Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti
Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti
Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti
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Theoretical background<br />
require collaboration <strong>and</strong> team ef<strong>for</strong>t of those skilled individuals to reach<br />
the goals. Fourthly, the special purpose of the temporary organization<br />
contains an element of change <strong>and</strong> thus a transition is required. The term<br />
emphasizes progression <strong>and</strong> underlines the purposefulness of temporary<br />
organizing. Related to the transition, Lundin <strong>and</strong> Söderholm (1995)<br />
consider action as the most distinctive <strong>and</strong> the most important feature of a<br />
temporary organization.<br />
It can be argued that the organizational perspective to project<br />
management is nothing new but has existed <strong>for</strong> decades alongside the<br />
engineering based task-oriented tradition (Söderlund, 2004a). Although<br />
the temporary organization perspective has only recently started to attract<br />
attention in the major project management journals (e.g. Andersen, 2006;<br />
Modig, 2007), empirical research adopting the temporary organization view<br />
has appeared in high-ranking management <strong>and</strong> organization journals (e.g.<br />
Engwall <strong>and</strong> Svensson (2003) in Sc<strong>and</strong>inavian Journal of Management<br />
<strong>and</strong> Bechky (2006) in Organization Science). Empirical studies adopting<br />
the temporary organization perspective have often examined interorganizational<br />
projects where one clear parent organization cannot be<br />
identified, such as the organizing of the Olympic Games (Løvendahl, 1995),<br />
creative projects in the film industry (Bechky, 2006) <strong>and</strong> in television<br />
production (Sydow & Staber, 2002), <strong>and</strong> other kinds of multi-firm project<br />
networks (Larson & Wikström, 2007). Several studies of project networks<br />
emphasize the project’s embeddedness in the wider organizational context<br />
(Aaltonen, Kujala, Lehtonen, & Ruuska, 2010; Sydow et al., 2004).<br />
However, when compared to the current study, the focus of these studies<br />
tends to be on delivery projects rather than on internal change projects <strong>and</strong><br />
the studies are often located in contexts where no single parent<br />
organization can be identified.<br />
There is another stream of recent project management research that has<br />
evolved with the temporary organization notion <strong>and</strong> is well aligned with<br />
this school of thought, namely the practice-based school (e.g. Cicmil,<br />
Williams, Thomas, & Hodgson, 2006; Packendorff, 1995; Söderlund,<br />
2004a). In line with the wider “practice turn” in management research (cf.<br />
Miettinen, Samra-Fredericks, & Yanow, 2009) <strong>and</strong> especially the growing<br />
stream of research labeled as strategy-as-practice that examines the microlevel<br />
practice of strategy development <strong>and</strong> implementation (e.g. Ikävalko,<br />
2005; Jarzabkowski, 2003; Johnson, Melin, & Whittington, 2003;<br />
Whittington, 1996), a movement has emerged within the project<br />
management research community, labeled as projects-as-practice (e.g.<br />
Blomquist, Gällstedt, Hällgren, Nilsson, & Söderholm, 2006; Hällgren &<br />
Wilson, 2008). This stream of research aims to strengthen the current<br />
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