Boundary activities and readiness for ... - Projekti-Instituutti

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