving the purpose (Mayer, 2018) of the owner organization making the investment. We suggest that “task” is better reserved for research on the standard operating procedures (Cyert & March, 1993) of the project organization and the associated team level of analysis, which we will discuss further below.

The centrality of the project life cycle. While pervasive in their importance in project organizing research, life cycle concepts have developed significantly with the realization of their importance for the design of the governance interface between the owner organization and the temporary project organizations it invests in through stage/gate life cycle routines (Giard & Midler, 1993; Merrow, 2011; Morris, 1994). This development links the life cycle to the focus on decision-making above.

From FPT we take

The fundamental distinction between action and behavior in which action is the future-orientated in-order-to motivation for organizational activity, and behavior is the past-orientated because motivation for organizational activity. The research tradition deriving from BTF largely focuses on behavior, whereas that from TTO largely focuses on action, and FPT provides TTO with the underpinning for a theory of action in contrast to behavior.

The project as action-orientated. The inherently future-orientated nature of action overcomes one of the principal limitations of BTF with its focus on short-term problem-solving rather than longer-term anticipation of desirable future states. Thus, the action theory of the project complements the behavioral theory of the firm to provide a wider theory of both stability and change in organizations.

Decision-making as central to the action theory of the project as choosing between alternative projects as courses of action toward desired future states (Schütz, 1951; Vickers, 1965). Decision-making is conceptualized as a process of deliberation (Dewey, 2002). It is “a dramatic rehearsal (in imagination) of various competing possible lines of action…. Deliberation is an experiment in finding out what the various lines of action are really like….Thought runs ahead and foresees outcomes, and thereby avoids having to await the instruction of actual failure and disaster (Dewey, 2002, p. 190).”

Theoretical Implications

We believe the conceptual framework for an action theory of the project we have developed here has several theoretical implications. First, and perhaps most importantly, the action theory of the project provides a bridging concept between TTO and BTF and so also to the long line of enquiry in organization studies that flows from that seminal contribution (Gavetti et al., 2012). The action theory of the project is the dynamic complement to the behavioral theory of the firm and hence opens up the prospect of a more holistic theory of organization that encompasses both stability and change and makes the theory of the temporary organization an essential contributor to organization theory rather than an interesting specialism. This is achieved by drawing on FPT to clearly distinguish between action as future-orientated projecting and behavior as present- and past-orientated being. It also opens up a bridging potential to a number of other recent developments in organization studies broadly defined. A further connection through to contemporary debates in organization studies is provided by the concept of action-based entrepreneurialism elaborated above. Entrepreneurship is central to economic dynamism (Schumpeter, 1934, 1943), and there has been growing interest in the phenomenon in organization studies (Shepherd et al., 2019; Townsend et al., 2018; Wood et al., 2021). However, this literature has not connected with research on project organization despite the observation that entrepreneurs largely achieve their entrepreneurial ambitions through projects, which is why entrepreneurs were called projectors in early capitalism (Yamamoto, 2018). There is a significant potential here for cross-fertilization between entrepreneurship studies and project studies; so, we suggested the reintroduction of the role of projector to capture the importance of action-based entrepreneurialism.

A third bridge becomes possible to the recent body of work in strategy on imaginaries and futurescapes. These are imagined future states that are sketched out as part of the strategic discourse of many organizations, particularly, but not only, in the tech sector (Beckert, 2013; Beckert & Bronk, 2018; Rindova & Martins, 2022). Such imaginaries also play a profound role in scoping out how societies and economies can address the challenges around global warming (Augustine et al., 2019), and narratives of plausible technological futures (Rindova & Martins, 2022). The contribution of FPT to temporal structuring in project organizing (Winch & Sergeeva, 2022) provides the substance of this bridging concept because it emphasizes the inherent future orientation of projecting. It also turns our attention to the importance of narratives in project organizing, because imaginaries and futurescapes are particular ways of narrating.

