Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies: Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Implications 3031304101, 9783031304101

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Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Implications Edited by Mats Fred · Sebastian Godenhjelm

Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies

Mats Fred  •  Sebastian Godenhjelm Editors

Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies Theoretical Perspectives and Empirical Implications

Editors Mats Fred Department of Political Science Lund University Lund, Sweden

Sebastian Godenhjelm Swedish School of Social Science University of Helsinki Helsinki, Finland

ISBN 978-3-031-30410-1    ISBN 978-3-031-30411-8 (eBook) https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8 © The Editor(s) (if applicable) and The Author(s), under exclusive licence to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 This work is subject to copyright. All rights are solely and exclusively licensed by the Publisher, whether the whole or part of the material is concerned, specifically the rights of translation, reprinting, reuse of illustrations, recitation, broadcasting, reproduction on microfilms or in any other physical way, and transmission or information storage and retrieval, electronic adaptation, computer software, or by similar or dissimilar methodology now known or hereafter developed. The use of general descriptive names, registered names, trademarks, service marks, etc. in this publication does not imply, even in the absence of a specific statement, that such names are exempt from the relevant protective laws and regulations and therefore free for general use. The publisher, the authors, and the editors are safe to assume that the advice and information in this book are believed to be true and accurate at the date of publication. Neither the publisher nor the authors or the editors give a warranty, expressed or implied, with respect to the material contained herein or for any errors or omissions that may have been made. The publisher remains neutral with regard to jurisdictional claims in published maps and institutional affiliations. This Palgrave Macmillan imprint is published by the registered company Springer Nature Switzerland AG. The registered company address is: Gewerbestrasse 11, 6330 Cham, Switzerland

In memory of Solvig Andersson—Mats For Ella, Sofia and Josefine—Sebastian

Foreword

This book deals with one of the major transitions impacting the social sciences in recent decades: deployment of the notion of a project as an organising concept of collective action. This deployment has taken place in the sphere of both business and public administration, and has profoundly modified the visions that we still generally have regarding the ways of framing cooperation and coordination, marked by the classic concepts of organisation, operation and the market in the field of private action and of constitution, law or regulation in the field of public administration. These framings are obviously still decisive, but they aim to stabilise permanent forms of collective action. In contrast, the term project refers to transitory and evolving forms of collective action, to fluid collective commitments with multiform and temporary perimeters and heterogeneous stakes, ranging from debates on initially evanescent potentialities to the effective implementation of tangible realisations, such as infrastructures, products or common rules of action. For approximately 50 years now, we have been witnessing in the different spheres of private and public administration the invention and deployment of forms of collective action that seek to articulate and blend these vastly differing notions of permanent organisation and project. The extent and generality of this deployment is, in retrospect, obvious, but it has in a way taken place ‘under the radar’. This process of transforming the frameworks of collective action, which I rather crudely in the 1990s termed ‘projectification’, did not give rise to large-scale demonstrations or spectacular public debates, as has been the case with other major movements in industrial societies, such as the spread of Taylorism or the automation of industrial and administrative processes. However, this vii

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deployment of the term project has profoundly transformed our working environment, but also, more generally, our lives. Understanding how these forms of stable collective action can be articulated in combination with transient and dynamic forms of project organising is a key socio-economic challenge for contemporary societies, which are faced with the need to make urgent major and varied transitions. It is also an intellectual challenge: the term project crosses established disciplinary boundaries. In the field of management, which I know better, it refers both to the field of strategy and to disciplines focusing on rationalising the way in which they are implemented. It broadens the focus of the school of ‘decision’, taking into account, on the one hand, an analysis of the previous processes that have laid the groundwork for it, and, on the other, the subsequent processes that will make it effective—or not. Hence, one persistent difficulty involves reflecting on how projectification is generally discussed, and often dismissed, in excerpts from the most prestigious academic journals, despite evidence of its empirical importance. The publication of this book is therefore important. Beyond participating in the general effort to understand how the notion of project is understood in contemporary societies, I would like in this foreword to insist on three reasons to assign it a more specific value both in terms of its originality and topicality. The first reason is that the book focuses on transformation projects in the field of public administration. From the 1990s to the present day, the idea of project management has been largely, if not essentially, addressed by researchers in the field of private enterprise management. The reason is well known: since the 1980s, the innovative capacities of companies have become a key competitive advantage, and even a precondition for survival, in an economy of intensive innovation. It is no longer enough to organise production and sales operations efficiently: new, well-targeted products must be invented quickly and launched at low cost, with differentiating offers, on markets that are increasingly saturated and so tend to avoid the deadly prospect of initiating price wars over competing commoditised offers; or else firms must conquer increasingly exotic markets with offers adapted to local specificities, and so forth. All these new challenges make project efficiency a necessity. But today’s innovations are less and less in line with the one that I have just described, ultimately that of Schumpeter, where efficiency is judged based on markets and customers. Innovation in the twenty-first century is increasingly societal in scope. Consider, for example, the electric car, which is not being promoted by car users and

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even less by manufacturers, but by public authorities in the name of reducing CO2 emissions or improving air quality in cities. Like the effort to eliminate or recycle plastics or insecticides for the sake of protecting biodiversity, public actors at all levels are increasingly having an impact on the innovative projects of private companies in the name of societal issues that differ from the individual, immediate preferences of clients. It is therefore essential that the disciplines that seek to understand the levers of efficiency (or, on the contrary, of failure) guiding projects consider them as actors in their own right, not just as peripheral ‘stakeholders’, lagging far behind the revered clients. In the same way, an urgency exists for such public actors to become aware of their importance to the efficient operations of companies facing international competition and seeking to broaden their competence beyond their traditional limited sphere of expertise, becoming actors who intervene effectively in projects and do not only adhere to existing regulations and constraints. The second reason, which is obviously related to the first, is the profile of the authors gathered together in this book. The first academic authors working on the project, until the 1980s, came from the disciplines of operations research. They constructed the instrumental toolbox for the discipline, the planning, cost control and analytical approaches to understanding complex systems based on the specifications of the time: ‘getting the job done’. Since the 1990s, authors in the field of business management have largely taken up the theme, broadening the scope of analysis to include questions of organisation, processes and even the business strategy involved in the project concept. This book takes a fresh look at this already rich tradition by bringing together authors from the fields of public administration, management, philosophy and political science. They invite us to explore questions located in the blind spots of management theorists. From the standpoint of public administration, the effectiveness of the ‘result’ of collective action is not the only criterion to be taken into account. Questions regarding the quality of citizens’ commitment to consensus-­building and the collective learning process induced by these collective action processes constitute evaluation criteria in themselves, alongside or beyond the explicit purpose of the projects. They therefore lead to further questions, such as the relationship between a project and democracy, an extremely important subject that project management theorists have largely ignored until now. The third and final reason that the book is of specific interest is that it brings together the work of researchers from Northern Europe, which in

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turn draws on two important lines of focus. On the one hand, the Scandinavian school of project management research, under the impetus of Rolf Lundin in particular, played a key role in the 1990s in the bifurcation of the theoretical work of the discipline from a focus on tools and best practices to a theory of the temporary organisations employing projects and their relations with permanent organisations. On the other hand, the Nordic countries have for decades constituted a pole of experimentation for new forms of democratic political organisation at the local as well as the national level, aiming to respond almost without inertia to the evolution of societal issues, whether the evolution of working conditions, the relationship between the professional and the domestic sphere, the school or environmental issues. Analysis of the projectification of public administration—especially local government—is therefore particularly instructive for other countries, which could see in this specific context sources of inspiration for the future development of projects. I therefore strongly recommend that all communities mentioned in the foreword read this book, with the hope that it will contribute to developing this field of research, which is both necessary for all and promising for those who will engage in it. Paris, France January 10, 2023

Christophe Midler

Preface and Acknowledgements

The first step towards the creation of this book was taken in the spring of 2021 when we (Mats Fred and Sebastian Godenhjelm) rather casually pondered about how many PhD theses we knew of that had the same, or similar, focus as we had—projectification. A quick look in the bookshelves of our offices and some googling exercises had us count to at least 10. These where all theses written within the last 10 years or so and all by authors geographically close to each other, from Sweden, Finland, Denmark and Estonia. We found this impressive and extraordinary, and argued (to ourselves at that time) that here is quite an extensive amount of research and insights about a topic that to the general public and even to a greater extent the research community is hidden or at least difficult to get hold of. We contacted Nicholas Barclay, Editor at Palgrave at that time, as well as the authors of the 10 PhD thesis and they all agreed that this was something worth exploring. Following this we set up a series of online workshops during the spring of 2022 at which we discussed the aim and scope of the book as well as each and every chapter. Later that year we received funding from the Centre for European Studies at Lund University and the Research Network on Democracy, Political Participation and Institutional Change at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki to organize an onsite symposium in Lund, Sweden to which we invited not only all the authors but also Christophe Midler, Beata Jałocha, Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren and Marie Stissing Jensen to get an ‘outside’ perspective on what it was that we were embarking on. Thank you so much for your detailed and constructive feedback! xi

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PREFACE AND ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

This is not the first book on projectification. Many researchers including, but not limited to, Damian Hodgson, Svetlana Cicmil, Kestin Sahlin, Andreas Söderholm, Rolf Lundin and Stefan Sjöblom have dedicated vast amounts of time and effort to scrutinising the phenomenon of a growing reliance on ‘the project’ in contemporary society. Although we are responsible for assembling this volume, we owe many people our deepest gratitude for helping us reach this point. We would like to thank Karl Löfgren and Stefan Sjöblom for their valuable comments on an early draft of the introduction to this book. We would like to extend our deepest appreciation to the contributing authors1—without your hard work, patience and engagement in your own and others’ work this book would not exist. We would also like to acknowledge the support and encouragement of the editorial team at Palgrave Macmillan, including Stewart Bale for supporting our proposal and taking our idea on board and Karthika Devi Ravikumar who’s been very supportive as we have worked to finalize the book. Also, great thanks to the anonymous reviewers who gave us constructive feedback and who also supported the idea. Last but not least, we would like to thank our families for their support throughout this process. Lund, Sweden Helsinki, Finland  January 20, 2023

Mats Fred Sebastian Godenhjelm

1  The research conducted in the doctoral dissertations have been supported by numerous funders for which we all are grateful. For a complete list of these funders, please see the individual doctoral dissertations.

Contents

1 Introducing Projectification Research  1 Mats Fred and Sebastian Godenhjelm 2 The  Philosophical History of Projectification: The Project Society 17 Anders Fogh Jensen 3 The  Trojan Horse of Local Government 39 Mats Fred 4 Entering  the World of Project Making: Mobilizing Assemblage Thinking to Unpack Projects as Political Constructions 57 David Scott 5 What  Makes It Tick? On the Projectification of the Labour Market in Sweden 75 Malin Mc Glinn 6 The  Janus Face of Participatory Projects 93 Kanerva Kuokkanen

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7 HRM  and Projectification: Moving Beyond the ‘Project-­ Based Organization’ Concept111 Karin Bredin 8 The  Road to Isolation of Public Health Policy Projects: Consequences of Demarcating the Project by Its Task, Time, Team and Transition131 Erik Söderberg 9 Interfaces  in Project-Based Innovation Governance: Can Hackathons Hack into Policy Processes?147 Peeter Vihma 10 Stepping  on the Throttle While Hitting the Brakes: Project Organisations and Governance167 Sebastian Godenhjelm 11 Projects  as Vessels for Institutional Change: From Appealing Promises to Some Pressing Concerns187 Johan Munck af Rosenschöld 12 Explaining  Project-Based Policy Implementation: Multiple Governance Framework and Causal Mechanisms203 Isak Vento 13 Where  Do We Go from Here?221 Sebastian Godenhjelm and Mats Fred Index229

Notes on Contributors

Karin Bredin,  PhD, is an associate professor of Business Administration at the Department of Management and Engineering at Linköping University. Bredin conducts research at the intersection of human resource management (HRM), project management, and temporary work and organization. Besides studies into HRM in projectified contexts, her research includes studies on engineering consultants and on organizational solutions for sustaining specialized knowledge in cross-functional work settings. Mats Fred  is an assistant senior lecturer in Public Administration at the Department of Political Science at Lund University. Following his doctoral work on projectification (2018), Fred has been engaged in research on temporary and ‘experimental’ forms of organization and governance in  local and regional government as well as in the context of public transport. Sebastian Godenhjelm  is a university lecturer in Political Science, Public Administration and Management at the Swedish School of Social Science at the University of Helsinki. Godenhjelm’s research interests include new forms of public management at both supra-national and local levels. His research interests include crisis management in the Nordic local democracies, hybrid forms of governance and pedagogical leadership in higher education.

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NOTES ON CONTRIBUTORS

Anders  Fogh  Jensen,  PhD, D.E.A., is an independent philosopher, writer and playwright. He is the author of 10 books translated into several languages. His interest is in inventing new concepts in order to grasp our time, to bring philosophy alive among ordinary people giving presentations at conventions, and to heighten the public debate by pressing philosophical thought into the arteries of society through TV, radio, podcasts, books and spoken presentations. Kanerva  Kuokkanen  works as a university lecturer in Social Science Methodology at the Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki. In 2016, she defended her PhD. thesis in Political Science on project-based development of citizen participation. Kuokkanen’s research interests include public sector projectification, public administration and its relation to civil society, citizen participation, urban and regional policies, and interpretive policy analysis. Malin Mc Glinn  works as a lecturer in the Faculty of Culture and Society at Malmö University where she has been teaching courses in subjects such as Political Science, Diversity Studies, and Leadership and Organization. She has two Master’s degrees, one in International Migration and Ethnic Relations, and one in History. She holds a PhD in Urban Studies from Malmö University. Mc Glinn’s research interests include epistemology and other strands of philosophical thought, the contradictory nature of sustainability, and issues concerning what constitutes politics and ‘the political’. Johan Munck af Rosenschöld,  PhD, is a senior research scientist and leads the Climate Policies and Risk group at the Finnish Environment Institute (Syke). His research interests centre on projectified governance and climate change adaptation policy, especially from the perspectives of justice, innovation and monitoring. He has been involved in multiple assessments of adaptation policy and climate risks on the national and international level, most recently the European Climate Risk Assessment. David Scott  holds a PhD in Political Science and works as a university lecturer at Karlstad University, Sweden. He has a general interest in how processes of neoliberalization are expressed in modern society. Consequently, in his research he has studied the influence of neoliberal technologies of governing on politics, such as marketization and managerialization of development aid and the use of expertise in international organizations.

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Erik Söderberg  defended his PhD work in June 2023, where he studies how local projects concerning public health are managed. Söderberg works as a performance auditor and Head of the public sector department at KPMG, Sweden. His main research interests are public management, health and temporary organizations. Isak Vento  is a doctor in political science and project researcher at Åbo Akademi University. His main research interests are political behaviour, political trust, migration and minorities, as well as public administration and organization research. He is the responsible researcher for a citizens’ panel on the Swedish-­speaking Finns, the Barometern. Peeter  Vihma,  PhD, is a researcher at the University of Helsinki and Estonian University of Life Sciences. His research interests include environmental policy and crisis preparedness, networks of cooperation and conflict, as well as collective action in the age of digitalisation. He is a regular author of columns for the e-­Estonia Briefing Center.

List of Tables

Table 4.1 Table 12.1

Strategies for data generation The multiple governance framework

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CHAPTER 1

Introducing Projectification Research Mats Fred and Sebastian Godenhjelm

Introduction Even though one might argue that projects have always existed, the traditional narrative of how the contemporary project came to be fashionable often takes as its point of departure the US military and space programmes of the 1950s and 1960s. The overwhelming scale—in terms of resources and ambitious timing—of such initiatives as the Manhattan Project and the Apollo space programme created daunting coordination and control challenges, which led to the development of techniques and tools for project planning and monitoring as well as the professionalization of the project manager (see Grabher, 2002). Since then, the project has been implemented in almost every sector of society and throughout the world, and in a sense, it has even transformed the way we think about our lives. As a whole, this development shows no sign of slowing down: quite the contrary, in fact.

M. Fred (*) Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] S. Godenhjelm Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_1

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Today, we engage in projects at our workplaces, regardless of whether we work in the public or the private sector, we encounter them in our leisure time when participating in sporting or cultural events and we encounter them through the education and activities of our children and young adults. Sometimes they are described or defined as projects—an EU project, a school project, a housing project—and to those descriptions and definitions we may connect resources and specific activities or plans for desirable objectives or outcomes. The existing literature often characterises projects based on their temporality, uniqueness and goal-oriented ambitions. A project is frequently defined as ‘a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result’ (PMI, 2017, 715). A project is quite concrete, and since 2012 a series of standards and operating procedures have been applied to projects (see ISO 21500), evidence of the fact that projects are essentially good and that there is a correct or right way to manage them. However, sometimes ‘the project’ refers to something less tangible, to a discursive theme in contemporary society that appears to aid us in the way we make sense of what we do—applying for a job is a project, buying a car is a project, having a baby, taking a vacation or going to the dentist can be perceived, understood, or managed as a project, and some people even refer to their marriage as a project. Here, one might argue that the above definition (or the ISO standard for that matter) is less suitable or applicable and that other means for understanding what is going on are needed. The proliferation of the project has spawned a great deal of research within a wide variety of academic fields, ranging from engineering and construction, IT and new media to political science, public and business administration, sociology and human resource management, and each field has contributed to different understandings (and definitions) of the project and its proliferation. In this book, we have gathered together researchers interested in what we call projectification, a concept that aims to capture an increasing reliance on ‘the project’ in our contemporary societies and economies. The word itself does not have an entry in any dictionary, but its origin is usually associated with Christophe Midler’s study of Renault and its transformation from an ‘ordinary’ car manufacturing plant to a project-based organisation throughout the 1970s, 1980s and 1990s (Midler, 1993, 1995). Since then, we have observed a field of research starting to take shape in its own right. Whereas many studies subsequent to Midler’s work have aimed to identify the advantages and disadvantages of the transformation

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of organisations (see Maylor et al., 2006), several scholars have also argued for and applied a broader and sometimes more critical perspective to what projects are and how we are to understand projectification (Packendorff & Lindgren, 2014). This broader and more pluralistic approach to the phenomenon implies an understanding of projectification as existing beyond specific organisations, with the discursive spread of the project having become embedded and institutionalised across societies and in everyday lived experience (Hodgson et al., 2019). This volume draws together researchers who in aggregate have devoted more than 40 years of research to projectification. They are all researchers who share an interest in the proliferation of ‘the project’, researchers who regard the project as something more than (just) an organisational form or function, researchers who critically examine the function and effects of projects and analyse the logic, the politics, the discursive practices and context, or interfaces, of projects and projectification. The aim of this book is to consolidate this research field by illustrating theoretical perspectives on and empirical implications of projectification. In essence, this entails mapping out what we know (in theory) and how we can conceptualise the phenomenon at hand, but it also involves illustrating the empirical implications of projectification—what does projectification mean for individuals, organisations and societies? Consequently, the book identifies both what we know so far and emphasises avenues for future research.

