Advancing Theory and Debate in Project Studies

Project studies, in other words, the scholarly inquiry into projectbased organizing and working life, is advancing. The field has gained increasing attention from scholars around the world and across disciplines. Not only organizational theorists and business scholars (Clegg et al., 2002; Grabher, 2004; Sydow et al., 2004) but also sociologists (Scott et al., 2011), psychologists (Chiocchio et al., 2015; Lovallo & Kahneman, 2003), historians (Scranton, 2014), and economists (Hirschman, 2015 [1967]) and many others explore projectbased organizing and its implications to individuals, organizations, and society. This increasing and vivid diversity of disciplines has provided a new platform for further theorization and has opened the field for fruitful crossfertilization with other fields of inquiry (Davies et al., 2018; Söderlund, 2011). We have also witnessed an impressive institutional advancement of the field as international academic journals and research institutions dedicated to projectbased organizing grow in number, reputation, quality, and impact. Concomitantly, the field relishes academic legitimacy, as projectbased organizing features frequently in many topranked journals and at leading international academic conferences. The academic and institutional developments have contributed to extending the field beyond its traditional engineering school orientation, which characterized much of its early days (Morris, 2012). Grounded in social theories and humanities, scholars have come to demonstrate the importance of looking at projects as political, social, and cultural entities that span multiple contexts of socially interdependent networks. As a consequence, we are becoming much better equipped to understand the multifaceted and processual nature of contemporary projects (Söderlund, 2011) and project ecologies (Grabher, 2004). Thus, project studies are not only growing in volume and variety, but also advancing in legitimacy and theoretical sophistication. In light of this development, we can expect the field to grow, but we cannot expect it to bloom. The growth increases the diversity of scholars, inspired by different theories, different empirical settings, and different ontoepistemological traditions. If not connected to a community of scholars with common interests on projects, the diversity can lead to fragmentation (Knudsen, 2003; Söderlund, 2011), and thereby the field could fail to benefit from its diversity and size. The core of such an academic community are theories and debates, working in tandem (Chalmers, 1976) to advance our understanding of projects as societal, organizational, and individual phenomena. We believe that in a vibrant academic community, different views clash and debates will raise. The debates, in turn, call for better and more carefully crafted arguments, more empirical data, and so forth. Hence, crossfertilization and debates fuel our theorizing practices (Davies et al., 2018), and help advance project studies and our understanding of the project phenomenon. Thus, grounded in a dialectical view of research, this special issue aims to open a space in project studies, where project scholars can voice their opinions and draft bold theorizing in the forms of essays and conceptual articles, where we can spur debate and raise controversies.