Projecting is how firms achieve their desired future states or avoid undesired ones articulated through project narratives (Sergeeva & Winch, 2021), whereby actions are socialized to mobilize the resources required. Conceptualizing FPT at the organizational level of analysis, we can conceive of the temporary project organization as the vector of change in economy and society as organizations move through their strategic trajectories (Terenzi et al., 2024). The action theory of the project is therefore also a narrative theory of the project because narratives are the principal way of enabling action under (ontological) uncertainty (Kay & King, 2020; Vaara et al., 2016; Winch & Sergeeva, 2022). Attention needs to be paid to how competing antenarratives (Boje et al., 2016) become performative project narratives (Sergeeva & Winch, 2021) that mobilize resources (financial, human, and technical) toward a specific project mission and how project narratives generate counternarratives in reaction (Ninan & Sergeeva, 2022). Of course, not all such projections are successful in their own terms; the narrative aspirations may, in the due course of time, be unfulfilled. In some cases, different aspirations may be realized (Hirschman, 1967; Sawyer, 1952) or, with hindsight, the projection may simply turn out to have been a bad idea (Scudder, 2017).

Implications for the Project Organizing Research Agenda

We have sketched out axiomatically what an action theory of the project might look like in which the temporary project organization acts as a vector of organizational hopes and aspirations for the future. We also suggested some theoretical implications in the form of additional bridges to current debates in organizational research more generally around entrepreneurship, imaginaries, and narratives of the future. What sort of research agenda does this perspective suggest for researchers in project organizing? One perspective opened up by bringing decision-making back into the theory of project organization is on choosing among projects of action (Schütz, 1951; Vickers, 1965), an area that is currently left to researchers influenced by behavioral economics (Flyvbjerg et al., 2009; Lovallo et al., 2023) around the use of project investment appraisal tools. We need much more case study research on project shaping that moves beyond a focus on the technicalities of decision-making tools to a more organizational analysis. Research investigating the performativity (Cabantous & Gond, 2011; Gond et al., 2016) of these decision-making tools, particularly those routinely deployed during project shaping, such as cost-benefit analysis (Sunstein, 2018), would be particularly welcome.

Research on standard operating procedures in project organizations has tended to be rather siloed off into the optimization school (Söderlund, 2011; Turner et al., 2013) with little connection back to the main body of work on project organization, yet research on standard operating procedures is central to BTF. However, profound changes in the research objects of the optimization school are currently happening (Whyte, 2019), which can be captured in the concept of Project Management 4.0 (APM, 2019; Winch et al., 2023) defined as a digital transformation of how projects are shaped and delivered analogous with Industry 4.0 (Lee et al., 2015; Tao et al., 2019). Technologies, such as project data analytics, blockchain, and model-based definition, will have profound effects on the standard operating procedures of a project—after all organizations are essentially information processing systems (Cyert & March, 1993; Galbraith, 1977).

Drawing on BTF, there is an opportunity to bring the practices associated with this transformation of project organizing’s distinctive project management toolbox (Morris, 1994) back into the mainstream of project organizing research. While the theoretical literature has moved on to capture this concept in routines (Nelson & Winter, 1982) as the smallest unit of analysis in organizing and their performative as well as ostensive nature (Feldman & Pentland, 2003), the concept is also central to project organizing research (Cacciatori & Prencipe, 2021). The concept of routine thereby allows the contents of the project management toolbox to be incorporated conceptually into an action theory of the project at the analytic level of the teaming dynamic of teams (who?), tasks (what?), and routines (how?) (Winch et al., 2022).