An Emerging Research Field This is not the first book on projectification, and we are not the first to scrutinise the phenomenon of a growing reliance on ‘the project’ in contemporary society. We do, however, argue that it is the first book to build on such an extensive, but still coherent, amount of research. Compared to earlier works, the book captures different theoretical conceptions and empirical illustrations of the phenomenon. In addition to Midler‘s seminal work, and without claims of being exhaustive, we think that the development towards a research field on projectification can be described in relation to several publications emerging from networks of researchers and research activities. One important part of this development was the publication of Beyond project management: New perspectives on the temporary–permanent dilemma, a 2002 publication edited by Kerstin Sahlin-Andersson and Anders Söderholm. They, and the other contributors, argue that several

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steps have been taken ‘towards a new style of thinking about projects’ through the combination of organisation theory and ‘theories on entrepreneurship and industrial development with in-depth empirical studies of how projects unfold in practice’ (Sahlin-Andersson & Söderholm, 2002, 7, 11). The authors involved with the volume broadened the scope of project studies beyond that of single projects, emphasising the importance of context and putting forth the idea of projects as temporary organisation. Taken together, their line of approach should be understood as constituting the Scandinavian School of Project Studies, which, by extension, can be seen as part of the Scandinavian School of Management and even more broadly as a form of Scandinavian institutionalism, with the aim of conceptualising and making sense of organisational change more generally (see Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005). The book was the result of a group of people gravitating towards a common understanding of, or at least a similar research interest in, projects, a topic that (prior to the book) also generated a special issue of the Scandinavian Journal of Management, edited by Rolf Lundin (1995), an issue that included Midler‘s work on Renault. The articles in the journal generated a range of additional publications in the following years. Lundin and Hällgren’s (2014) edited study Advancing research on projects and temporary organisations is one such work. Here, the editors explicitly state their relations to the Scandinavian School of Management, while the book is also an honorary publication dedicated to Anders Söderholm, one of the editors of Beyond project management. Another example worth mentioning is Managing and Working in Project Society: Institutional challenges of temporary organizations, by Lundin et al. (2015). Whereas Sahlin-Andersson and Söderholm (2002) broadened the definition of project (to include the temporary organisation), this book zooms out even further, and discusses how ‘project thinking is spreading to most parts of society’ (Lundin et al., 2015: preface) and the observed shift from an industrial society towards a project society. In addition to these publications, one can also observe several other manifestations of the workings related to the Scandinavian School of Management, including the emergence of academic journals devoted to a particular form of project studies (see Scandinavian Journal of Project Management) or the foundation of large international project networks and conferences (see IRNOP1 as an example).

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 www.irnop.org

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There are, however, also a couple of more loosely connected researchers, activities, networks and publications related to this development. The first example is a group of researchers contributing to the publication Temporary Organization: Prevalence, Logic and Effectiveness (Kenis et al., 2009). The authors make a similar claim as those affiliated with the Scandinavian school regarding temporary organisations being a unique form of organisation. They also emphasise, however, the collaborative aspects of temporary organisations, defining them as ‘two or more non-­ temporary organizations collaborating to accomplish a joint task with the duration of the collaboration explicitly and ex ante fixed’ (Kenis et  al., 2009, xiv). Their empirical example also differs somewhat from those focused on in earlier research and includes movie productions, rescue operations and product development. An additional influential network, or ‘movement’, which has generated a series of workshops and an influential publication is Making Projects Critical. Here, we find a collection of researchers gathered under a more critical umbrella, where the very foundation of their work critiques the more traditional, prescriptive, functionalist and quantitative approaches to projects and project management. Similar to the Scandinavian School of Management, these scholars call for a broader scope of research by considering the subject within a wider organisational and societal context (Hodgson & Cicmil, 2006). More specifically, they suggest adopting a wider picture of what goes on in projects and project management by focusing on who is included in and who is excluded from the decision-­ making process, analysing what determines the position, agendas and power of different participants, and how these different agendas are combined and resolved in the process by which the decision are arrived at. (Hodgson & Cicmil, 2006, 12)

Whereas the Scandinavian School of Management was inspired by an institutional research tradition, the scholars involved with Making Projects Critical draw their inspiration from critical management studies (see Alvesson et al., 2009; Alvesson & Willmott, 2003) and a broadening out of critical theory (for an overview, see Wiggershaus, 1994). Somewhat related to this movement is also a more specific focus on public-sector projectification. As part of the Making Projects Critical workshops, a symposium was organised in Malmö, Sweden, in 2016. At the workshop, critical project

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researchers met with researchers from the fields of political science, public administration and business administration with a penchant for studying temporary forms of organisation. This cross-disciplinary symposium generated an IRSPM (International Research Society for Public Management) panel and, three years later, a publication titled The Projectification of the Public Sector (Hodgson et al., 2019). In this more specialised area of projectification research, we still find a broader understanding of projectification but with an emphasis on projects ‘and similar temporary modes of organising’ (Hodgson et  al., 2019, 1) within the specific public-sector context of politically run organisations and democratic governance structures. Much of the research related to projects had, hitherto, been devoted to a private-sector setting and to that of ‘the firm’, which is somewhat surprising given the fact that in recent decades, we have witnessed an increasing reliance on temporary forms of organising in the public sector (Hodgson et  al., 2019). In fact, a special issue of the Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning (JEPP), devoted to ‘The Project State’ and edited by Sjöblom (2009), argues that the gradual shift towards temporary forms of organising in the public sector is ‘one of the most important—although still very much neglected—administrative changes of the past decades’ (Sjöblom, 2009, 165). Scholars had attempted prior to the book by Hodgson et al. to reconcile research on projects and public-sector research. In 2017, the International Journal of Project Management (IJPM) published a special issue entitled ‘Public policy and projects’ (Sanderson & Winch, 2017). Prior to that publication, the Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration (SJPA) devoted a special issue to the theme ‘Projectified Politics: The Role of Temporary Organizations in the Public Sector’ (Sjöblom et al., 2013). What is interesting about the special issues is that none of them really bridged the gap between different research traditions, as they contain few or no cross references between the different fields. They also attracted very different kinds of empirical interest. For instance, all articles in the IJPM publication focus on economic infrastructure programmes mainly from a management perspective, whereas the SJPA special issue includes articles about local and central government, e-democracy and the EU. The last example, the EU, might deserve a bit more attention here since it has played an important role in the proliferation of the project and the projectification of the public sector, and as such, it has also spawned a great deal of research. Projects and project funding, the main instruments

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for implementing EU policy, forms a great part of what constitutes the EU, and we have, during the last couple of years, witnessed a growing body of literature devoted to EU projectification (see Fred et al., forthcoming; Carlsson et  al., 2022; Godenhjelm et  al., 2015; Büttner & Leopold, 2016; Kovách & Kučerova, 2009; Mukhtar-Landgren & Fred, 2019; Jałocha, 2019). Taken together, the research field of projectification has (thus far) devoted much attention to the private sector and has developed mainly from business and management studies. The field has grown in scope, from a field interested in specific projects to one having a broader interest in the increasing reliance on and importance of all temporary forms of organising in the private as well as the public sector, and even more, to an interest in the phenomenon as a discursive element embedded in contemporary society and our daily lives. This development has been aided by the engagement of different academic fields in projectification discussions, where management, business and organisation scholars as well as political scientists, public administration researchers and even philosophers have contributed to our understanding of the phenomenon.

Making Sense of Projectification Not all the researchers mentioned above think of their work as projectification research, and some do not even use the term. In the book Beyond Project Management, for instance, the authors talk about the ‘mushrooming of projects’, whereas Kenis et al. (2009) talk about the prevalence of temporary organisations and others speak of a project society (Fogh Jensen, 2012; Lundin et al., 2015) or of project logic (see Fred, 2020). Even when referring specifically to projectification, scholars use the term somewhat differently or use it to signify different occurrences and situations. One useful way to differentiate between various understandings of projectification is to think of them as narrow and broad definitions (Packendorff & Lindgren, 2014). The former relates to projectification as a management fad of organisational restructuring, whereas the latter, broader definition relates to a multifaceted, cultural and discursive phenomenon. To unpack the term even further and capture the many different ways scholars conceive it, Jacobsson and Jałocha (2021, 1591ff) talk about four views on projectification: (1) as a managerial approach and “an organisational restructuring initiative to increase the prevalence of projects in organisations”; (2) as a societal trend, where projectification is the effect

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of the “embeddedness of project practices in social structures”; (3) as a human state, which refers to consequences at the micro-level, “such as changes in work relations and/or private life due to increased participation in project work”; and (4) as a philosophical issue, with scholars treating it as “a metaphysical shift in the perception of time, space and work, where the project semantics have become so pervasive that it, unreflected upon and often unnoticed, creeps into our daily vocabulary, our culture and our everyday lives”. In this volume, we do not adhere to any specific, mutually agreed upon definition of projectification, but what we do have in common is an understanding of the phenomenon as something existing beyond the increasing reliance on projects as an organisational function or form. We also share the view that there is a need to further scrutinise the logic, politics and power behind temporary (or the temporalities of) initiatives as well as their practices, contexts and consequences. Whereas previous research has in many cases been conducted within the framework of management studies, this book includes a broader social science repertoire with somewhat different theoretical approaches that asks different questions and perhaps also provides somewhat different answers related to projectification. We therefore suggest that the book represents the first concerted effort to gather together scholars who are part of a burgeoning ‘Scandinavian School of Projectification’.2

Overview of the Collection In addition to this introduction and the concluding chapter, the book includes ten chapters emanating from ten different, but substantial, PhD research projects. Each author has been asked to tease out one or two key findings, or arguments, in their research and substantiate them in a chapter. PhD theses are bound to a specific format and in essence represent a summary of research conducted over at least four years, which often makes them broad in scope and character. But each thesis often contains one or two great arguments, and this volume thus emphasises such arguments and provides space for them to be fleshed out and also made more visible. The fact is that PhD theses often remain unread and are often not even 2  The northern European School of Projectification might be even more geographically accurate, though, given the nationality of the book’s authors, as the volume includes researchers originating from Finland as well as Estonia.

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listed in databases or search engines; as a result, they become hidden gems for a few devoted readers and they are also left out of, for instance, review articles. As an example, it is possible to readily find four recent and interesting review articles on projectification (Jakobsen, 2022; Jacobsson & Jałocha, 2021; Aguilar Velasco & Wald, 2022; Voros Fregolente et  al., 2022), none of which, though, refers to any of the PhD theses that constitute the backbone of this book. As such, the review articles risk missing out on important theoretical as well as empirical contributions to the field. It should, however, be noted that some PhD theses are collections of articles accessible via databases, and some of the authors here have also contributed to the field via publications in addition to their PhD thesis. So, beyond their contribution to this volume, the researchers have already begun to make their mark on this emerging field of research. So, let us get to know the authors a bit better and the nature of their research. In the first chapter, titled ‘The Philosophical History of Projectification: The Project Society’, Anders Fogh Jensen takes us on an exploratory adventure of just what constitutes the contemporary project society. Using a wide range of empirical examples including a history of the way we dance, of warfare and of football systems, as well as a philosophical approach inspired by Foucauldian thinking, Fogh Jensen illustrates the impact that ‘the project’ has had not only on our organisations but more broadly on our lives, fundamentally changing our ‘ways of living, relating, aiming and hoping, building and preparing, and not least acting’. Where others have argued that projectification has grown out of organisations themselves, spreading into society’s other spheres, Fogh Jensen flips that understanding around and argues that earlier post-World War II cultural movements provided the mould for the projectification of the organisation. This argument also calls for other disciplines, such as cultural studies, anthropological studies and social studies more broadly, to pay attention to ‘the project’ and projectification, highlighting that more needs to be unpacked and made sense of than what management and organisational scholars have devoted their attention to thus far. Following this is a chapter called ‘The Trojan Horse of Local Government’, where Mats Fred uses empirical examples from Swedish local governments and theories of institutional logics to illustrate how projectification entails more than just an increasing reliance or use of project organisations—it also entails adapting a great variety of actions to what can best be called a ‘project logic’. Whereas the traditional project management literature describes projects as an aspect of technicality, a method

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‘at our disposal’, a neutral, apolitical instrument used to deliver predefined objectives within a specific time frame, Fred regards them as policy instruments that produce specific effects of their own, independent of the stated objectives and aims ascribed to them. These effects, or ‘latent consequences’, are made concrete through organisational transformations and the adaptations made to routine work and administrative systems, but they also materialise in organisational capacity building, as organisations increasingly adapt all kinds of activities to fit a project logic and handle them as if they were projects. One of the key arguments in Fred’s chapter is that the consequences of projectification often are unintentional, not calculated or even recognised at the time. Continuing the critical scrutiny of projects and their broader effects, David Scott explores the political aspects of projects in his chapter, ‘Entering the World of Project Making—Mobilising Assemblage thinking to Unpack Projects as Political Constructions’. He argues that projects are often treated as ‘black boxes’, that is, as stable and apolitical forms of organisation that can be used to organise activities in the most divergent of contexts. However, they are the result of project making, meaning the laborious act of constructing and maintaining projects. Scott argues that project making is a way of ordering and stabilising reality—an operation that also establishes hegemonic ways of thinking and doing. Drawing on assemblage thinking and an empirical analysis of development aid projects, the chapter illustrates the ‘assembly work’ that aid projects depend upon at the outset and throughout their duration, such as the construction and maintenance of cooperation, the activation of expertise, the creation of markets and the organisation of temporality. The work is profoundly political in the sense that it makes particular views and actions possible, while others remain impossible. The chapter, therefore, not only demonstrates the assembly work needed to construct and maintain projects, but also provides an analytical model of how the political dimension of project making can be unpacked. With a similar interest in the political aspects of projectification, and with a critical edge, Malin Mc Glinn has written a chapter entitled ‘What Makes it Tick? On the Projectification of the Labour Market in Sweden’. Inspired by translation theory and an ethnographic study of EU-funded labour market projects in Sweden, McGlinn offers a critical analysis of projectification. She argues that projects, especially those aiming to tackle societal problems, become practically operational and morally justifiable and legitimated through three acts of translation: framing, calculation and

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arrangements of visibility. McGlinn’s analysis concludes that the project management logic tends to convert complex problems into short-term, goal-oriented and budget-sensitive solutions. If the aim is to unpack (or expose) the inner workings of projectification, then scholars must study projects discursively, symbolically and economically. It is only when we learn what makes these projects tick, she argues, that we can question where projectification might lead to in the long run. Whereas the first four chapters devote their attention to what projectification is and the power struggles and political aspects of what constitutes the project, the next four chapters more closely examine different kinds of projects or project environments: participatory projects, public health projects, hackathons and human relation management projects. Kanerva Kuokkanen’s chapter it titled ‘The Janus Face of Participatory Projects’. In it, Kuokkanen makes the case that public-sector projectification is a phenomenon that goes hand in hand with the trend of participatory governance—a development that has materialised in participatory projects at a local level. Whereas previous researchers can be divided into opposing ‘optimist’ and ‘pessimist’ camps concerning the democratic qualities and effectiveness of both participatory governance and public-­ sector projects, Kuokkanen asks if participatory projects support more of an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation. From an optimistic viewpoint, participatory projects lead to more participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. From a pessimistic perspective, participatory projects reduce participation to a set of ‘post-political’ tools and models rather than promote citizens’ opportunities to influence public policies. Using a case study from the Helsinki metropolitan area, in Finland, and an analysis of the role of citizens and civil society actors in participatory projects, Kuokkanen concludes that there is support for both an optimistic and a pessimistic understanding of these kinds of projects. On the one hand, they provide NGOs with room for manoeuvring and give citizens some possibilities to influence initiatives aimed at them. On the other hand, though, one can see evidence of a shift from the traditional role of NGOs towards service provision, where the projects concentrate on creating generalisable and transferable models or tools of participation instead of enabling citizens to make a difference. Following this is Karin Bredin and her chapter ‘HRM and projectification: Moving beyond the ‘project-based organization’ concept’ in which she calls for more research on what projectification means for HRM, how sustainable HRM can be achieved in a more projectified landscape of work

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and organisation, and how HRM could make contemporary organisations more resilient. She brings up how the dominant focus on project-based organisations in project management research into HRM creates problematic limitations in the study of what projectification means for HRM. Future research into HRM would benefit from switching the attention to how three specific traits of work and organisation, namely: temporariness, cross-functionality, and blended workforce, are expressed in the context of study. In her chapter, Bredin discusses how these traits tend to be accentuated by projectification, that they normally coincide in organisations that rely on projects, and how they impact the playing field for HRM systems and practices. She suggests that using the set of traits as a tool for analysis of actual project work settings provides a more fine-­ grained understanding of contexts for contemporary HRM and a guidance in the transformation processes of management and work models driven by projectification. The next chapter, by Erik Söderberg, is called ‘The Road to the Isolation of Public Health Policy Projects’. As hinted at in the title, Söderberg here assesses public health projects, which according to him are often more ideologically driven compared to projects in an industrial or commercial context. The public health context comes with specific consequences regarding the possibility for the project’s intentions to influence the more permanent organisation. The specific and time-framed task, combined with a temporary team of public health experts, contributes to a high degree of demarcation with respect to the organisation that is supposed to be influenced by the project. Rather than demarcating projects within their environment, Söderberg discusses how policymaking actors need to interpret the different professional contexts that comprise the project to be able to integrate the objectives of public health projects into the permanent organisation. From a traditional policy field to a more fashionable one, Peeter Vihma’s chapter, ‘Interfaces in Project-Based Innovation Governance: Can hackathons Hack into Policy Processes?’, takes us on a journey to Estonia where public sector ‘hackathons’ are used to generate innovative projects. While the hype of digital entrepreneurship has inspired the public sector to approach societal problems through hackathons, these rather new and presumably innovative forms of organisation have not been analysed through the lens of projectification. Using and developing the concept of ‘interfaces’, Vihma discusses the role of hackathons as mechanisms of interaction between projects and permanent organisations. Vihma

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argues that although digitally inspired project governance tools such as hackathons are capable of producing promising disruptive ideas, their eventual impact depends on how they are positioned vis-à-vis the larger policy network. Following the four chapters discussing different kinds of projects and project environments, the book then contains three chapters that discuss issues of implementation, effects and measurement. The first chapter in this section, ‘Stepping on the Throttle while Hitting the Breaks  – Project Organisations and Governance’, is by Sebastian Godenhjelm. Inspired by public administration theories on public-sector reform and theories on project governance, Godenhjelm makes the argument that temporary governance mechanisms and project organisations are calling for increased speed in their experimentation and search for innovations without necessarily taking individual, organisational or societal consequences into consideration. While project organisations can potentially yield significant benefits and might play a vital role as interlinking mechanisms between (horizontal and vertical) administrative levels, Godenhjelm claims that it is important not to become blinded by the speed of their implementation. The increasing reliance on projects in the public sector includes several challenges that have yet to be fully understood, which suggests that contextual sensitivity and a slow-down in pace are needed. Following this, Johan Munck af Rosenschöld’s chapter is entitled ‘Projects as Vessels for Institutional Change: From Appealing Promises to Some Pressing Concerns’. Here, Munck af Rosenschöld explores how institutional change occurs in projectified governance using empirical examples from the USA, the UK, and Finland. Failing to properly understand the process of institutional change is a clear weakness in the existing literature on projectified governance and projectification, Munck af Rosenschöld argues. By contrasting two idealised modes of projectified governance—a mechanistic model emphasising the close connection between permanent and temporary organisations and the instrumental implementation of project outcomes, and an organic model expected to produce more significant types of change due to the autonomous nature of projects and weaker connections with permanent organisations— Munck af Rosenschöld propose a third mode, or a middle-ground solution. This mode, called adaptive projectified governance, builds on the notion that it is not the relationship between projects and permanent organisations, or between projects and the broader local community, that

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is the focal interest. Rather, projects should be viewed as existing within broader social networks of actors operating at multiple levels and in various sectors. Projects should be understood as temporary nodes of larger project networks that become engaged and activated in different constellations across time. Last, but not least, we have Isak Vento’s evaluative approach to ‘Explaining Project-Based Policy Implementation’. Despite a growing body of literature on public-sector projectification, Vento argues that we still do not fully know or understand how project organisation affects policy implementation. Such an understanding is important because modern policy implementation involves decision-making in the broad sense, and as such, public project organisation cannot be reduced merely to an administrative question but actually involves questions about public authority and the use of political power. Based on the multiple governance framework approach and theories of governance, this chapter’s main contribution lies in the fact that it provides the analytical constellations for operationalising future research undertakings with an explanatory focus. Moreover, the chapter invites further research on public projects from different research perspectives that will help explain how actors implement public policy. In sum, this volume draws together a significant amount of research on projectification to demonstrate, via theoretical pluralism, an emerging research field focusing on a phenomenon with extensive empirical implications for individuals as well as organisations and societies. Given the vast transformative processes set in motion by, or just understood and conceptualised as, projectification, we hope that this volume can inspire others from other disciplines and backgrounds to investigate the logic, politics and power behind temporary (or the temporalities of) ‘projects’ as well as the consequences of their practices, the significance of various contexts and their ability to achieve the desired effects.

