The Temporary Society and its Enemies : Projects from an Individual Perspective

From the perspective of the individual, projectisation of society has implied important consequences for work and life. In increasing number of people spend their working days in different kinds of project organisations, and even more people are involved in projects as a part of their otherwise routine-based employments. Besides being organised into all kinds of projects during work hours, there is also a tendency to perceive processes at work and in life in general in terms of projects. Given this position, the aim of the paper is to critically analyse the consequences of project work for individuals – both at work and in life in general. From a classification of project work situations into four different types (project-based work, renewal project participation, temporary work an independent entrepreneurship), project work is discussed in terms of time limits, creativity, careers and personal development. It is also investigated what kind of life form consequences the project work form might have; projects imply flexible work hours, which in its turn has reshaped the conditions for family life in contemporary society. It appears that projectisation implies increased self-responsibility and individual risk, and that stability (rather than flexibility) is what many individuals try to achieve through conscious action. In many ways, the enemies of the temporary society are the individuals that construct it – the very same individuals that we thought to be its proponents and its beneficiaries. 1. The individual in the projecticised society Since the middle of the 1960’s, it has been repeatedly claimed that our society – and thus also our lives – is becoming increasingly projecticised, i.e. organised in terms of time-limited sequences of action and interaction (Miles, 1964, Bennis and Slater, 1968). This development was expected to imply an increased use of the project work form, but also an increasing tendency to view ongoing processes as limited in time and scope. When discussing reasons for this development, authors usually referred to a general increase in the speed of change at all aspects of society in combination with an increased complexity. For organisations, the solution to a reality in which most relevant factors changed and interacted at the same time was to organise the flow of events into discrete projects, limited in time and space. As a trend in the development of work organisation, projectisation is usually expected to imply increased task focus, better conditions for learning, renewal and flexibility, less bureaucratic forms for management control etc (cf Ekstedt et al, 1999, Berggren and Lindkvist, 2001). In complex settings, a project-based leadership strategy is often said to be preferable over classic, all-encompassing ones (Lundin, 1990). Even though there are some dangers of projectisation – such as short-term thinking strategies and increased de-coupling of organisations (Blomquist and Packendorff, 1998) – this trend is mainly perceived as a positive one for contemporary organisations. The basic reason for this perception seems to be that the project – viewed as a task specific and time-limited form of working – is perceived as a way of avoiding all the classic problems of bureaucracy, inertia and rigidity with which most ”normal” organisations are struggling (Pinto, 1996). In that sense, project-based work is a part of the wave of ‘new organisational forms’ that has entered most industries during the last decades (cf Kerfoot and Knights, 1998). In many industries and companies, the project is now the normal work form. This is obvious in cultural life, advertising, consulting, R&D, IT etc, but also in several large corporations who executes numerous projects both externally and internally. Given this trend, one might assess that work life for many people is becoming increasingly ”projecticised”, i.e. that substantial parts of individuals’ work lives are spent in projects and similar temporary forms of organising. This is especially evident where individuals working in ”project-based firms” are concerned, i.e. firms where almost all operations take place in projects and where the permanent structure fills the function of administrative support. What hamper this development are the taken-for-granted views of industrial organisations as dependent on routines, hierarchies and technologies rather than flexibility, teamwork and customer orientation (Ekstedt et al, 1999). Still, just a small portion of contemporary organisations actually organise work with both decentralisation and organised knowledge development in mind (Karlsson and Eriksson, 2000). Many of the calls for new organisational forms and a strengthened civil society can be analysed in a similar manner – if people are liberated from their structural chains, they can create wonders together (cf Kidder, 1981, Grantham, 2000). Most research on individual work satisfaction and commitment also support these claims (Karlsson and Eriksson, 2000). The silent proponents of traditional industrial organising should thus be the enemies of the temporary society, failing to see the necessities of projectisation at all levels of society and business. Or are they? Let us ask the alleged victims of the old industrial society and the intended beneficiaries of the new projecticised one – the individuals. Is it really so that projectisation has implied better working conditions, increased possibilities for personal development, and more freedom in choosing individual lifestyles? Is the projecticised society the solution to the problems that inhabitants of the bureaucratic society experienced? The chapter starts out with a discussion of what project work means – as compared to “traditional” work forms -, and a classification of different ‘project workers’ is presented. In the next sections, we meet different individuals from these different ‘classes’, and some important consequences of project work are discussed through their narratives. Then, we turn to the question of how project work affects life in general, more specifically what kinds of life forms that are constructed by project working individuals, again through the narratives of the individuals. The paper ends by a discussion on what kind of society that people working and living by projects construct together – could it be so that the enemies of the temporary society are the same people that created it. 2. Project work from an individual perspective – a typology From the perspective of the individual, the development toward projectisation has implied important consequences for work and life. More and more people spend their working days in different kinds of project organisations, and even more people are involved in projects as a part of their otherwise routine-based employments. Besides being organised into all kinds of projects during work hours, there is also a tendency to perceive processes at work and in life in general in terms of projects (Kunda, 1992, Blomquist and Packendorff, 1998, Lindgren et al, 2001). While there are theoretical expectations of different kinds in the literature, there are actually few empirical studies made on how individuals handle a projecticised reality. The project has usually been viewed as a planning task, and large parts of the project management literature are in fact just as de-personalised as organisation theory once was. Moreover, if individuals have indeed been studied, they have exclusively been project managers, a category that is actually just a small portion of the total population of project workers. Moreover, this line of research rests upon quite a weak empirical base; while there are a lot written about how project managers should behave, there are very few descriptions of their actual behaviour (Perlow, 1997, Lindgren & Packendorff, 2001, Rapp Ricciardi, 2001). Given this position, the aim of the paper is to critically analyse how individuals construct projects – both projects that they are organised into and projects that they construct themselves in their everyday life. In this analysis, examples of individual narratives on projects and projectisation will be included, individuals working in the IT sector, in the cultural sector, as entrepreneurs, as consultants, and even as voluntary community workers. The problem of this kind of general reasoning is that there are many different project work situations. Formally organised projects that individuals are organised into, i.e. perceives as necessary parts of their work life and careers, appears in most organisations. Project work is actually not just one homogenous work form, however; it means different things depending on what situation in which it is performed. The necessity of identifying different types of projects and thereby different work situations has also been widely acknowledged in literature during the past decade (cf Turner and Cochrane, 1993, Packendorff, 1995, Ekstedt et al, 1999). In the same way as there are many different types of projects, there are thus also many types of project work situations, ranging from ‘perfect projects’ where the individual works full time for one single project and can devote all her time to that, to all sorts of ‘imperfect’ project work situations where life is more complicated. We will therefore look closer into different sorts of project work situations from two different dimensions, dimensions that have been important in understanding the narratives of the individuals interviewed: 1. To what degree the individual’s work situation is tied to the temporary project or the permanent organisational context 2. To what degree project work is routine or exception to the individual The question if the individual is actually representing a project or an organisation in her work is not always that easy to answer, but individuals often tend to make such narrative separations (Lindgren and Packendorff, 2001). If you are employed in a firm and work by project