Finally, an earlier application of FPT to project organization research (Pitsis et al., 2003) identified the importance of endgaming as the actions and interactions within project organizations that focus on deadlines. Endgaming emphasizes the inherently deterministic temporality of projects and the ways in which entrainment (Söderlund, 2010; Vaagaasar et al., 2023) structures projecting though the life cycle; it enables the focusing of effort, stimulates innovative solutions, and entrains task execution across diverse project teams (Lindkvist et al., 1998). However, endgaming on projects is not just around a final deadline, but around intermediate milestones as well. Thus, the filling in (Schütz, 1967; Winch & Sergeeva, 2022) of the projected future is replete with endgaming around intermediate stage gates within the project life cycle as well as around the final deadline. Arguably, endgaming is softer during project shaping, where the whole point about stage gates is that the project can fail to pass them and will need to be recycled back in time (Cooper, 1993; Winch et al., 2022). It becomes harder during project delivery when much larger resources are mobilized toward the final endgame, which has typically been publicly announced some time previously.

Concluding Thoughts

Inspired by the work of Christophe Midler, who from the start insisted on the importance of researching both “projets et entreprises” for understanding project organizing, we have built on the classic theoretical contributions on the temporary project organization and the behavioral theory of the firm to articulate an action theory of the project. Our concept of action, in distinction to behavior, is taken from the work of Schütz on future-perfect thinking. From this synthesis of these differing streams of theory we now have the basis of a theory of organization with two mutually supporting perspectives that can address even-handedly both stability and change in contemporary organizations. We can also articulate why project organizations exist as a vector for firms’ aspirations toward achieving desired futures or avoiding undesired ones. It follows that as organizations, temporary project organizations are qualitatively different from the types of permanent organizations studied for BTF focused on sustaining current operations, and that a major research challenge is specifying more closely what those differences are between temporary and permanent organizations while also fully acknowledging the similarities. Mutatis mutandis, the action theory of the project also applies to public sector and not-for-profit owner organizations.

This article has presented a series of axioms for an action theory of the project as theoretical complement to the behavioral theory of the firm, drawing on earlier research on the theory of the temporary organization and the process of projectification of the permanent project organizations that are the investors in, owners of, and suppliers to, temporary project organizations. Just as the theory of the firm in economics theorizes how the firm contributes to the workings of market economies, we propose the action theory of the project as means of theorizing how projects contribute to change in those economies through both public and private initiatives (Schumpeter, 1934). In particular, we need an action theory of the project to deepen understanding of how the world is going to achieve sustainability transitions (Geels, 2002; Geels & Turnheim, 2022) and other UN Sustainable Development Goals over the ensuing decades of the 21st century.

During the 1960s, project organizing research played a major role in the development of organization theory (Ford & Randolph, 1992; Gaddis, 1959; Johnson et al., 1964; Knight, 1976). We suggest that this was because it was perceived to be addressing urgent socioeconomic issues in the form of the cold war arms and space races (Winch et al., 2023). Project organizing research now has the opportunity again to be seen to contribute to the wider development of organization theory by focusing on how firms and government agencies project a more sustainable, and therefore more desirable, future. We suggest that an action theory of the project along the lines sketched here will support theoretically this endeavor.

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

The author declared no potential conflicts of interest with respect to the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

Funding

The author received no financial support for the research, authorship, and/or publication of this article.

ORCID iD

Graham M. Winch

Author Biography

Graham M. Winch, MAPM MCIOB, is Professor of Project Management at Alliance Manchester Business School where he directs project leadership programs for corporates such as BP and BAE Systems. He is author of Managing Construction Projects (2nd edition) (Wiley-Blackwell, 2010), numerous research articles, coauthor of Strategic Project Organizing (Oxford, 2022), and co-editor of Research Handbook on Complex Project Organizing (Edward Elgar, 2023). He can be contacted at graham.winch@manchester.ac.uk

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An Action Theory of the Project

Abstract

Keywords

Introduction

Theories of Project Organization

A Theory of the Temporary Organization (TTO)

A Behavioral Theory of the Firm (BTF)

Projecting Desirable Futures: Future-Perfect Thinking (FPT)

Axioms for an Action Theory of the Project

Theoretical Implications

Implications for the Project Organizing Research Agenda

Concluding Thoughts

Footnotes

Declaration of Conflicting Interests

Funding

ORCID iD

Author Biography

References