References Aguilar Velasco, M. M., & Wald, A. (2022). The dark side of projectification: A systematic literature review and research agenda on the negative aspects of project work and their consequences for individual project workers. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 15(2), 272–298. https://doi. org/10.1108/IJMPB-­05-­2021-­0117 Alvesson, M., & Willmott, H. (2003). Studying management critically. Sage.

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Alvesson, M., Bridgman, T., & Willmott, H. (2009). The Oxford handbook of critical management studies. Oxford University Press. Büttner, S., & Leopold, L. (2016). A ‘new spirit’ of public policy? The project world of EU funding. European Journal of Cultural and Political Sociology, 3(1), 41–71. https://doi.org/10.1080/23254823.2016.1183503 Carlsson, V., Fred, M., & Mukhtar-Landgren, D. (2022). Local autonomy and the partnership principle: Collaborative governance in the European Social Fund in Sweden. Public Money and Management., 2022, 1. Czarniawska, B., & Sevón, G. (Eds.). (2005). Global ideas: How ideas, objects, and practices travel in the global economy. Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press. Fogh, Jensen, Anders. (2012). The Project Society. Aarhus University Press Fred, M. (2020). Local government projectification in practice – A multiple institutional logic perspective. Local Government Studies, 46(3), 351–370. https:// doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2019.1606799 Fred, M., Jałocha, B., & Mukhtar-Landgren, D. (forthcoming). Projectification and the European Union. In M. M. Germán (Ed.), Projectification of society. A necessary debate. Official University of Granada Press. Godenhjelm, S., Lundin, R. A., & Sjöblom, S. (2015). Projectification in the public sector – The case of the European Union. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 8(2), 324–348. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJMPB-­05-­2014-­0049 Grabher, G. (2002). Cool projects, boring institutions: Temporary collaboration in social context. Regional Studies, 36(3), 205–214. https://doi. org/10.1080/00343400220122025 Hodgson, D., & Cicmil, S. (Eds.). (2006). Making projects critical. Palgrave Macmillan. Hodgson, D., Fred, M., Bailey, S., & Hall, P. (Eds.). (2019). The projectification of the public sector. Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management. Jacobsson, M., & Jałocha, B. (2021). Four images of projectification: An integrative review. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 14(7), 1583–1604. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-­12-­2020-­0381 Jakobsen, R. (2022). Public sector projectification – A systemic review of the literature. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 26(4), 91–112. Jałocha, B. (2019). The European Union’s multi-level impact on member state projectification in light of neoinstitutional theory. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 12(3), 578–601. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJMPB-­09-­2018-­0198 Kenis, P., Janowicz-Panjaitan, M., & Cambré, B. (Eds.). (2009). Temporary organizations. Prevalence, logic and effectiveness. Edward Elgar Publishing. Kovách, I., & Kučerova, E. (2009). The social context of project proliferation – The rise of a project class. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 11(3), 203–221.

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Lundin, A.  R. (1995). Project management and temporary organizations. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4). Lundin, A. R., & Hällgren, M. (Eds.). (2014). Advancing research on projects and temporary organizations. Copenhagen Business School Press. Lundin, A. R., Arvidsson, N., Brady, T., Ekstedt, E., Christophe, M., & Sydow, J. (Eds.). (2015). Managing and working in project society: Institutional challenges of temporary organizations. Cambridge University Press. Maylor, H., Brady, T., Cooke-Davies, T., & Hodgson, D. (2006). From projectification to programmification. International Journal of Project Management, 24(8), 663–674. Midler, C. (1993). L’auto qui n’existait pas. InterÉditions. Midler, C. (1995). Projectification of the firm: The Renault case. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 363–375. Mukhtar-Landgren, D., & Fred, M. (2019). Re-compartmentalizing local policies? The translation and mediation of European structural funds in Sweden. Critical Policy Studies, 13(4), 488–506. https://doi.org/10.1080/1946017 1.2018.1479282 Packendorff, J., & Lindgren, M. (2014). Projectification and its consequences: Narrow and broad conceptualisations. South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences, 17(1), 7 21. Project Management Institute (PMI). (2017). A guide to the Project Management body of knowledge (PMBOK® guide) (6th ed.). Project Management Institute. Sahlin-Andersson, K., & Söderholm, A. (2002). Beyond project management: New perspectives on the temporary–permanent dilemma. Liber. Sanderson, J., & Winch, G. (2017, April). Public policy and projects: Making connections and starting conversations. International Journal of Project Management, 35(3), 221–223. Sjöblom, S. (2009). Administrative short-termism—A non-issue in environmental and regional governance. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 11(3), 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080903033747 Sjöblom, S., Löfgren, K., & Godenhjelm, S. (2013). Projectified politics. The role of temporary organisations in the public sector. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17(2). Voros Fregolente, M., Neto, A. C. S., Ribeiro, D. R. P., Salerno, M. S., Nakano, D. N., & de Carvalho, M. M. (2022). From the wall of the industry to the soul of society: A review and multi-level analysis on projectification. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 15(2), 241–271. https://doi. org/10.1108/IJMPB-­05-­2021-­0123 Wiggershaus, R. (1994). The Frankfurt school: Its history, theories and political significance. MIT Press.

CHAPTER 2

The Philosophical History of Projectification: The Project Society Anders Fogh Jensen

This project did not fall from heaven; nor did it rise from hell. The project has its historical roots in culture and society. On the one hand, the project has always been there. Caesar had his projects, as did Napoleon; even the Judeo-Christian God must have had been working on a project as he set out to create the world in six days. On the other hand, the project has not always been the central mould for every student, employee, and even non-­ employed, as it has become in recent times. How did this happen, that this old form of imagining and throwing forward (i.e. projecting) has become the central mould? And what does it take to manage oneself under these conditions?

A. F. Jensen (*) Silkeborg, Denmark e-mail: [email protected]; http://www.filosoffen.dk; http://www.philosophers.net © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_2

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Aim of the Chapter When embarking upon my research in 2003, I was not interested in projects at all. I set out to find an adequate diagnosis of our present condition on the hunch that Foucault’s description of society as a disciplinary society (Foucault, 1975) was no longer satisfying and that the refinement in a société de sécurité (Foucault, 1980, 12–13) or a biopolitique’ de l’espèce humaine (Foucault, 1976, 216) or Deleuze’s concept of sociétés de contrôle did not cover what was actually happening in society today; such descriptions seemed to assume a world that was too planned, too controlled (Deleuze, 1990). Hence, I started out with the question: ‘What does the disciplinary society consist of?’ Later, the plausibility of this concept of a Project Society was confirmed in organisational studies (Lundin, 2016, 2017). The concept of projectification is even older, going back to Midler’s studies of the reorganising of the car company Renault’s factory into a project organisation (Midler, 1995). The interest in projectified companies was later taken up by, among others, Bredin (2004) and Maylor et al. (2006), and, as the book you hold in your hands convincingly shows, there has been such widespread interest in the projectification of organisations in Scandinavia and surrounding countries that one could talk about a Scandinavian or Nordic School of Projectification. Now what I contest is not that project management in general and the more specific studies of projectification are wrong. Just the opposite. What I claim is that project management studies tend to have tunnel vision, as they focus on the mechanisms and spreading of projects in organisations and companies. On the one hand, we have the line from Midler focusing on projectification in organisations and companies—a narrow definition of projectification, so to speak—and, on the other hand, we have a line from Packendorff and Lindgren (2014) following a broader definition of projectification, where projectification is understood as a discursive spread of ‘the project’ embedded in and institutionalised across societies and in lived experience with projects (Hodgson et  al., 2019). The latter, broader, focus, however, is still organisational as it covers organisational and institutional consequences. What I propose is a third and more fundamental level of projectification that is far from always even goes by ‘project’ but concerns a more fundamental change in ways of living, relating, aiming and hoping, building and

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preparing, and nonetheless acting, that is—among other spheres—recognised in the sphere of organisations as projectification. Thus, the aim of this chapter is to convince the reader that the characteristics of a project are much broader, that it permeates all spheres of Western-global culture, and that organisations are just one sphere of the Project Society. This means that project studies in organisational studies are dealing with something very central and crucial to our society and culture that transcends work. Accordingly, the aim here is to show that projectification does not simply grow out of organisations and spread into society’s other spheres, as Foucault argued about the prison and discipline society (1975), but that earlier movements in other spheres in post–World War II culture prepared a mould for the projectification of organisations. I shall argue by analogy hoping to evoke the reader’s sense of plausibility and coherence. I shall draw upon my research in such disparate sectors as dance, social work, warfare, single life and dating, treatment of diseases, the firm and public organisations, branches of sports, football systems, architecture, and pedagogy in order to circulate around a project system that characterises the Project Society. I shall touch upon historical developments to indicate a general isomorphic transformation by examples from these spheres, which I hope the reader will be able to recognise in projectified organisations.

Practical Implications The practical implications of what I present here are thus to provide the reader with a different and much broader vision of projects and projectification, a vision that one can bring to life and keep in mind when reading subsequent chapters. As I shall show, the problems, difficulties, dilemmas, and pleasures of projects also apply to other areas of life, for example crucial questions about when one is free, secure, connected, bored, safe, or acknowledged. Becoming aware of and recognising the not-always-visible or hidden rules of the game will be one benefit gained from reading this chapter. Thirdly, this chapter sketches a tree of research on the Project Society and projectification, where organisational project studies are just one of the branches, and suggests that organisational studies open up to other branches, as there can be mutual insights to share.

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What Is a Project? To put our thesis on solid ground, we need as clear definitions as possible. Often in the management and organisation literature, one talks about projects with presuppositions, which makes the matter rather murky. As I see it, a project has three essential characteristics. The meaning of the Latin word ‘project’ is a throw or a toss forward. It is not a throw in space, but a throw in time. The throw forward in time is not a postponement. It is something imagined, and thus not yet realised, that is thrown into a plane of the possible. A project differs from a job, a task, or a duty in that it has not yet been performed and so has never been accomplished before. A task or a duty relies on an earlier accomplishment; it has been done before and must now be repeated. Therefore, a task or a duty can have a method—meta hodos in ancient Greek, meaning ‘after the way’. After the way, one can look back and write down all the steps and phases into a procedure to follow the next time. This means that when project management pushes a project into schemas with phases, tasks, and transitions and establishes a timeline to control a project and secure a level of quality and time of deliverance, it pushes the project, on a continuum, towards a job or a task to do (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). A third characteristic of a project—the first being the fact that it is forward-­oriented and takes place only once—is that the project is temporary, unlike operations and routines, which have their continuation in repetition; though the workday ends, work continues through a repetition tomorrow, next week, next month, next year. Most projects are simply limited in time, whereas others are limited by accomplishment, but in all cases projects are temporary (Packendorff, 1995, 320). Their temporary character is not only a condition for projects; it is a known condition, and this condition constitutes activities within the projects. Project people are concerned with and not seldom worried about transitions between projects. And this knowledge of the unknown next temporary engagement can be used as a social technology to make project workers overperform. On the other hand, it can result in performances being oriented towards securing a transition rather than what is best for the project, or leaving projects prematurely for longer-lasting projects. As Boutinet (1990) states, a project implies certain contradictions or, rather, mediations to cope with. There is utopia and realism. There is the sense and sense-making in the project and the instrumentalisation. And

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there is individual participation and engagement and the collectivity, the team. What I consider here as closest to a ‘pure project’ will be the utopian or idealistic part and the sense-making part of the project. This is not to say that the realisation and the instrumentalisation of the procedures are not part of the project, only that if one pushes the project to a mere instrumentalisation and realisation, it stops being a project and becomes a task. In addition, one notices that many false projects are in circulation; these are tasks and duties disguised as projects, because of the first characteristic of a project, namely that it is considered more heroic to give form to the future than repeat the past; that is to say, there is a disguise of utopia, idealism, and hyper sense-making of something rather trivial, when tasks just have to be accomplished and duties fulfilled, and these activities are renamed ‘projects’. Nonetheless, it can be a necessary disguise to obtain the means for the day-to-day running of a Project Society.

Projectification Now what justifies talking about projectification? The first response is that the project has become the dominant mode of working and living to the point where it has become the ‘default setting’ of activity, overtaking planning, tasks, and duties, particularly in the public sphere (Boutinet, 1990; Godenhjelm et al., 2019; Hodgson et al., 2019). Why has projectification become the default setting of activity? In this chapter, the short answer to this question is that our Western-global culture has been so obsessed with ‘the new’ that activities in and outside of institutions must legitimise themselves by how they contribute to ‘the new’, for example how they contribute to innovation, and the project is the form par excellence for creating something new. I am not saying that in projectified activities we actually create important changes, only that our activities are oriented towards changing the future, that they are legitimised by a seeming contribution to change, and that our discourse is then satiated with project lingo. As Joseph Schumpeter had already realised in 1939, an innovation is a schöpferische Zerstörung (Schumpeter, 1939, 136–138). It destroys as it creates, so a project not only brings forward the new, it is also involved in a destruction of the given. For example, our technological devices permanently get ‘old’ even though they are new, and after a few years, they are simply unusable. Projectification not only means structuring temporary forward-oriented activities but also enters into a normative

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reconfiguration, where repetition means death, history means too old, and tradition is a mere tourist attraction. But this concerns not only work and capitalism but also national and supranational solutions to welfare problems (Godenhjelm & Johanson, 2018, 43) because it concerns private life and life in general on a personal level. For example, projectification also applies to the level of identity. To be concise, one could say that we no longer ask our dinner partner what she has been saying over and over for the last ten years but what she is in the process of becoming. This leads us to the second response to the question of what justifies our talking about a ‘projectification’. As the other contributions in this book affirm, a transformation of the project mould in and between organisations, I shall try to convince the reader that the purpose of this structure is not only to find a limited sector, public administration, or field of work but to embed these sectors in a larger societal context, which we tend to call culture and society—Gemeinschaft and Gesellschaft—and which are influenced by and exert their own influence on these sectors. The project as the default setting for activity did not simply arise in the change of organisations and companies to spread to the rest of the culture; it is part of a larger isomorphic transformation that has been taking place since the 1960s. It has surprised me, in conducting my research, to discover that these isomorphic changes were barely societal; they were concerned with a reconfiguration of core philosophical dimensions—or, in Kantian terms, transcendental ideas—as time, space, relation, and activity. Because these dimensions concern not only social life but also psychical conditions and relation-making and touch upon the philosophical question of being in the world, it is not surprising that the characteristics of projects are ubiquitous. Finally, why talk of projectification and a Project Society, rather than a projectified society? This has to do with normativity and unending ‘throws forward’. As Foucault remarked, by société disciplinaire he did not mean a disciplined society as in a totalitarian state, where discipline was completely pushed  through, but rather a society where discipline played a decisive role, also for normativity (Foucault, 1978, 15–16). This difference is often neglected in organisational studies and management studies. Likewise, by Project Society—rather than projectified society—I do not mean that all activities are projects but that the project as the default setting plays a

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crucial role, as well as for normativity. There is an ‘ought to have’ and ‘better’ associated with the project. Now, for an example of the large-scale historic transformations on which we build our structure of (1) disciplination of society, (2) counter-­ disciplination or anti-disciplination, (3) projectification as a post-­ disciplinary society, let us take a look at the evolvement of common and popular folk-dance forms in society from 1400 to today. This should make some structures clear.

Example of a Field: The History of Dance The history of dance in the fifteenth to the nineteenth centuries reveals organised group dances where all of the attendees dance together in a collective dance as we know it today from, for example, the Lancers, and often with the main persons, for example a bride and groom or hosts, in the centre. These were line dances, circle dances, procession dances, figure dances, and country dances (International Encyclopedia of Dance, ‘Social Dance’, 1988). From the beginning of the nineteenth century and notably from the 1830s, we see new couple dances appear and spread, like the walz, the mazurka, and the polonaise. Though there were rules of conduct for avoiding collisions, the couples danced only as a couple and not in a larger organised structure. The historical and structural conditions for these dances were the disciplining institutions, which we know as dancing schools, where the bourgeoisie sent their children to develop social skills and docile bodies. Now, what is especially clear here is that there is a codification of the dance. One does not have to feel anything special, and to demonstrate such feelings, one can lean back in the code. Secondly, the time for dance is structured before the dance starts. And thirdly, the space for drinking and chatting is separated from the dance floor. In other words, we have an a priori structuring of the where, the when, and the how of the activities. When we look at the development of social dance in the twentieth century, we mainly see two things. Through dances like, for example, the Charleston of the 1920s and the Jitterbug of the 1950s, we see two main tendencies. The first is that the dancer’s weight shifts increasingly backwards from the toes to the heels. The second is that couples are moving away from each other, creating a space for larger and freer movements.

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Now, with the Twist in the 1960s, social dance reaches its low of complexity and its hitherto pinnacle of freedom. It was scandalous for the disciplinary institutions as it required no preceding skills. But what is even more important here is that couples let go of each other’s hands. This opens the relationships up to everyone and no one. The anti-disciplinary revolt in dance—freeing feelings and expressions from the code—has succeeded in its goal of total freedom. Social dance didn’t remain the Twist; it evolved through inspiration from movies and TV series like West Side Story (1961) and Fame (1982–1987), creating room for schools of jazz ballet. Disco appeared in the wake of Saturday Night Fever (1978), and the 1980s hit songs “Electric Boogie” and “Break Dance” influenced social dance. However, the opening of relationships to dance with everyone and no one remained, and that is important as it demonstrates the reconfiguration of the fundamental philosophical dimensions of the Project Society. It is almost impossible to answer the simple relation question: who did you dance with last night? With dancing, neither space before the activity nor the time defined. The dance floor can open up as and where the activity goes, and it closes as the activity stops. Structured like a reception, no one asks anyone to dance, you simply enter the mass of dancing bodies, show your energy, and direct it towards various people, dancing with one or more at a time, opening new connections to other people, leaving others behind with their new connections. In the Project Society, the ‘no’ simply seems to have vanished, leaving the enthusiastic ‘yes’—or the bodily expression of ‘connection accepted’—as the only explicit answer. Unfortunately, it is not so simple that everyone can dance with anyone. The ‘no’ is the telephone that does not ring. It is the postponement, the unending postponement, of the agreement that is not kept or simply the emergence of the ‘half appointment’ that does not bind either partner. The relation is replaced by the connection—so close that it can be exploited, insofar as it does not obligate. It is the ambiance of the reception that pervades the Project Society. What we see here is: 1. The replacement of a relationship with colleagues with loose connections and the multiplication of simultaneous connections common to project work (Christensen & Krejner, 1991).

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2. The disappearance of the ‘no’ into a ‘culture of yes’, where the primary concern and fear of the individual is not to avoid dismissal but to obtain the ‘yes’ of a reconnection to a new temporary project. 3. The preorganised time and space (a priori) are replaced by activity, where not only does the activity then become central to performing a project, but because the borders inside and outside the project have been blurred, performing activity is crucial to entering the project and to continue to be part of the project. With inactivity affiliation stops. Let us now return to the relationship between a disciplinary society and the Project Society.

Discipline and Projects Perhaps the reader is not completely convinced that the change in common dance forms serves as a valid example of how we have transgressed the disciplinary society, since most people today are so badly educated in dance. This might be one reason why most people dance ironically; they simply want to reject the seriousness of any excellence on the floor and so evade any qualitative judgement of performance. Furthermore, one could argue that it is not true that we have left behind the times of a disciplinary structure. And that is correct. Rather than thinking about the past and present, we should think about history in layers. The masterpiece of disciplinary social technology is to split up every space, time, activity, and process into pieces and put it all back together again in coordination, forming a plan and carrying out the execution by surveillance and control, all the while planning for what will happen where and when, that is by making programmes and plans for large institutional behaviours before the activities unfold in time and space. Without this model of organisation, our world would probably not have reached the level of wealth we have today. What’s different about the Project Society is that every activity is planned a priori—that is, they are planned (where, when, and how) before they are executed. In the Project Society, such factors often result from activity and are thus decided a posteriori. For example, you can say only looking back if a coincidental chat or a meeting was part of a project, just as the criteria for success of the project can change depending on how the activities of the project unfold.

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What is also different from the disciplinary society, and somewhat confusing for disciplinarily educated subjects, is that the functions crawl out of institutional spaces, and activities can open the time and space in any three-dimensional institutional space. A meeting can take place in a locker room, a health project can be launched at a vacation site, bank activity can being in a café, as can the project for education—and of course work and all institutional functions can take place at home. Discipline is not over. It lies at the foundation of our coordination, as well as in project work, and, as we saw during the Covid-19 pandemic and its restrictions, we very quickly adapted to a plague-stricken disciplinary way of living. On top of the discipline layer and the more profound layer of a code of law, Foucault saw a third layer evolving, especially in the nineteenth century, a dispositif de sécurité, a security arrangement or system having as its object the population, accounting, and acting on probabilities to optimise even the disciplinary society. This adds to the discipline and optimises populations in a new form of rationalité gouvernementale (Foucault, 1978, 31–56). Now, what I am suggesting is that the dispositif de sécurité is not the only way that we developed an organisational structure on the basis of law and discipline. I suggest that a fourth system of distributing goods, organising activities, and influencing behaviour, which does not have a central eye as discipline and security had, was emerging at the same time as Foucault wrote Surveiller et punir. This post-disciplinary system does not optimise discipline through probability but is directly oriented towards transgressing discipline, and so it always needs discipline to relate to. Anyone who has applied for project funding has learned at least four things: (1) you won’t get funding if you’re just planning on repeating what works, (2) you can’t apply for repeated rounds of funding, (3) you have to transcend borders, and (4) you must pretend to be creating something unique. One must transcend and connect what was differentiated by discipline: Borders between sectors, countries, professions, institutions, and so forth. 

The Spirit of Projects The task that we have already begun in this chapter before we get to an explanation of discipline is to describe what this post-disciplinary system consists of. Seen from the point of view of a disciplinary system, it seems

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chaotic. It has systemic traits, but it does not have central coordination, nor does it have much predictability at the individual level. This doesn’t mean that it has no systematic way of functioning, but it is not always visible at the individual level. In their brick of a book Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello write the history of capitalism and its crises. Building on Boltanski and Laurent Thévenot’s De la justification (1987), Boltanski and Chiapello set about showing how capitalism, which in itself is meaningless and has no other end than accumulation over time, succeeds in legitimising itself by drawing upon other systems of legitimation that Boltanski and Chiapello call cités. An example of this is the connection to the Calvinist religious worldview, where the deadly sin avaritia, greed, is turned into a virtue over the course of the sixteenth century (Weber, 1905). After 1960 in the globalised world, the ideas of capitalism and companies bringing social justice and social security gradually faded out. Boltanski and Chiapello suggest that a new regime of legitimisation and greatness (grandeur) emerged that does not explain how it vouchsafes justice or social security—in fact, it does not care—but nonetheless, individuals keep joining the system either by promises of self-realisation or by fear of falling out of the system. The authors call this regime la cité par projets (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999, 161). It is not so much expertise or education that gives dominance but the number of connections and social abilities. The Project Society can be compared with an unending reception, where you will always have a smiling, open, and confidence-inspiring attitude since acrimony and critics do not promote you to new projects. As the cité par projets evaluates people by the number and quality of connections, it becomes important to show and show off these connections. Three years after Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme, we got LinkedIn, and ten years later the selfie.

The Project Society as the Post-Disciplinary Society Coming up with this fruitful idea of a regime of projects, Boltanski and Chiapello, however, remain in the field of capitalism and organisations. They pay little attention to the broadness or deepness of their own thesis, so they conclude that it is the development of capitalism and competition that transforms organisational structure. They look at the Gesellschaft but not the Gemeinschaft. This helps to explain how a precarious relation to

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the labour market arises, even among people with distinguished educations, who Guy Standing would later name the precariat (Standing, 2014). It is this broadness and deepness that I set out to explore in my research from 2003 to 2007 aiming to design a system of surveiller et punir for the post-disciplinary society. We shall now see more expressions of the Project Society in a range of various empirical fields as examples of catalysts of and reactions to projectification. Again, I direct the reader’s attention to the similarities between fields that constitute a system, which we could bring together under the concept of a project system. The manifestations of this system constitute the Project Society.

Facilitating Transdisciplinary Activities: Architecture and Education When everything seems like a project and projectification starts cropping up everywhere and becomes the default setting for arranging activities, it seems that something quite fundamental has changed. For example, we can see the results of an emerging architecture in the 1970s, where the buildings tell us that project work in groups—or, as they are later called, ‘teams’—has become crucial not only in companies and public organisations but evidently also in schools and higher education. The school has a double role here, as it is both part and product of the Project Society while at the same time given the responsibility of making individuals and populations capable of managing life and work in the Project Society. In the previously built schools, education through projects often required more than one classroom, and corners at libraries or unused rooms were utilised for project work. Architecture is very expensive and takes more time to change in a fundamental way than educational ideas structured around a project. In schools built before 1970, architecture was rearranged internally, where the arrangement of tables in rows and columns was replaced by a ‘horseshoe’ and sometimes into groups. From the 1970s, schools of all levels and universities were built to suit and satisfy projects, and the common spaces beyond the classrooms were allowed to grow to a significant degree. Corridors in both schools and offices were built for transportation in between fixed structures, whereas the new common areas outside the classrooms were built for temporary stops during breaks and group work. The transportation zone was made visible for stopovers and temporary meetings.

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The open-plan office was introduced in Scandinavia in the late 1980s, but it proved to be too open, letting too much noise and disturbance pass through individual working spaces. Some sort of enclosure was needed, for example rooms for groups (or, later, again, teams) to hold project meetings. Architects learn from the use of buildings. What is common to these Project Society constructions is that they are neither programmed nor totally open. They are sufficiently open so that a variety of activities can define what the spaces and zones are. The spaces are defined through those activities, just as the dance floor at a party in an apartment is not defined a priori but is actually opened in different rooms as the dance goes on and closes as the dance comes to an end. Such responses by architecture tell us that activity, as opposed to stratification and programming, has become more central to the Project Society.

The Revolt and the New Conditions for Project People: Single Life, Exploitation, and Passage Angst Now, how should we understand this transformation of ideas of education, the construction of buildings, and encouragement of temporary transdisciplinary meetings? It seems to me that it started as a revolt against former ideas of education, influencing behaviour, and the corresponding construction of buildings. The transcending of borders was a response to limitations and restrictions that, in light of new ideas of freedom and realisations of desire, was experienced as simply too confining and alienating. It also seems to me that this revolt against discipline—sometimes collected under the temporal synecdoche of 1968—did not end up as intended. For example, the revolt against the nuclear family, its morals, its suburban houses, and its repetitive way of living gave rise to the commune and an (imagined) free and borderless way of living with shifting sexual partners and a common economy. But it did not end as free sexuality in the commune; it ended up with the appearance of the single. The single did not exist in the 1950s, but there were solitaries without partners. The single is the project structure of the private and sexual life, where the task is to inhabit the passage. On TV screens there emerged a new Hollywood genre starting in the late 1970s, usually with the (liberated) girl living a liberal life on her own, entering into relations with various men. The Mary Tyler Moore Show (1970–1977), Designing Women (1986–1993), The Golden Girls (1985–1992), Murphy Brown (1988–1998), and Ally McBeal

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(1997–2002) are examples. The string of TV series on single women culminates with Sex and the City (1998–2003) and the opening question of the pilot: ‘How can one have sex like a man?’—meaning ‘How can one have sex without feelings?’ The reason for this question is the desire to inhabit the passage, and feelings inhibit the passage. A new concept of exploitation is at stake here: The exploitation of the opposite sex does not take away anything or hollow out one’s personality; the exploitation is simply an unfolding of oneself and one’s sexuality— which a temporary partner can enjoy the benefits of simultaneously. In the Project Society for private human beings, as well as for professional project workers, exploitation acquires a new meaning. It is no longer something to be feared; rather, it is a situation where what you fear more than being exploited is not being exploited. Since those who are used are visible and show their skills and competencies, enlarging their network, it is better to be misused than unused. Since activity keeps you in the game, those who are not in circulation are in danger of falling out of the eternal reception of the Project Society and are therefore in the Scandinavian welfare state subject to activation. This also explains why it can be better to give your work away for free than to ask for decent remuneration. The condition of the temporary brings into play the dangerous passage, which is what religion and anthropology have thematised for so long; only now the passage is not something rare in life. As projectification penetrates society, the dangerousness of the passage becomes part of the social climate. A new passage angst emerges in this climate. One no longer fears the ‘no’ (e.g. the dismissal); one fears not getting the ‘yes’ of others (e.g. engagement in projects). And here the docile and polite attitude falls short; it is replaced by a never-ending positive and self-promoting attitude that always says yes. It is precisely these conditions of uncertainty, passage, and overbooking that must be taken into account if we want to map the lived life in the Project Society and, for example, understand why people break down or get stressed out.

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Pace of Reorganisation and Project Structure: Engagements, Appointments, Football, Warfare, and Leadership by the ‘Yes’ If discipline is somehow eclipsed in the last third of the twentieth century or is reduced to the basis of other ways of organising activities and distributing goods, how is it that discipline became eclipsed? First, discipline is very good at eliminating the aleatory and making specimens of the same out of different materials, for example making identical soldiers or citizens out of different human beings. But it (1) cannot exploit the aleatory, (2) is very good at planning but not at timing and is unable to adapt to a posteriori conditions, (3) is insensitive to differences in basic materials, to users, citizens, customers, trends in fashion, or changes in technology, and, (4) while being very good at repetition, is not very flexible in its reconfiguration. The best chances for success no longer lie in rising above complexity and controlling it, but in the postponing of decisions because the conditions in which decisions are made are about neither fixation nor circulation, but change. We shall end this chapter on the philosophical explanations of the rise of the Project Society by looking at how the speed of reconfiguration has catalysed projects. It is evident tp companies that if they don’t know what commodities, services, or results to produce and how to produce them next year, then permanent employment becomes a millstone around the company’s neck. Project employment in temporary terms becomes much more suitable in a milieu with a pressure to change and spur some imagined innovation. This condition evidently has precarious consequences for the temporary employee, as he must still meet the demands of the old work of repetition, such as a bank demanding future repetitions like monthly pay slips in order to value borrowers as ‘safe’. Gaps open between the structure of the flexible world of projects and the structure of the inflexible world of discipline, which the individual must bridge himself, in this case, for example, in a life of permanent sublease. This bridging might be easy for young people, but it seems to wear out individuals, as we have seen with the prevalence of new mental diseases of exhaustion. On a private level, this flexibilisation by postponing decisions results in the emergence of the ‘half appointment’. When individuals try to increase their security by quantity—to borrow a term from the airline industry, ‘overbooking’—insecurity and complexity increase, as no one knows who

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is available until the last moment. Hence, appointments must nowadays— like flight tickets—be confirmed. Sometimes at the last minute. The speed of reorganisation challenged routines in football, when Rinus Michels introduced ‘Dutch total football’ in the years of the Twist, communes, and the spirit of ‘68—it was in Ajax Amsterdam from 1965–1971 and in Barcelona from 1971–1975. A shipping agent would never let a truck drive back empty from Milan to Stockholm; it would try to find articles to transport from Milan to Munich, from Munich to Hamburg, and from Hamburg to Stockholm. Likewise, a defence player in the attack zone should not just run back to his fixed space. If all players could play all roles, then the team could regroup immediately as everyone took up new positions. This is the ‘hippie’ or total flexibility of football. But it didn’t end up as ‘Dutch total football’, as no players were smart enough to practice this ideal. It ended up as the libero—and today’s football has extremely flexible backs whose job is not just to break down the enemy’s attacks but to launch positive, forward-oriented projects. The duty is not only to do the prescribed, though discipline towards the tactics plays a key role; one is expected to take initiative and be creative, even when defending. Only when a player is sent off does the team return to a disciplinary strategy of fixation and a no-fault strategy with the aim of just getting the time to pass, just like the Project Society regresses to a disciplinary society’s focus on space, distance, and defensive behaviour when an pandemic arrives at the territory. In warfare, the enemy army is replaced by the project worker, namely the terrorist. Whereas the disciplined army defended or invaded the territory on the battlefield, the French and US armies ran into trouble in Vietnam around the time of the Twist, the (hippie) commune house, the non-hierarchical ideas of education, and the ideas of sexual liberation. The Vietcong army was simply more flexibly organised in clusters. War didn’t end up as a Vietcong army organisation; it ended up project-structured terrorism. Terrorists operate in cells, they meet in teams to organise their operations, and they split up again after bombing projects. Hence, the defence must change and infiltrate communications and networks. With the Second Gulf War, war became ‘nation building’, where the goal was not to eradicate the enemy but to turn the cultural and civil energy around into a building up of democracy and capitalism (Hardt & Negri, 2004, 23, 53–58). This is the curving of the confrontation by opposite interests, a curving forwards of both sides into development and change, which we see also in

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education and leadership. In upbringing and education, progress is achieved by the elimination of faults (education by ‘no’) to facilitate the unfolding of the will of the child (education by ‘yes’). Leadership follows this transformation of education and warfare, concentrating not on employees’ faults but on talking to employees about how self-­development can go hand in hand with the development of the company. And in welfare institutions like public employment service, we prefer not to talk about rights and duties but about inclinations and desires, motivations and possibilities, networks and projects. These become the new norms of the Project Society, but these norms differ from those in the disciplinary society, for they are not rules to be followed but personal energy to be expected.

The Pathologies of the Project Society As Ehrenberg (1998) remarked, this transformation from duty to initiative—and activity—has made the individual suffer in new ways, and there is a remarkable convergence between the new expectations of the individual during the 1980s and the appearance of Prozac in 1987 and an explosion of an entire psychopharmacological industry. As Ehrenberg states, ‘Le Prozac n’est pas la pilule du bonheur, mais celle de l’initiative”1 (1998, 239)—and we could add, keeping in mind the conditions of the dance floor and the unending reception: Prozac was the first of a series of project pills. “An die Stelle von Verbot, Gebot oder Gesetz treten Projekt, Initiative und Motivation,”2 states German-Korean philosopher Byung-Chul Han (2010, 20)—the project becomes part of a new normative regime. The normative individual distinction, which until around the 1960s was also a collective distinction, was between the permitted and the prohibited. After the transcending of disciplinary structures and borders, which we saw with the Twist as just one example, this distinction collapses into the possible. And, as Ehrenberg states, this also comes with a shift from a relation between society and the individual to a personal responsibility for the realisation of the possible … in projects. Ehrenberg (1998, 16) is aligned with Han, as he states that ‘Les notions de projet, de motivation, de

 ‘Prozac is not a happy pill but an initiative pill.’  ‘Prohibition, command or rule is replaced by project, initiative and motivation.’

1 2

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communication sont aujourd’hui des normes.’3 The normativity in the Project Society is rather a ‘can’ than an ‘ought to’, as the way to success has changed from avoiding the ‘no’ of others to gaining the ‘yes’ of others. But what about the incapacity, the inability, and the lack of motivation that each of us experiences in life? This is scarcely described in the project literature. However, it is described in psychiatric diagnoses, when the flipside of a project results in breakdowns. Whereas the society of the ‘no’, the disciplinary society, could result in neurosis, this great disease of Freud and his followers seems to have faded out during the 1970s, and the language of breakdowns becomes that of anhedonic diseases, notably depression and, later, burnout (Ehrenberg, 1998, 13). I cannot help thinking that people still seem nervous, but in the language of depression, this is now conceived of as ‘anxiety’. What could catalyse anxiety in the Project Society is exactly the a posteriori judgements of activities (what is relevant? when is an activity complete? what are the criteria?), the temporary conditions of projects (what will happen to me next?), or the anxiety connected to passages and the transformation of relations into connections (who will support me?). It is of huge importance not to fall into depression and burn out in the Project Society, at the same time as the conditions of the Project Society foster these anhedonic sufferings, because the depressed and the burned-­ out suffer twice: They suffer from receiving no encouragement or initiative, and now  they must mobilise these deeds to rejoin the Project Society (see the chapter by McGlinn). The nightmare of the depressed and the burned-out is social gatherings of positive attitudes, suggestions, flatteries, and connections—and this is exactly what the Project Society is. The code of the dance, the discrete politeness, and the duty could have saved them, but their world is a world of roars of laughter, selfies, and social (media) activities.

Conclusion and Practical Implications The aim of this chapter was to render plausible the idea that the emergence of projectification is much broader and much deeper than is commonly assumed in organisational studies. It is broader in the sense that what in project studies is called ‘projectification’ is in fact part of a much larger synchronic isomorphic change in culture, society, and private life 3

 ‘The concepts of project, motivation, and communication are today norms.’

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that sets projective conditions in such different spheres as dance and warfare, single life, administration, football systems, and architecture. It is deeper in the sense that this reconfiguration is not just the ubiquitous emergence of the word ‘project’ or even of the temporary, future-oriented throw forward in time but a reconfiguration in the core of what we describe by philosophical basic concepts—space, time, relation, and activity—that we associated with the Kantian transcendental ideals (Kant, 1781). This reconfiguration sets activity as primary to space, time, and relation (where, when, and with whom), so that activity opens and maintains space, time, and relations, whereas inactivity closes these transcendental forms. What we describe as a transformation from plan to project is so deeply rooted in our approach to time that we have moved from a clear culture of a priori evaluation to a posteriori evaluation, meaning that the criteria for success are shaped by activity and that decisions are postponed as long as possible in order to have more information in a more unpredictable world. We saw that changes in the nature of appointments are also changing norms. All this is to say that the conditions of the a posteriori have become a cultural and historical a priori in our time. You might not know what counts, but you know that it will take the form of a project. And this is what we call projectification, with all its normative connotations. If this is right, then project studies are more central to cultural studies, social studies, anthropological studies, and philosophical studies than project studies think of themselves. This can open up a view of projects where one sees a solid tree of research consisting of branches, where organisational project studies are just one branch. This chapter proposes to crawl back from the branch to the trunk and do the research from there. It also suggests a lens through which to read the other chapters of this book, as they all in their particular way make it clear how projectification has permeated the culture. I hope I have outlined here the historical, societal, and philosophical context of projectification. Finally, it is my hope that the reader has acquired a sense of the not-­ always-­visible, but still not hidden, rules of the game in the Project Society. In addition, emotions like impatience, anxiety for passage, confusions in relations, and much too open answers to your fundamental questions far from always have to do with personal dysfunctions; rather, they are built into the very structure of the Project Society, with individual consequences as logical implications. Finally, I hope that this will stimulate in you a great hunger to know what projectification is all about.

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Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2003 and 2007, together with responses coming from the last 15 years of talks, lectures, and presentations. It was first published as a Ph.D. thesis as Jensen, Anders Fogh (2007) Projektsamfundet at the University of Copenhagen, and then as a book, Projektsamfundet, in 2009 at Aarhus, Denmark, by Unipress, together with an abbreviated version Projektmenneket (2009b). It was later translated into English and published at Unipress in 2012 as The Project Society. In 2016 the first journal article was published as Jensen, A., Thuesen, C. & Geraldi, J. (2016) ‘The projectification of everything: Projects as a human condition.’ Project Management Journal, 47(3), 21–34, which won Article of the Year from the Project Management Journal. For the idea of the post-disciplinary society as a Project Society, of relevance is not only Michel Foucault’s Surveiller et punir (1975), but especially the lectures of 11 and 18 January 1978 at Collège de France in Security, Territoire, Population, as well as the final lecture in 1976, on 17 March, in ‘Il faut defendre la societé’. However, it is combined with a thorough reading of Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello’s Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme (1999), where one can glean the first contours of a post-­ disciplinary society as a Project Society. From here the empirical fields outside organisatisation theory open up easily, and I shall refer the reader to the bibliography in Projektsamfundet (Unipress 2009a) for further reading.

References Boltanski, L., & Chiapello, È. (1999). Le Nouvel esprit du capitalisme. Gallimard. Boltanski, L., & Thévenot, L. (1987). De la justification. Gallimard. Boutinet, J.-P. (1990). 1990. PUF. Bredin, K. (2004). Human resource management in projectified firms: Organization and logics. In EIASM conference on strategic human resources management, HEC. EIASM. Christensen, S., & Krejner, K. (1991). Projektledelse i løskoblede systemer: Ledelse og læring i en ufuldkommen verden. Jurist- og Økonomforbundet. Deleuze, G. (1990). “Post-scriptum Sur les sociétés de contrôle” in Pourparles (pp. 240–247). Minuit. Ehrenberg, A. (1998). La fatigue d’être soi. Dépression et société. Odile Jacob. Foucault, M. (1975). Surveiller et punir (p. 1975). Gallimard. Foucault, M. (1976). Il faut défendre la société (p. 1997). Seuil/Gallimard.

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Foucault, M. (1978). Sécurité, Territoire, Population. Seuil/Gallimard, 2004. Foucault, M. (1980). “Le poussière et le nuage” in Dits et écrits, IV (Vol. 1994, pp. 10–19). Gallimard. Godenhjelm, S., & Johanson, J.-E. (2018). The effect of stakeholder inclusion on public sector project innovation. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 84(1), 42–62. Godenhjelm, S., Jensen, C., & Sjöblom, S. (2019). Innovation och projektifiering. Att styra och leda handlingskapaciteten i moderna offentliga organisationer. Nordic Academic Press. Han, B.-C. (2010). Müdigkeitsgesellschaft. Mattes & Seitz. Hardt, M., & Negri, A. (2004). Multitude. Penguin. Hodgson, D., Fred, M. B., & Hall, S. (2019). Projectification of the public sector. Routledge. International Encyclopedia of Dance. (1988). Social dance. Oxford University Press. Jensen, A. F. (2007). Projektsamfundet, Doctoral thesis. University of Copenhagen. Jensen, A. F. (2009a). Projektsamfundet. Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Jensen, A. F. (2009b). Projektmennesket. Aarhus Universitetsforlag. Jensen, A. F. (2012). The project society. Aarhus Universitetsforlag (translation of Projektmennesket 2009). Jensen, A., Thuesen, C., & Geraldi, J. (2016). The projectification of everything: Projects as a human condition. Project Management Journal, 47(3), 21–34. Kant, I. (1781). Kritik der Reinen Vernunft (p. 1956). Insel Verlag. Lundin, R. A. (2016). Project society: Paths and challenges. Project Management Journal, 47(4), 7–15. Lundin, R.  A. (2017). Managing and working in project society. Cambridge University Press. Lundin, R. A., & Söderholm, A. (1995). A theory of the temporary organization. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 437–455. Maylor, H., Brady, T., Cooke-Davies, T., & Hodgson, D. (2006). From projectification to programmification. International Journal of Project Management, 24(8), 663–674. Midler, C. (1995). “Projectification” of the firm: The Renault case. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 363–375. Packendorff, J. (1995). Inquiring into the temporary organization: New directions for project management research. Scandinavian Journal of Management., 11(4), 319–333. Packendorff, J., & Lindgren, M. (2014). Projectification and its consequences: Narrow and broad conceptualisations. South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences, 17(1), 7–21. Schumpeter, J.  A. (1939). Kapitalismus, Sozialismus und Demokratie (7th ed., p. 1993). UTB – Francke. Standing, G. (2014). The precariat: The new dangerous class. Bloomsbury. Weber, M. (1905). Die protestantische Ethik und der Geist des Kapitalismus. In Gesammelte Aufsätze zur Religionssoziologie (Vol. 1920, pp. 17–206). Mohr.

CHAPTER 3

The Trojan Horse of Local Government Mats Fred

[The European cohesion policy] works as a ‘Trojan horse’ to improve and modernise public administrations, to enhance transparency, and to foster good governance (Inforegio, 2008, 4).

This analogy was formulated by the European commissioner Danuta Hübner, and the Trojan horse refers to the European cohesion policy trotting its way into public administrations around Europe with the good intentions of improvement and modernisation. The EU Cohesion policy is the EU’s main investment tool, described by the European Commission as the policy behind the “hundreds of thousands of projects” (ec.europa. eu, 2023) all over Europe. When Hübner talks about the Trojan horses that “modernise public administrations” and “foster good governance,” she is talking about projects. Whereas the cohesion policy aims to increase economic growth and employment in all European regions and cities, the policy implicitly advocates ‘projects’ as the organisational solution to do so.

M. Fred (*) Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_3

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With approximately 350 different funds and programmes funding project initiatives in European countries, and a budget where more than 70% is devoted to project activities, the EU has unsurprisingly been described as important in pushing the use of projects (and other temporary forms of organisation) in European countries (see Büttner & Leopold, 2016; Hodgson et al., 2019; Jałocha, 2012). Albeit important, the EU is not the only contributing factor in its promotion for the use of projects. There are also push factors coming from a variety of sources: international as well as national project management associations (working for standardisation of project techniques or models and accreditation of project managers); project programmes and courses in universities all over the world (educating a project-skilled future work force); consultants (developing and selling project models and project consultation); civil servants, managers, and politicians at all levels engaging in—or advocating for—various project initiatives; and funding agencies facilitating the organisation of projects. All these efforts, activities and actors support and encourage the same kind of logic—a common belief system with a common language and shared practices—a project logic. Inspired by the institutional logic perspective (Thornton et al., 2012), I study local government and their organisations as sites where several, coexisting institutional logics are ‘available’ for civil servants and politicians alike to act upon and translate into practices. The growing importance of the project logic in relation to other logics, and the resulting consequences, are a vital (but often neglected) part of projectification. The project logic, however, is somewhat more elusive than the specific project organisations. It operates implicitly or “under the radar” (Reay & Hinings, 2009)—in other words, like a Trojan horse. Even though the ancient Greek story of the wooden horse used to help Greek troops invade the city of Troy by stealth is far more malevolent than processes of projectification, it tells the story of offering something upfront while something else is concealed, and it is a story of unexpected change. When an organisation launches a project aimed at tackling issues such as unemployment, gender equality or social exclusion it expects—or hopes for—positive effects on the employment rates or improvements in gender equality. Merton (1968) calls these expected consequences of organisational behaviour manifest functions. However, consequences emanating from the logic permeating these very same initiatives—such as impermanence, organisational transformation and adaption and the mobilisation of project capacity—are seldom explicitly stated, intended, or even recognised. These more

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‘concealed’ consequences are what Merton call latent functions, and fit in well with the analogy of projectification as a Trojan horse. Where traditional project management literature describes projects as a technicality, a method “at our disposal,” a neutral, apolitical instrument used to deliver predefined objectives within a specific time frame (Sahlin-Andersson & Söderholm, 2002), I regard them as policy instruments that produce specific effects on their own, independently of their stated objectives and the aims ascribed to them (see Lascoumes & Le Galés, 2007, 3), and they structure, I argue, their surroundings according to a specific logic. The aim of this chapter is to illustrate the latent functions of projectification using local government practices as an example and explore organisational consequences of an increasing reliance on a project logic. While a great deal has been written about traditional project management, we know less about the actualities of the latent consequences of project-based work in the public sector (with the notable exception of Hodgson et al., 2019): how does the intensification of project activities and the reliance on a project logic changes (if at all) the practices of public organisations? Until quite recently, much of the writing on projectification has been focused on the increasing number of projects and how they can be managed (see Bergman et al., 2013; Maylor et al., 2006). The sheer number of projects (efficient or not) does not tell us much about how they unfold in practice or what their consequences are for the organisations, the employees, or the institutional environment. In tandem with Packendorff and Lindgren’s (2014, 7) argument of projectification as not only a “management fad and a structural trajectory in corporate re-­ structuring” but a “cultural and discursive phenomenon”, I argue that research should embrace processes in the project environment in which institutions, organisations, and individuals adapt to, or are encouraged to change in accordance with—not just specific projects but also—the principles surrounding these projects. Projectification then goes far beyond (the proliferation of) projects and is constituted of a specific belief system, language, and practices embedded in organisational and institutional environments. No project, in this respect, is an island, as Engwall (2003) so eloquently wrote. In this chapter I borrow and stretch Hübner’s analogy of the Trojan horse to include not only the implementation of the EU cohesion policy, but to include all forms of organising that encourage project (or project-­ like) activities in local government. The Trojan horse of local government projectification is manifested through the propagation and amplification

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of project logic: a logic applied to, or absorbed by, traditional, permanent local government organisations that results in new forms of routines, practices, and a ‘projectified’ way in which civil servants and politicians alike can present, understand, and make sense of their work.

Institutional Logics and the Organisational Practices of Swedish Local Government Project work in local government may be organised as additions to ordinary work, but it may also be activities performed instead of ordinary work, or routine work performed using project techniques and project models or even work planned out (in policy documents, budgets, or PowerPoint presentations) using vocabulary inspired by project management techniques. The consequences—in terms of organisational change or transformation—from these diverse uses of projects and the reliance on project logic may be very different, but all may be regarded as processes of projectification—they all encourage a certain way of thinking, acting, and organising, and as such also restrain what can and cannot be done. To analyse such organisational processes of change, neo-institutional theory has introduced the concept of institutional logics (Friedland & Alford, 1987). Institutional logics refer to the belief systems and related practices that predominate an organisational field (Scott, 2014); thus offering guidance on appropriate and legitimate behaviour. Studies of institutional logics analyse the processes through which logics govern action, and how logics provide opportunities and constraints, but also offer insights into institutional change through competition between, or through, the co-existence of several institutional logics (Lindberg, 2014). Studies have emphasised the co-existence of different logics, and institutional change is often explained as a movement from one dominant logic to another (see Purdy & Gray, 2009; Forbes & Fincham, 2015). However, in tandem with researchers like Pache and Santos (2010) and Reay and Hinings (2009), I regard organisations as places where co-existing institutional logics—in combination with local, embedded meanings—produce a variety of local practices. Hence, institutional logics carry meaning, but meaning also arises through social interaction in concrete settings (Hallett & Ventresca, 2006). Here I concur with Binder’s (2007) idea of the organisation as not “merely the instantiation of environmental, institutional logics ‘out there’…where workers seamlessly enact preconscious

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scripts valorised in the institutional environment” (p. 551). Instead, she argues, organisations are places where people and groups “make sense of, and interpret, institutional vocabularies of motive, and act on those interpretations”. Organisations then are places where employees gather and interpret information and make decisions “that sometimes depart from official policy, but also sometimes embrace institutional logics for all variety of reasons, and in all variety of ways” (Binder, 2007, 551).

Local Government Institutional Logics: The Case of Sweden In Swedish local governments, one might come across multiple logics “and how these relate to each other, and are acted upon, varies from situation to situation” (Lindberg, 2014, 486). Compared to most countries (but similar to Nordic ones), local self-government is strong in Sweden— there is great freedom for each municipality to decide on its own activities and organisation, and they have independent powers of taxation stated in The Instrument of Government. (Larsson & Bäck, 2008). Here I analyse Swedish local government through the lens of four different interlinking logics: bureaucratic logic, market logic, political logic, and project logic. In terms of institutional logics, Swedish local government organisations are heavily inspired by bureaucratic logic, described by Styhre (2007, 6) as the outcome of “a rule governed process of organising complex undertakings.” Bureaucratic logic is characterised by routines, stability, efficiency, predictability, and transparency (see Ellström, 2009; Poulsen, 2009). In relation to projects, the logic of bureaucracy is often represented by “permanent” or ordinary operations, while the projects are viewed as “temporary”’ organisations (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995) or post-bureaucratic organisations (Styhre, 2007). To organise in project form is described as a way of avoiding “all the classic problems of bureaucracy” (Packendorff & Lindgren, 2014, 7). However, we also see great influence of market logic in Sweden, stemming mainly from the New Public Management (NPM) reforms of the 1980s and 1990s, which consisted of several conflicting elements, but share a common core of marketization and corporatisation of public administration inspired by the firm as an organisational model (Hall, 2012). This means organising public administration like any other company in a market of different public-sector services, using management techniques from the private sector. Local governments are also

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governed by political logic: logic that is more change-oriented and perhaps more flexible than the logic of bureaucracy (Byrkjeflot & Du Gay, 2012). Political logic is characterised by democratic ideals, decisiveness, and the ability to act (Larsson & Bäck, 2008). Moreover, it is a logic that encourages the visible aspects of change and development efforts (Fred, 2019). However, it is a logic of conflicting entities in which different parties may want and strive for completely different things (Larsson & Bäck, 2008). Compared to the other logics, project logic encompasses two almost contradictory features: one innovative, flexible feature expressed as a break with bureaucratic ideals and practices; and the other supporting control, standard operating procedures, and hierarchical structures. Practices associated with project logic can be regarded as exercises delivering both “controllability and unpredictability”, promising a solution to clearly defined objectives, plans on how to reach them, and techniques for how to evaluate them, while at the same time, they can be argued to deliver innovation and organisational change (Sahlin, 1996). This duality makes project logic attractive for many actors, but it may also be elusive and at the one hand promise debureaucratisation but at the other hand result in rebureaucratisation (Hodgson, 2004; Rhodes & Milani Price, 2010). In their day-to-day work, local government employees continually face situations that call for various actions—actions that are, in turn, guided by institutional logics. These logics are to be understood as co-existing— competing, one might say—for attention, but they need to be acted upon to be relevant to practices (Lindberg, 2014). This means that these logics do not exist, per se, but must be performed; thus, they are continuously re-constructed in practice. They are sets of expectations regarding social relations and behaviour (cf. Goodrick & Ray, 2011). However, individual and organisational actors may also choose to act—or not act—upon them. In this respect, the different logics offer “ways of imagining organisations, their inner lives and how they are to be coordinated… In the process, other ways of thinking, acting, calculating and organising are displaced” (Clarke et  al., 2015, 97). This somewhat elusive notion of institutional logics means that specific methodological considerations must be taken to study and analyse its practices.

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How Do We Study Trojan Horses? My journey to this research field started in pure curiosity—why do they do what they do? Why do Swedish local governments, despite critique of the project format from researchers and evaluators as well as from local government employees, organise so many activities according to a project logic? Early in my research process I adopted an ethnographic approach and started to follow and interview people involved in social investment work in local governments—a popular phenomenon at the time that also appeared to generate a great variety of project activities. These kinds of studies are rarely planned out fully in advance. Instead, the process of inquiry is rather like “grabbing a ball of string, finding a thread, and then pulling it out.” (DeVault & McCoy, 2006, 20). Echoing the theoretical perspective of my study—that aid our understandings of the linkages between wider institutional phenomena with local practices—I found methodological inspiration in institutional ethnography, an approach that allowed me to combine multiple data sources to capture the linkages between local settings of everyday life, organisations, and translocal processes of administration and governance (Scott, in Devault & McCoy, 2006, 15). In other words, this helped me capture the interplay of the practical activities of civil servants and the institutional logics in their organisational and institutional contexts (Smith, 1999). Even though all ethnographic work focuses on the nitty gritty details of organisational practices, the institutional approach encouraged me to regard the practices in one particular setting as part of a greater organisational and institutional complex. Hence, I may have started my fieldwork in one small Swedish municipality, but I ended up investigating the wider organisational and institutional environment surrounding and influencing their work—or the net of actions connecting actors, events, and recourses at various level of society (cf. Lindberg & Czarniawska, 2006). For a period of about six years, I followed and interviewed civil servants, politicians, and consultants in and around multiple Swedish local governments. In total, I conducted well-planned scheduled research interviews with 52 people. However, I also attended 9 conferences and participated in and observed about 20 meetings. The ambition was to describe the institutional complex of social investment (as a case of projectification), as held together not only by the actions of local government civil servants and organisations but also by conferences, networks, consultants, courses, and training programmes and funding opportunities. The stronger the connections

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between these actors, activities, and resources, “the more likely the [project] logic will insinuate itself into the organisation” (Greenwood et  al., 2011, 342–343).

The Trojan Horse in Practice In this section, I use empirical examples from Swedish local governments to illustrate the latent consequences of projectification. First, I describe the prerequisites for processes of projectification to take place in local governments. This illustrates the availability of funding, as well as project ideas and project recourses in and surrounding Swedish municipalities. After this, I use the case of local government social investment funds to illustrate processes of organisational transformation and adaptation following an alignment to the project logic. In close connection to this, I finally discuss projectification in terms of organisational capacity building.

Prerequisites for Projectification To illustrate an important factor supporting the reliance on project logic in local government, we start by considering the availability of project funding and the actors advocating their use. As an example, many Swedish local governments have engaged themselves in work related to social investment the last decade, an area surrounded by numerous funding and project possibilities. Briefly put, social investment is about early interventions in people’s lives to avoid future costs. Starting at the local level, several (100 out of 290) local governments have their own social investment fund from which civil servants may apply for project funding. At the time of my field work (2012–2018) some regional governments also had funding available for social investment activities in and between local governments and at the national level the Swedish Association of Local and Regional Government (SALAR) initiated (on behalf of the Swedish government) several large social investment projects together with multiple Swedish municipalities. They also initiated networks, conferences, and seminars on the topic so there was no shortage at this time of actors, activities, and funding supporting a “social investment movement” (Morel et al., 2012). Targeting the same policy areas as the social investment initiatives, we also find the project funding organisation Finsam, an organisation that initiates approximately 1000 projects per year in the Swedish municipalities. Much like the social investment funds, Finsam encourages

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collaboration, but has a specific focus on job-retraining initiatives. Then, of course, we also have the EU, with more than 350 different programmes and funds to choose from. From a local government perspective, the most commonly used EU funding sources—comprising over half of all EU funding—come from five major European structural and investment funds. Adding to this is also a ‘Social Investment Package’, launched in 2013 as guidance for member states to modernise their welfare systems in response to Europe’s common challenges: “‘Preparing’ people to confront risks throughout their lives, rather than simply ‘repairing’ the consequences, is key to the social investment approach,” it was argued (EC, 2015, 4). In addition to the EU funds, support from the SALAR, Finsam, and regional and local social investment funds, there are also government grants and project funding from specific government agencies that are announced on a regular basis. So, if you, as a local government representative, are looking for project funding related to social investment work and are willing to make some adjustments in your project idea to match the requirements of a specific funding agency, you will most likely find funds. When taking this overview of the social investment landscape in Sweden, market logic is evidently visible with availability of several competing funding possibilities, but also a great range of project ideas competing for attention. When talking to local government civil servants, it becomes clear that projects and project ideas travel between municipalities and the same, or very similar, projects can appear in several municipalities at the same time. There is no shortage of project ideas, whether from within the municipalities or from ‘outside’; the physical distance does not seem to matter, and ideas appear to be transferred rather easily. The fact that the activities are framed according to a project logic—that is, projects with clearly defined resources, activities, intended outcomes, and a specified time frame—appears to facilitate transfer between different organisations and contexts. The projects are, in a sense, packaged and ready to be shipped, or ‘ordered’ when seen at a seminar or on a webpage, for instance. When moved to another context, however, projects most likely change in character. In fact, this is one of the major points made by translation theorists: ideas or projects are context-dependent, meaning that the organisation of or effects from a specific project may be completely different or even counterproductive (Czarniawska & Sevón, 2005). In addition to moving between organisations, I also observed how projects ‘move’ between funding agencies. A project could start out being locally funded, but when funding ran out, the project allocated funding

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from the EU, for instance, or from Finsam as mentioned above, and then again, when that funding was out, a social investment fund stepped in to keep the project alive. In the literature, this would be called ‘implementation failure’ or a ‘clash of institutional logics’ but in my research, local government representatives attributed it to a lack of interest from—or weak ownership in—the municipality. It was also attributed to the great availability of project funding. In a more theoretical sense, this is an example of how political logic is acted upon to initiate projects, but it also shows how there is less (political and managerial) interest in the achievements—or the effects, for that matter—of those projects. It appears important that the organisation do something regarding a specific issue, that it shows decisiveness and the ability to act—and demonstrate—action (political logic.). However, how or what the initiated project amounts to is of no immediate political (but bureaucratic) concern. On an individual level, this proliferation of projects, ideas and funding may have several consequences. Many of the projects I came across were quite small in terms of economic resources, so most people were involved only part time in these projects. In some cases, people’s full-time employment was built around several projects, and for people in the earlier stages of their career, projects were often a means of entry into the labour market. One of the civil servants, a young woman—perhaps 25 years old and newly graduated from the university—describes how she began her employment in one of the municipalities as a part-time project manager. Through that work, she quickly became involved in two more projects and was able to ‘survive’ through the allocation of more funding and involvement in several other projects: “I’m now working full time, but still a project employee,” she said. When employed in local government, the employment normally become tenured after two years due to the Swedish employment protection act (1982, 80). However, by tying a person to one or several projects, the employer can ‘avoid’ tenure, but still keep the employee for more than two years. The municipality may then tie personal resources to the organisation without committing to a long-term relationship. In these cases, local government practices appear to allow project logic and bureaucratic logic to co-exist. Local government bureaucracy adapts to project logic, internalising it almost like a routine. These projects (and the project job positions) are not temporary in the sense of activities ending after a specific period of time. Rather, they are repeating sequences, changing somewhat in accordance with the requirements of the funding agency in an effort to keep certain activities and job positions alive.

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Transformation and Adaptation Even though one of the more well known, influential and well cited Swedish pro–social-investment advocates at a conference described his contempt towards projects, I would argue that the bulk of all local government social investment initiatives the last couple of years have transpired through project-related work. The first Swedish municipal social investment fund was initiated in 2006. In 2017, about 100 (out of 290) municipalities had one, and about 20 were considering starting a social investment fund (Hultkrantz & Vimefall, 2017). The funds range from SEK 2 to 500 million and by administrating and organising these as project funding systems, it is possible to invest in activities that extend over several years, it is argued, in contrast to what is allowed by ordinary municipal budgets. The social investment funds target policy areas, such as social services, education, work, livelihood, and public health, and aim, as such, at activities at the very heart of local government practices. As an example, one municipality directed their social investment fund towards public health, which meant that civil servants employed in the organisation could apply for funding, in competition with other employees and project proposals. In practice this entailed a transformation of (at least parts of) the municipalities’ public health work—from an issue handled within the ordinary budget to an issue handled by a project funding system, and, as such, from the permanent structures of the municipality to the realm of temporary organisations. This transformation also entailed a series of adaptations in the municipality—administrative routines had to be developed to handle call for projects, applications procedures, and funding mechanisms between departments as well as routines for documentation and evaluation. With this came new criteria for public health initiatives—in order to receive funding, the project had to be collaborative, innovative, evidence-based, evaluable and organised in project form. My research does not say anything about the quality of the public health work and social investment initiatives in these municipalities, but what it does show is that the introduction of social investment funds had the organisations align their processes and practices to project-based logic. Social investment actions were, as such, at the forefront of networks, conferences, and field trips, and projects had more the function of vehicles transporting social investment objectives. While describing and presenting social investment work in terms of public health, social services, or

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education, organisations adopted project logic to make the work possible. However, this transformation also meant that the organisation required a great deal of knowledge and capacity related to project management and project organising.

Projectification as Organisational Capacity-Building The introduction of social investment project funding systems in the municipalities entailed the introduction of highly formalised—and in many ways, bureaucratic—procedures, managerial practices, and standards for evaluation and control. Hence, the municipalities had to become fluent with specific concepts and ideas about project organising and project management in order to make their social investment initiatives work (see Gengnagel, 2022). They not only had to install and manage a project funding system, many of the municipalities also onboarded a project model, which also led to the employment of more project managers and the need for further project management courses. These kinds of transformative processes are often missed in the literature on projectification, and my research shows that the alignment of practices to project logic goes far beyond the proximity of specific projects. I met municipalities with more project managers—or civil servants with project management skills, than there were projects. I also found civil servants, as well as politicians, to promote the use of project models (designed to streamline specific projects) in all municipal activities—meaning that whatever the civil servants had in front of them, it could (or should) be treated as if it were a project. In practice, municipalities employed project managers (instead of civil servants), enrolled their staff in project management courses, created project offices, produced project models, and made use of a project-inspired lingo when describing and presenting their work and practices. This is a great example of when project logic and bureaucratic logic goes hand in hand. One civil servant/project manager illustrates this point: Organisationally, we are heading towards more hierarchy. This very flat organisation does not function anymore. Society has changed, and with it, the demand for the opposite has been aroused. You want more hierarchy but at the same time to have influence on working procedures and the capacity to do something, and I think that the particular structure from the project has exactly that: clearly defined project owners, project leaders who lead distinct groups with defined tasks. [The project model] should act as a bridge between these two systems. The project model is

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implemented in the old organisation, because you do not want to change the organisation, since organisational change is costly (Interview, 2015). The quote is also an example of how project logic not only connotes innovation and flexibility but at the same time also supports control and hierarchical structures. These processes of transformations and adaptations are not solely brought forward by local government employees or politicians but also, to a great extent, by consultants. A consultant working closely with several municipalities describes how they bring forth the project as a model for all kinds of municipal activities when they consult local governments: People in these organisations are doing lots of work in the project form, but they don’t always label it as projects for some reason, but they are projects, and they benefit immensely from the project form. So, we bring that with us [into the project management courses], we take their day-­ today work and tweak it a little bit to fit it to the project format, and that also gives them some tools to help them understand how everything holds together (Interview, consultant 2014). While many projects, at least in theory, represent a departure from the ordinary bureaucratic work, the alignment of ordinary work to the project logic (via the use of a project model) appear to be aimed at organisational clarity, order, and control—thus strengthening the bureaucratic logic. Ironically then, the bureaucratic organisation appears to combat bureaucracy with more bureaucracy.

Latent Consequences of Projectification The aim of this chapter has been to illustrate processes of projectification beyond the increasing number of projects in local government. I have used the analogy of the Trojan horse to describe organisational consequences coming from the adoption of, or alignment to, project logic. Even though we may observe an increasing use of projects, due to the way in which they are diffused between organisations and impact their surroundings, processes of projectification are more far-reaching. However, to conceptualise those consequences as something related to projects, we should look for project logic rather than at specific projects. This allows us to understand the increasing employment of project managers, the use of project management vocabulary, and the development of project courses and project models in local government as part of the same phenomenon—the increasing use and diffusion of project logic. This broader

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understanding of projectification (see Packendorff & Lindgren, 2014) might also have vast consequences for local government organisations and their employees. Whereas clearly defined and demarcated projects are often criticised for not having the intended effects, consequences coming from project logic are more widespread, and go relatively unnoticed. When acting upon project logic (outside the clearly defined projects), the organisations not only take on this mode of thinking after flexible and innovative characteristics with the ‘project-logic-package’, they also get impermanence, competition, and visibility: impermanence regarding jobs, activities and/or organisational focus; competition between civil servants and between organisational solutions not only for attention (visibility), but also for funding, and through this, organisational focus. These (latent) consequences are often unintended, not calculated for or even recognised. Following such an argument, projects are not ‘just’ vehicles carrying something forward, but techniques, tools and practices that produce specific effects of their own, independently of their stated objectives or any aims ascribed to them. Social investment or social innovation, total quality management, collaboration or any other organisational ‘solution’ sweeping across the public sector implicitly encourages organisations to build project capacity and organise in project form. Just as in other industries, there are fashions when it comes to local government organisations. The organisational solutions come and go (social investment was high on local government agendas in 2012–2018 but is now declining), but when they come, they often do so through project funding. No matter what intended consequences these solutions may have, the odds are great that the organisations, through latent consequences of project logic, will also become somewhat projectified.

Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted during 2012–2018 and is, in its entirety, published in the PhD thesis: Fred, M. (2018). Projectification: The Trojan horse of local government. Lund, Sweden: Statsvetenskapliga Institutionen. For readings related to the theoretical ideas presented in this chapter on institutional logics, I recommend Thornton, P. H. Ocasio, W. Lounsbury, M. 2012. The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure, and process. Cambridge: Oxford University Press. This is a great introduction to the notion of institutional logics and its application in social sciences. A great addition to this is also found in Lindberg, K. 2014. “Performing multiple logics in practice”. Scandinavian

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Journal of Management, 30(4): 485–497. Finally, I would like to encourage everyone interested in all sorts of temporary organisations to read Czarniawska, B. Sevón, G. (ed.). 2005. Global ideas: How Ideas, objects, and practices Travel in the global economy. Fredriksberg, Denmark: Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press.

References Bergman, I., Gunnarsson, S., & Räisänen, C. (2013). Decoupling and standardization in the projectification of a company. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 6(1), 106–128. Binder, A. (2007). For love and money: Organisations’ creative responses to multiple environmental logics. Theory and Society, 36(6), 547–571. Büttner, M.  S., & Leopold, M.  L. (2016). A ‘new spirit’ of public policy? The project world of EU funding. European Journal of Culture and Political Sociology, 3(1), 41–71. Byrkjeflot, H., & du Gay, P. (2012). Bureaucracy: An idea whose time has come (again)? In T.  Diefenbach & R.  Todnem (Eds.), Reinventing hierarchy and bureaucracy – From the bureau to network organisations (Research in the sociology of organisations) (Vol. 35, pp. 85–109). Emerald Group Publishing. Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N., & Stubbs, P. (2015). Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage. Policy Press. Czarniawska, B., & Sevón, G. (Eds.). (2005). Global ideas: How ideas, objects, and practices travel in the global economy. Liber and Copenhagen Business School Press. Devault, M. L., & McCoy, L. (2006). Institutional ethnography: Using interviews to investigate ruling relations. In E. Smith & E. Dorothy (Eds.), Institutional ethnography as practice. Rowman & Littlefield. ec.europa.eu (2023). Programming and Implementation. webpage accessed April 2023: https://ec.europa.eu/regional_policy/policy/how/programming-­and­implementation_en. Ellström, P.  E. (2009). The use of evaluation: A learning perspective. In L.  Svensson, G.  Brulin, S.  Jansson, & K.  Sjöberg (Eds.), Learning through ongoing evaluation. Studentlitteratur. Engwall, M. (2003). No project is an Island: Linking projects to history and context. Research Policy, 32(5), 789–808. European Commission (EC). (2015). Social Investment in Europe. A study of national policies. European Social Policy Network (ESPN). European Commission. Forbes, R., & Fincham, T. (2015). Three’s a crowd: The role of inter-logic relationships in highly complex institutional fields. British Journal of Management, 26(4), 657–670.

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Fred, M. (2019). Local government projectification in practice—A multiple institutional logic perspective. Local Government Studies, 46(3), 351–370. https://doi.org/10.1080/03003930.2019.1606799 Friedland, R., & Alford, R. R. (1987). Bringing society back in: Symbols, practices, and institutional contradictions. In S. Lash & S. Whimster (Eds.), Max weber, rationality and modernity. Allen & Unwin. Gengnagel, V., Zimmermann, K., & Büttner, S. M. (2022). ‘Closer to the market’: EU research governance and symbolic power. Journal of Common Market Studies, 60(6), 1–19. https://doi.org/10.1111/jcms.13326 Goodrick, E., & Ray, T. (2011). Constellations of institutional logics. Changes in the professional work of pharmacists. Work and Occupations, 38(3), 372–416. https://doi.org/10.1177/0730888411406824 Greenwood, R., Raynard, M., Kodeih, F., Micelotta, E.  R., & Lounsbury, M. (2011). Institutional complexity and organisational responses. The Academy of Management Annals, 5(1), 317–371. Hall, P. (2012). Managementbyråkrati: Organisationspolitisk makt i svensk offentlig förvaltning. [Management bureaucracy: Organisation of political power in the Swedish public administration]. Liber. Hallett, T., & Ventresca, M. (2006). Inhabited institutions: Social interaction and organisational forms in Gouldner’s patterns of industrial bureaucracy. Theory and Society, 35(2), 213–236. Hodgson, D. (2004). Project work. The legacy of bureaucratic control in the post-­ bureaucratic organisation. The Organ, 11(1), 81–100. Hodgson, D., Fred, M., Bailey, S., & Hall, P. (2019). Projectification of the public sector. Routledge Critical Studies in Public Management. Hultkrantz, L., & Vimefall, E. (2017). Social investment funds in Sweden: Status and design issues. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 21(3), 85–107. Inforegio. (2008, June). EU Cohesion policy 1988-2009: Investing in Europe’s future. Inforegio Panorama, No 26. European Union Regional Policy. Jałocha, B. (2012). Projectification of the European Union and its implications for public labour market organisations in Poland. Journal of Project, Program & Portfolio Management, 3(2), 1–16. Larsson, T., & Bäck, H. (2008). Governing and governance in Sweden. Studentlitteratur. Lascoumes, P., & Le Galès, P. (2007). Introduction: Understanding public policy through its instruments – From the nature of instruments to the sociology of public policy instrumentation. Governance, 20(1), 1–21. Lindberg, K. (2014). Performing multiple logics in practice. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 30(4), 485–497. Lindberg, K., & Czarniawska, B. (2006). Knotting the action net, or organizing between organizations. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 22(4), 292–306.

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Lundin, R. A., & Söderholm, A. (1995). A theory of the temporary organisation. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 437–455. Maylor, H., Brady, T., Cooke-Davies, T., & Hodgson, D. (2006). From projectification to programmification. International Journal of Project Management, 24(8), 663–674. Merton, K. M. (1968). Social theory and social structure. Free Press. Morel, N., Palier, B., & Palme, J. (Eds.). (2012). Towards a social investment welfare state? Ideas, policies and challenges. Policy Press. Pache, A., & Santos, F. (2010). When worlds collide: The internal dynamics of organisational responses to conflicting institutional demands. Academy of Management Review, 35(3), 455–476. Packendorff, J., & Lindgren, M. (2014). Projectification and its consequences: Narrow and broad conceptualisations. South African Journal of Economic and Management Sciences, 17(1), 7–21. Poulsen, B. (2009). Public administration in teams: Self-governing civil servants. In E. Sørensen & P. Triantafillou (Eds.), The politics of self-governance. Ashgate Publishing Group. Purdy, J., & Gray, B. (2009). Conflicting logics, mechanisms of diffusion, and multilevel dynamics in emerging institutional fields. Academy of Management Journal, 52(2), 355–380. Reay, T., & Hinings, C. R. (2009). Managing the revelry of competing institutional logics. Organisation Studies, 30(6), 629–652. Rhodes, C., & Milani Price, O. (2010). The post-bureaucratic parasite: Contrasting narratives of organisational change in local government. Management Learning, 42(3), 241–260. https://doi.org/10.1177/1350507610385765 Sahlin, I. (Ed.). (1996). Projektets paradoxer. [Paradoxes of the project]. Lund Studentlitteratur. Sahlin-Andersson, K., & Söderholm, A. (2002). Beyond project management  – New perspectives on the temporary—Permanent dilemma. Liber/Abstrakt. Scott, W. R. (2014). Institutions and organisations (4th ed.). Sage. Smith, D. E. (1999). Writing the social: Theory, critique, investigations. University of Toronto Press. Styhre, A. (2007). The innovative bureaucracy. Bureaucracy in an age of fluidity. Routledge Studies in Innovation, Organisation and Technology. Thornton, P.  H., Ocasio, W., & Lounsbury, M. (2012). The institutional logics perspective: A new approach to culture, structure, and process. Oxford University Press.

CHAPTER 4

Entering the World of Project Making: Mobilizing Assemblage Thinking to Unpack Projects as Political Constructions David Scott

Introduction: Entering the World of Project Making On a mild winter day, a state funder of Swedish development aid has convened a meeting to inform a number of civil society organizations about its project funding arrangements. During the meeting, the funder introduces the requirements and rules surrounding applications and reporting. Applications, which are written under conditions of competition in a “project market”, are to be completed in predetermined templates in which the applicants should be able to describe a time-limited project with specified goals, activities, indicators, expected results and budgets (according to the so-called Logical Framework Approach to project planning). The quality of applications is assessed by an expert group consisting of

D. Scott (*) Karlstad University, Karlstad, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_4

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scholars and representatives from other civil society organizations. If the project is approved, continuous reporting is required, also according to predetermined templates. As the project proceeds, the organizations should be prepared for so-called spot checks—spontaneous audits—of their internal management and control systems. In a following discussion, the civil society organizations reflect on the dark sides of this project management system, such as the hardships of interpreting and adapting to the bureaucratic and temporal requirements as well as introducing this way of working to cooperation partners. This scene1 works as an illustrative example of the world of project making. Project making is laborious work, often conducted by multiple actors; it requires, as briefly touched upon above, the construction and maintenance of cooperation between different actors, the activation of expertise and bureaucratic procedures, the construction of “project markets” as a way of promoting competition, and the organization of temporality to fit the “production” demands of projects. In both scholarly work (particularly technical project management literature) and in the world of practitioners, this work is obscured, transforming projects into what Latour (1987, 131) calls “black boxes”—as stable and coherent constructions in which “many elements are made to act as one”. The project as a coherent and stable entity emerges and all the conflicts and struggles that have informed its construction are left in obscurity. The project becomes an apolitical standard model that can be deployed in and code a multitude of contexts. However, as the above example illustrates, project making is a political activity. Projects do not just become stable and coherent constructions automatically, but they are made so through the reproduction of power relations that make particular ways of understanding and acting upon the world possible and others impossible. Projects are made possible through acts of ordering reality; a process that entails attempts at establishing hegemonic ways of thinking but also continuous struggles and conflicts. I argue, thus, that projects should be understood as political constructions characterized by a battle between what Mouffe (2005) calls “politics” and “the political”. For Mouffe, “the political” is the ubiquitous presence of 1  This scene is based on an observation made during empirical research conducted between 2016 and 2021. The aim of the meeting was to introduce rules and requirements for project funding in a “dialogical” form, thus giving the civil society organizations the opportunity to give feedback on project funding arrangements.

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conflicts and struggles, while “politics” are the arrangements put in place to handle, and possibly discipline, these struggles. Projects are no exception to this struggle but contain a continuous battle between politics and the political. In this chapter, I mobilize a theoretical framework that allows for an analysis of projects as political constructions, meaning that their apparent coherence and stability are the result of power relations being reproduced and contested. In this way, projects as coherent entities can be unpacked in order to show how they are the results of multiple practices, technologies, and artefacts being held together in precarious formations. The theoretical framework draws on assemblage thinking, which builds on the poststructuralist philosophy of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari (2013). Assemblage thinking has emerged as an appealing framework to deconstruct apparently coherent and stable formations of power and show how they are dependent on the drawing together of multiple and heterogeneous components. In this chapter, assemblage thinking works as a theoretical tool to show how ostensibly coherent and stable organizational forms that are labelled “projects” are dependent on the work of drawing together—or assembling—heterogeneous components, such as people, documents, expertise, models, and technical systems. The analytical potential of assemblage thinking is demonstrated through an analysis of how development aid projects—heavily used by the aid industry but poorly studied—are assembled in practice, and how power relations are reproduced in this process.

Assemblage Thinking as a Theoretical Toolbox During the recent decade, assemblage thinking as a theoretical perspective has exploded (Savage, 2020) and found its way into multiple disciplines in the social sciences, such as anthropology (Li, 2007; Ong & Collier, 2005), human geography (Anderson and McFarlane 2011, McCann, 2011), sociology (Clarke et al., 2015; Sassen & Ong, 2014; Savage, 2020), and political science (Acuto & Curtis, 2014; Bueger, 2018; Öjehag-Pettersson, 2015). In this research, assemblage thinking has been mobilized in different ways, leading to a lively discussion on theoretical conceptualizations and empirical applications. However, a common denominator for this research is that it engages with the philosophical work of Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari. In their seminal work A Thousand Plateaus (2013), they introduce a conceptual apparatus that rejects taken-for-granted

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axioms of Western philosophy such as logic, universalism, and linearity. Part of this conceptual apparatus is the concept of assemblage,2 which can be used as a tool for thinking about the world as in a state of permanent becoming—the world before us is not organized according to universal law-like categories, but is a product of complex “process[es] of arranging, organizing [and] fitting together” (Wise, 2005, 91). Thus, the world can be thought of as being continuously assembled as heterogeneous components are drawn together to form an unstable whole. Deleuze and Guattari (2013) argue that assemblages always strive to achieve consistency, meaning a degree of coherence that gives them a homogeneous character. At the same time, this consistency is temporary as there are always forces trying to subvert the homogeneity of any given assemblage. Assemblages also build on anti-essentialism, as there are no universal principles giving them their particular character. Rather than understanding assemblages as products of predetermined parts being put together, they should be considered as being composed of diverse elements coming from both discursive and material registers (Nail, 2017; Wise, 2005). The philosophy of Deleuze and Guattari is often considered obscure and inaccessible. Even so, it has been translated into fruitful analytical strategies that have been used to study such disparate fields as global governance, local policy-making, and even projectification. In these analyses, which I will give brief examples of below, assemblage as a concept has been mobilized primarily for showing how ostensibly coherent phenomena are dependent on complex and messy processes of assembling heterogeneous components. For sociologist Saskia Sassen (Sassen & Ong, 2014), the concept of assemblage is an “analytical tactic” that makes possible an understanding of how society is organized without taking taken-for-granted macro-­ concepts, such as “the state” or “the economy”, as starting points. For Sassen, the concept of assemblage makes it possible to discover organizational formations that include parts of different institutions and therefore can never be reduced to a particular identifiable institution. While Sassen uses the concept of assemblage to discover these formations, other researchers have deployed it as an analytical strategy to study actual practices of assembling. In this research, assemblage is conceptualized as a verb, meaning that the research gaze is directed towards the active work of assembling heterogeneous components into provisional configurations 2

 Assemblage is the English translation of the French term agencement.

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(Anderson & McFarlane, 2011). Anthropologist Tania Li (2007, 264) summarizes this analytical strategy: Assemblage flags agency, the hard work required to draw heterogeneous elements together, forge connections between them and sustain these connections in the face of tension. It invites analysis on how the elements of an assemblage might—or might not—be made to cohere.

This version of assemblage thinking has been fruitful in analyses of how policies and governing arrangements are assembled in practice. In the burgeoning literature on policy assemblages, the notion of assemblage is used to capture the work needed to construct and make policies coherent. McCann (2011, 144), studying drug policy in the city of Vancouver, argues that policies always require the labour of drawing together a range of elements: “people, institutional capacities, expertise, models, techniques and technologies, political sustenance etc. from local sources and, crucially, from elsewhere”. In this way, policies are constructions that require work—a form of work that does not recognize taken-for-granted boundaries. Scholars such as Clarke (2015) and Ong and Collier (2005) take this form of reasoning further by emphasizing that the construction of policies often includes global elements, meaning that globally circulating policy scripts, devices, and techniques are installed and translated into policy work. These elements often work as standardized “coding tools” that can code policies according to universal categories. In this version, assemblage thinking should be thought of as an empiricist project (Bueger, 2014), making it possible to analyze the mundane and practical work being mobilized to put something together. Thus, deploying an assemblage lens does not entail the “unveiling” of how predetermined elements are drawn together but enables an analysis of a form of assembly work that does not obey existing dichotomies and hierarchies. In the following sections, I show how this way of understanding assemblage thinking is useful for analyzing projects as political constructions.

Studying Projectification Through Assemblage Thinking: The Case of Swedish Development Aid In order to illustrate how assemblage thinking can be used to study projects as political constructions, I turn to the projectification of international development aid. Although the aid industry commonly uses the project

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format to translate development policy into time-limited interventions, it has remained surprisingly under-researched within development studies. During recent years, however, the role that the project plays in structuring development operations has attracted scholarly attention. Scholars note, for example, how projects have become “the sine qua non” (Graan, 2022, 5) of non-governmental organizations working in development aid. Krause (2014, 11) even argues, drawing on humanitarian work done by non-governmental organizations, that the professional concern of people working in these organizations is “to produce good projects”. Particularly, the so-called logistical dimension of projects (Graan, 2022), that is, how project making is dependent on technocratic and managerial practices of planning, organization, and documentation, has interested scholars in development studies. For instance, Dar (2008) and Mosse (2005) examine the role of project documentation and argue that it has a homogenizing effect by creating an illusion of coherent projects that have no in-built tensions. Compromises and struggles become effectively marginalized through the translation of projects in documents. Moreover, effects of the introduction of project management tools and models (Krause, 2014) and consequences of short term project funding (Sampson, 1996) have been objects of research. While this research has contributed to penetrating the inner workings of projects, it has mainly done so without taking the political aspects or the boundary-crossing character of project making into account. Here, I argue that assemblage thinking provides theoretical vocabulary that can be used to study these aspects of project making, thereby making it possible to analyze projects as political constructions. I am not completely alone in realizing the potential of assemblage thinking for the study of project making. Li (2019, 57) has made a significant contribution through explaining how the project format in itself can be understood as an assemblage of elements of diverse provenance: a set of rationales, authoritative knowledge, inscription devices, and modes of perception and evaluation that congeal contingently (and provisionally) in forms which are not identical, but have enough family resemblance to merit critical inquiry into how they hold together, and what they do.

In the following, I use Li’s mode of reasoning as a point of departure but also discuss how assemblage thinking can be used in order to approach project making methodologically and analytically.

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Translating Assemblage Thinking into a Workable Methodology: Following the Project Bureaucracy Across Sites Assemblage thinking has consequences for how projects as political constructions can be studied and analyzed empirically. In the following, I draw on the empirical results from a study conducted between 2016 and 2021 to show how development projects are constructed through the assembling of “elements of diverse provenance” (Li, 2019, 57). I see assemblage thinking as a tool for recalibrating the research gaze towards the practices of assembling projects. Assemblage thinking works, here, as a powerful tool since it “troubles” the empirical field and makes these practices, which often transcend established hierarchies and dichotomies, visible. In the empirical study, this focus on practices made it possible for me to approach the development aid project as an object of study in a different way. While some research on projectification starts in predetermined organizational settings, for example a local municipality (Fred, 2018) or a government agency (Jensen et  al., 2013), an assemblage approach made it possible to start in what I call the project bureaucracy, which refers to the life cycle of the project—the application phase, the appraisal phase, the implementation and reporting phase, and the auditing phase. This was a conscious strategy in order to be able to focus on the multitude of practices and elements that keep these phases together. A focus on the project bureaucracy entailed a form of “praxiography” (Bueger & Gadinger, 2018), meaning that I followed the project cycle pertaining to a multitude of projects in order to tease out general practices of assembling development aid projects. This move made it possible to come closer to the general managerial and bureaucratic techniques, artefacts, and processes that make a development project hold together. However, even when using this strategy, there was a need to start somewhere since the project bureaucracy can be found in an unlimited number of sites. I therefore traced the project bureaucracy to three common actors in international development aid projects: state agencies as funders, civil society organizations as implementers, and private consultants as experts. Although these are also organizational settings, they were selected as particularly suitable sites in order to achieve access to the project bureaucracy understood as a series of life phases. The idea of approaching the project bureaucracy as manifesting itself in a series of sites serves two methodological-analytical ends. Firstly, it reflects the

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central idea in assemblage thinking that different phenomena are the results of “multiple determinations that are not reducible to a single logic” (Ong & Collier, 2005, 12). This is particularly true for the project bureaucracy which has a boundary-crossing character; it cannot be confined, or reduced, to a specific site or organizational setting but is always mobile and present at multiple sites simultaneously. Secondly, understanding the project bureaucracy as a series of sites makes room for an analysis of practices of assembling, rather than of actors themselves and their intentions. In order to study the project bureaucracy as it manifested itself in these sites, data was generated through semi-structured interviews, a focus group interview, participant observations, and collection of project documentation (see Table 4.1 for an overview). The Work of Holding the Project Cycle Together In the following, I describe what happens when you start to “see” the project cycle through assemblage thinking. I return to the components of project making briefly touched upon in the scene that opened this chapter in order to show the work that is at play when assembling the project cycle. Thus, I describe the following aspects of project making: the construction of conditions for cooperation, the activation of expertise, the creation of markets, and the organization of temporality. Table 4.1  Strategies for data generation Project phase Application phase

Data generation techniques/sources

Semi-structured interviews, documents (applications, templates, instructions and guidelines for applications) Appraisal phase Documents (guidelines and criteria for assessment, handbooks, appraisal memos, templates, evaluations), semi-structured interviews Implementation and Semi-structured interviews, documents reporting phase (reports), field notes from observations, focus group Auditing phase Semi-structured interviews, documents (evaluation report, handbooks, instructions for follow-up, meeting minutes)

Organizational setting/ site Civil society organizations, consultants State funders, civil society organizations (consultants) Civil society organizations, state funders Consultants, state funders, civil society organizations

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Constructing and Maintaining Cooperation The project cycle is a complex machinery that involves multiple actors that seek to cooperate under heterogeneous conditions. A crucial aspect of assembling the different parts of the project cycle is to create functional collaborations between actors. Finding ways to ensure smooth collaboration is important in the entire project cycle: in the application phase, actors who are physically and organizationally separated from each other want to cooperate on application work; in the appraisal phase, funders need to form functional relationships with external experts recruited for conducting assessments of applications; in the reporting phase, actors seek to coordinate their reporting to funders; and in the evaluation phase, funders and consultants must form a functioning collaboration to effectively evaluate projects. Here, so-called brokers play an important role in facilitating collaboration by aligning and connecting actors. Brokers, who can be understood as “interpreters, intermediaries and ‘flex actors’, skilled at blurring roles and juggling representations” (Stubbs, 2015, 72), are found everywhere throughout the project cycle where they keep different bureaucratic processes together by establishing conditions for cooperation. An example can be drawn from the application and reporting process which, in order to be properly executed, are dependent on the work of brokers. In order to present coherent and transparent applications and reports, brokers are crucial for collecting information from distant cooperation partners and adapting it to the standardized reporting formats used by funders. Here, brokers occupy an “in-between space” in which they are able to connect different social and organizational worlds with each other by acting as mediators and translators. A representative from a civil society organization describes how project leaders are important for mediating between funder requirements and the wishes of cooperation partners: The project leader who works with it kind of sits in between […] it is a form of translation work going on all the time where [the cooperation partners] say “this is what we want to do, this is how we believe we can act in our context to make a difference”. And then our project manager will have to try to feed this into the funder’s format [and decide] “this is how we can tie things together so we have a common theme […].

While this is an example from the application process, brokers are crucial for the entire project cycle in which they “forge alignments”, which is the

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work of linking and connecting actors and their objectives so as to establish consensus (Li, 2007). Activating Repertoires of Expertise Throughout the project cycle, expertise is widely activated (see Mc Glinn’s chapter). Expertise in various forms—models, management tools, best practices, and scientific methodologies—provides different resources that can be drawn upon to deal with the “logistical” dimension of projects, such as planning, documentation, and reporting (cf. Graan, 2022). Planning and implementation models (such as the “Logical Framework Approach” and “Results-based Management”) provide conceptual and material resources to present projects in applications and to execute them in concrete implementation schemes. In application appraisals, funders use different technical tools to make assessments. In evaluation processes, externally recruited consultants draw from a palette of methodological tools to audit projects. Here, expertise in the form of models, tools, and methodologies should be understood as “repertoires” from which the project cycle can be composed (Clarke, 2015). These repertoires should be considered as offering tangible and practically useful resources to assemble the project cycle. Models offer a concrete management vocabulary, often objectified in templates, such as “SMART goals”, “indicators”, “target groups”, “expected results”, and “risk analyses” that makes reality legible and governable. Through this vocabulary, a complex reality can be represented through universal categories as well as appear controllable and measurable (cf. Kurki, 2011). This is useful for creating a coherent project in the application phase as well as for guidance in implementation. In the appraisal of applications, funders make use of assessment tools and handbooks that provide guidance on how to assess the quality of projects according to particular criteria. In the evaluation of projects, there is a plethora of methodological techniques available, such as different forms of quantitative and qualitative data collection, that make rigorous evaluations possible. What makes this expertise particularly useful in the assembling of the project cycle is its standardized yet contextually sensitive character. The tools, methods, and models that have been briefly described here are what Ong and Collier (2005, 11) call “global forms” which “have a distinctive capacity for decontextualization and recontextualization, abstractability

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and movement”. Thus, they consist of a set of ideas, concepts, techniques, and material objects that are standardized and universally applicable but also malleable and adaptable. This makes them useful as tools for “coding” the project cycle according to universal vocabularies and scripts while still being contextually sensitive. Creating Markets Marketization is a central part of the project cycle. Markets are purposefully created and maintained in order to organize and regulate parts of the project cycle. A first example is how the application process is regulated through markets. Here, funders create markets where civil society organizations are supposed to compete for funding. In order to maintain a state of competition, funders rely on “calls” to which organizations must respond with a high-quality application in order to stand a chance of receiving funding. A second example is the marketization of the evaluation process. Here, consultants are often recruited by funders to make thorough audits of projects. Since this is a matter of the state requesting services from the private sector, public procurement is required. A market relying on public procurement is often more organized than the application market and displays more refined rules for competition. Often, consultant companies are required to compete for so-called framework agreements that give them a privileged position to compete for concrete evaluation assignments against a smaller number of competitors. Competition under framework agreements involves a set of activities that give the market for evaluation assignments a more organized character. For example, consultants are required to respond to “call-offs” with competitive “tenders” in which they are asked to describe how they will conduct an evaluation. Tenders are then scored according to specific assessment criteria. Marketization, thus, plays a pivotal role as a way of organizing the different phases of the project cycle. It is important to stress that this organizing entails a form of assembly of markets, meaning that there is labor invested to create markets and their components. Conditions for competition need to be actively created through calls and tenders; to uphold an image of fair competition, documented assessment criteria and scoring systems need to be created.

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Organizing Temporality In order for the project cycle to hold together, it is dependent on a particular form of temporality that can be called “project time”. Here, project time should not be considered as an inevitable fact imposing its logic on the project cycle, but it is rather creatively invented by including dimensions such as future-orientation, sequentialism, and speed. In the application phase, it becomes apparent that a particular future-­ oriented notion of temporality is needed. This means that in the initial stages of formulating a project, there is a need for envisioning a future that can be acted upon. This entails formulating a project based on the analysis of a future that is essentially unknown. A representative from a civil society organization explains how orienting oneself to the future is important in application work: Yeah, but partly it is expected that you should know, very well in advance, what your own activities look like but also how the political reality will look like because often… when you submit your applications it is still a year and a half left until you sit there working on your projects. So, that’s how it is, it is expected that one and half year in advance […] you will be able to say “this will happen in the world” [and] “this is how we will work with this”.

Once the future, upon which the project is to act, has been established, it must be planned accordingly. Here, the idea of sequentialism becomes apparent in the sense that the project is envisioned as being implemented in sequences. The project is imagined as a series of activities that are to be implemented linearly according to calendar time. Here, standardized timetables are used to encourage this way of imagining the project. In the application and implementation phase, the project also introduces the notion of speed and acceleration. Although the time for application writing and project implementation is essentially limited, actors imagine time as malleable. This includes stretching working hours as well as “squeezing” as many activities as possible within a particular implementation period. “Project time” becomes an important organizing principle in the assembly of the project cycle, then, as it brings order to the work of planning and implementing projects.

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Concluding Discussion Throughout this chapter, I have illustrated how assemblage thinking can be used for studying project making. I have shown how the project cycle, understood as a series of life phases, is dependent on the assembling of a range of components. Here, the work of brokers, the activation of expertise, the creation of markets, and the organization of time are all equally central for keeping the project cycle together. Borrowing a phrase from Li (2019), the project cycle can be understood as an assemblage of elements “of diverse provenance”; they come from different registers, or “worlds” if you like, as they provisionally come together and form what we call a “project”. In line with assemblage thinking, projects cannot be reduced to a single organizing principle, but are dependent on a range of components that, assembled in a certain way, give them their ostensibly stable character. This chapter illustrates how assemblage thinking can be used as a general analytical model that makes it possible to unpack the process of project making. This means that the work invested to assemble and make projects “practically operational” (see Mc Glinn’s chapter) can be revealed through this form of analysis. However, assemblage thinking does not only make possible the analytical operation of revealing processes of assembling, but also makes visible that projects essentially are what I call political constructions. By this, I mean that projects organize reality in a way that makes particular views, actions, and behaviors possible while others remain impossible. The story told above is not only about how projects are assembled through various practices and techniques, it is also a story about politics and power. For the project cycle to even come into being, power is being reproduced in various ways; through the manufacturing of consensus in the work of establishing cooperation, through the (over)-reliance on supposedly neutral expertise, through the faith in markets, and through the disciplining of time to fit demands for project activities. Here, the bureaucratic and “hyper-rationalistic” machinery of projects displaces transformational ambitions, effectively rendering development aid technical (Li, 2007) and erasing “the political” in the form of ideological struggles (Mouffe, 2005). As such, projects can be understood as “manifestations of […] a neoliberal political rationality”, as Mc Glinn (2018, 15) argues by drawing on the work of Wendy Brown (2015). Neoliberal political rationality can be understood as a “normative order of reason” (Brown, 2015, 9) that transforms every domain of society in accordance with market and management logics. The project can be seen as a particularly striking

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example of this rationality as it builds on and naturalizes market and management logics, thereby having depoliticizing effects on everything it touches. In summary, the analytical model proposed here is not only suitable for analyzing the processes of assembling projects themselves but is also fruitful for critically scrutinizing the political effects of these processes. The fact that projects can be understood as political constructions contains important lessons for practice. With ongoing new public management reforms permeating society, projects have transformed into dominant forms of organization that provide resources to organize activities in a wide variety of sectors. This chapter shows that projects are not neutral or innocuous forms of organization but introduce a bureaucracy in which consensus-based collaboration, expert practices, market solutions, and particular project temporalities effectively “twist and tweak” the work that is supposed to be realized in projects. Thus, projects have the capacity to redirect activities and operations into other, perhaps not desirable, directions. This is particularly important for sectors characterized by political logics which can be understood as putting focus on conflict, ideology, and transformational ambitions (see Fred’s chapter). Today, projects are installed in settings which are permeated by political logics—in local municipalities working with providing welfare to their citizens, at public agencies working to make political visions come true and in civil society organizations dedicated to transformational work in various sectors. The powerful capacity of the project bureaucracy to redirect this work into undesirable directions should be taken into account by practitioners working with projects in these settings. Practitioners could, by using the insights in this chapter, develop a sensitivity for how project organizing influences political work. By “slowing down” when engaging with and assembling the project bureaucracy, practitioners can become more attentive and critical to how the project and its various components influence the possibility of conducting political work. An example can be for practitioners to slow down especially when dealing with the “logistical” dimension (Graan, 2022) of projects, that is, the bureaucratic practices of planning and documentation which rely heavily on expertise. Although perhaps typically seen as an innocuous aspect of the project cycle—merely as a package of technical means—logistics can have profound effects on political work and should be scrutinized. A strategy of “slowing down” can, hopefully, lead to a more critical engagement with the project bureaucracy.

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Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2016 and 2021 and published in the PhD thesis: Scott, D. (2021). (Dis)assembling development: Organizing Swedish development aid through projectification. Karlstad: Karlstad University Studies. Assemblage as a philosophical concept is discussed in Deleuze, G. and Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. London: Bloomsbury. For contemporary reviews and applications of assemblage thinking in empirical analysis, the following publications are recommended: Savage, G. (2020). “What is policy assemblage?” Territory, Politics and Governance 8(3), 319–335, Li, T.M. (2007). “Practices of assemblage and community forest management”. Economy and Society 36(2), 263–293 and Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N. and Stubbs, P. (2015). Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage. Bristol: Policy Press. For a discussion on how projects can be analyzed through assemblage thinking, see Li, T.M. (2016). “Governing rural Indonesia: Convergence on the project system”. Critical Policy Studies 10(1), 79–94. Acknowledgments  I would like to thank Elisabeth Olivius for comments on a previous draft of this chapter.

References Acuto, M., & Curtis, S. (2014). Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations. Palgrave Macmillan. Anderson, B., & McFarlane, C. (2011). Assemblage and geography. Area, 43(2), 124–127. Brown, W. (2015). Undoing the demos: Neoliberalism’s stealth revolution. Zone Books. Bueger, C. (2014). Thinking assemblages methodologically: Some rules of thumb. In M. Acuto & S. Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 58–66). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Bueger, C. (2018). Territory, authority, expertise: Global governance and the counter-piracy assemblage. European Journal of International Relations, 24(3), 614–637. Bueger, C., & Gadinger, F. (2018). International practice theory. Palgrave Macmillan. Clarke, J. (2015). The managerialised university: Translating and assembling the right to manage. In J.  Clarke, D.  Bainton, N.  Lendvai, & P.  Stubbs (Eds.),

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Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage (pp. 95–130). Policy Press. Clarke, J., Bainton, D., Lendvai, N., & Stubbs, P. (2015). Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage. Policy Press. Dar, S. (2008). Real-Iizing development: Reports, realities and the self in development NGOs. In S. Dar & B. Cooke (Eds.), The new development management: Critiquing the dual modernization (pp. 177–197). Zed Books. Deleuze, G., & Guattari, F. (2013). A thousand plateaus: Capitalism and schizophrenia. Bloomsbury Academic. Fred, M. (2018). Projectification: The Trojan horse of local government. Lund University, Department of Political Science. Graan, A. (2022). What was the project? Thoughts on genre and the project form. Journal of Cultural Economy, 0(0), 1–18. https://doi.org/10.1080/1753035 0.2022.2087716 Jensen, C., Johansson, S., & Löfström, M. (2013). The project organization as a policy tool in implementing welfare reforms in the public sector. The International Journal of Health Planning and Management, 28(1), 122–137. Krause, M. (2014). The good project: Humanitarian relief NGOs and the fragmentation of reason. The University of Chicago Press. Kurki, M. (2011). Governmentality and EU democracy promotion: The European instrument for democracy and human rights and the construction of democratic civil societies. International Political Sociology, 5(4), 349–366. Latour, B. (1987). Science in action: How to follow scientists and engineers through society. Harvard University Press. Li, T.  M. (2007). Practices of assemblage and community forest management. Economy and Society, 36(2), 263–293. Li, T.  M. (2019). Problematising the project system: Rural development in Indonesia. In D. E. Hodgson, M. Fred, S. Bailey, & P. Hall (Eds.), The projectification of the public sector (pp. 56–74). Routledge. Mc Glinn, M. (2018). Translating neoliberalism: The European Social Fund and the governing of unemployment and social exclusion in Malmö. Malmö University. McCann, E. (2011). Veritable inventions: Cities, policies and assemblage. Area, 43(2), 143–147. Mosse, D. (2005). Cultivating development: An ethnography of aid policy and practice. Pluto Press. Mouffe, C. (2005). On the political. Routledge. Nail, T. (2017). What is an assemblage? SubStance, 46(1), 21–37. Öjehag-Pettersson, A. (2015). Space craft: Globalization and governmentality in regional development. Faculty of Arts and Social Sciences, Political Science, Karlstad University. Ong, A., & Collier, S. J. (2005). Global assemblages: Technology, politics, and ethics as anthropological problems. Blackwell Publishing.

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Sampson, S. (1996). The social life of projects. In C. Hann & D. Elizabeth (Eds.), Civil society: challenging Western models (pp. 121–142). Routledge. Sassen, S., & Ong, A. (2014). The carpenter and the Bricoleur. In M. Acuto & S.  Curtis (Eds.), Reassembling international theory: Assemblage thinking and international relations (pp. 17–24). Palgrave Macmillan UK. Savage, G. C. (2020). What is policy assemblage? Territory, Politics, Governance, 8(3), 319–335. Stubbs, P. (2015). Performing reform in south East Europe: Consultancy, translation and flexible agency. In J.  Clarke, D.  Bainton, N.  Lendvai, & P.  Stubbs (Eds.), Making policy move: Towards a politics of translation and assemblage (pp. 65–93). Policy Press. Wise, J. M. (2005). Assemblage. In C. J. Stivale (Ed.), Gilles Deleuze: Key concepts (pp. 77–87). Acumen.

CHAPTER 5

What Makes It Tick? On the Projectification of the Labour Market in Sweden Malin Mc Glinn

Introduction Since the mid-1980s, increased class homogenization of neighbourhoods, an escalation of ‘ethnic’ polarization of urban spaces, and rapid gentrification, have led to diverse forms of segregation (see e.g., Sassen, 2001). Given this background, it is not surprising that project-based interventions directed towards unemployed and poor people in identified ‘deprived’ neighbourhoods have become a well-established practice within the EU. In the Swedish context, the objective to break segregation and end social exclusion has, in recent decades, generated hundreds of projects in so-called vulnerable areas. Critics of this form of governance argue that such projects very seldom lead to any real changes on societal or structural levels. Whether the focus is on welfare, integration, or development, project-­based governance of social problems has been compared to putting a bandage on a broken arm (see Krause, 2014). Rather than solving

M. Mc Glinn (*) Faculty of Culture and Society, Malmö University, Malmö, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_5

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complex problems, projects have a tendency to give rise to further projects, and this machinery becomes ubiquitous (see e.g., Sävenstrand et al., 2012). Apart from being deemed a waste of taxpayers’ money by critical voices from both the political left and the political right, the intense projectification of certain areas and groups also, some argue, runs the risk of adding to the problem that the projects aim to solve by further stigmatizing certain individuals, groups, and spaces (Abdul Fattah, 2014). This chapter does not start with a critique of projects themselves, but rather offers a critique of what Anders Fough Jensen (2012) terms “the project society”, meaning a system of governance built on ad hoc solutions and a compression of time. In my understanding, this system of governance has had a marked impact on how societal issues, like poverty, integration, and spatial segregation can be understood and, consequently, dealt with. One of the arguments put forth in this chapter, is that studying projects involves intimately following their progress and trying to understand what problems they are trying to solve, how they are funded, how the funding is used, who and what is the target in the main project objectives, and, furthermore, how results are measured and communicated. While considering these projects, the inner mechanical workings of a clock spring to mind. When hanging on the wall ticking, a clock is just a clock and no one can see how it functions; but when it is opened up, the complexity of its inner workings becomes apparent: small gearwheels turn in perfect harmony. If I was to open up the projects in the same way, what would I find? What makes them tick? The primary ambition of this chapter is to offer a critical analysis of projectification that is theoretically reflective and empirically anchored. I will try to achieve this ambition by demonstrating how the theoretical and methodological toolbox that I have developed can be used when analysing the projectification of the labour market in Sweden, and hopefully, also other empirical fields. An additional ambition is to tell the story of my research journey and the political motivation that guided me in my choices along the way. By doing so, I hope to offer some encouragement and support to others who are interested in doing research using multiple methods, and who are open to being inspired by academic texts from different research fields, such as anthropology, political philosophy, critical geography, feminist theory, and political science.

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On Translation: Theoretical and Methodological Underpinnings The theoretical discussion starts with the concept translation, which I originally came across in a text by Michel Callon (1984, 59) entitled Some elements of a sociology of translation. Callon describes how scallops in St Brieuc Bay transform through what he calls “four moments of translation”. The scallops go from being living beings in the sea, to becoming numbers in tables and graphical representations, and subject to mathematical analysis (ibid, 71). For Callon, the sociology of translation is an approach to the study of power that focuses on the processes (moments of translation) that “result in the designation of the legitimate spokesman” (ibid.). My research takes Callon’s work as a starting point for highlighting the inseparable relation between problematization and translation, both in terms of methods of analysis, and in terms of defining an object of study with the aim of connecting it to the wider production of truth. Governing, understood broadly by Paul Rabinow (2003, 20) as practices “that contain institutionally legitimated claims to truth,” is thus, I argue, achieved through multiple processes of translation. This chapter is concerned with three such translations, namely framing, calculation, and arrangements of visibility, all of which will be explained and illustrated through empirical findings and presented under separate headings. To offer context to these explanations, I will explain my research journey, as well as the research methods that I have adopted and developed along the way. The purpose of this contextualization is not only to give the reader an insight into how I went about doing research, but it is also to emphasize that the three processes of translation, which I advocate for, are the result of a dialectical process that involves going backwards and forwards between the analysed material and different theoretical and philosophical strands of thought. But first, I will highlight the political problem I am concerned with and which has ultimately been the driving force when conducting this research.

The Prisoners and the Food The political problem at the heart of this research can be illustrated with a story about a prison that was once described to me in a research seminar (also see Dikec, 2005). The story is based on a scene from the French film Vive la Republique (1997), in which a group of unemployed people in the

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city of Le Mans decide to start a new political party. However, they know nothing about politics so Victor, their elected leader, is assigned the task of learning more. He therefore goes to the city and ends up having a conversation with a homeless man. In response to Victor’s question of what politics is, the man asks Victor to imagine a prison inhabited by people who were born within the prison walls without ever having committed a crime. One day, the prisoners get frustrated because there is no food in the prison and they begin to complain loudly. Since there is representative democracy in the prison, the inmates elect a leader in the hope that she or he will stop the food shortage. First, they choose a leader from the left wing who points out the unfairness of the situation but who is incapable of solving the problem. They then elect a leader from the right wing who suggests other measures. However, the food problem still remains and over time, it comes to dominate all aspects of life in the prison. And this, says the homeless man to Victor, is the big fraud. Because even if the food problem is resolved one day, the prisoners will still be in prison. Politics, he concludes, is not about the food, but about the prison. This anecdote points to the process of representing a problem and its subsequent solutions. If the problem is represented as a lack of food, then it is the problem of food shortage; not why there is a food shortage or why only some people are continuously subjected to it—that will be the objective to solve. In the same vein, if problems of unemployment are represented to be the result of insufficient skills amongst those unemployed and the need for coaching instead of an unfair distribution of capital or structural racism and prejudice, then it is the former, not the latter that will be addressed. In relation to EU-funded labour market projects in Sweden, the prison should not be interpreted as meaning the same as structure” in the classic sociological sense, nor is it a single institution or the State. The practice of governing unemployment and social exclusion through projects is not the result of a single political programme or policy, and it cannot be blamed solely on EU politics. Rather, the prison is both the practical ways of doing things and the rationalities that inform these practices.1 1  In Foucault-inspired language, this view can be referred to as governmentality, a concept coined to capture “the intrinsic links between ways of representing and knowing a phenomenon (rationality) and a way of acting upon it as to transform it (technology)” (Miller & Rose, 2008, 15).

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The first step for me was to find a way—a method—that would help me capture and describe the complexity of the projects, rather than critique them based on if they were presented as ‘successful’ or not.

Multi-Sited Ethnography: Mapping and Translation My inspiration for conducting multi-sited ethnography, or mobile ethnography, comes from Marcus (1995), who makes two important points. First, he underscores that to study a cultural formation, in my case EU-funded labour market projects, means also studying the systems in and by which they are constructed. What follows is the second point, which is that to grasp such a formation one must follow it about by “groping one’s way”, to different sites (1995, 98). One way of doing this is, according to Marcus, to trace a cultural formation by mapping it. Marcus gives examples of how such a mapping can be achieved by following things, people, metaphors, or stories (Ibid.105ff). His suggestions correlate with the assumption that social realities are constructed in heterogeneous networks of practices, or assemblages in some people’s terminology (see e.g., Farias & Bender, 2010, Also see Scott in this volume). These networks include what Law (2004) and others (see e.g., Latour & Woolgar, 1979) call inscription devices. In the words of Rose and Miller (2010, 283), such devices are “any form of recording that renders activity susceptible to evaluation and calculation”. Thus, inscription devices could include calls for project applications, project descriptions, evaluations, project budgets, promotional material, policy documents, rules and regulations, graphs, and statistics. For me, the mapping of such devices, which initially started from following the money (i.e., project funding), unveiled other devices, and the ‘puzzle’ slowly grew bigger and bigger. Mapping the devices also allowed me to create a chain of events which, as pointed out by Czarniawska (2004, 779), is part and parcel of the translational process because “events do not chain spontaneously: the actors or the observers tie them together to one another, usually in the activity of story making”. Czarniawska’s point deserves special attention here, as it highlights the basic components of multi-sited ethnography, and stresses mapping and translation as inseparable methods of analysis in terms of problematization.

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Following the Projects The theoretical concepts and methodological tools that I developed, and which will be introduced shortly, came from quite literally following the projects about and mapping the devices that became apparent along the way. On my research journey, I was taken back and forth in time as well as to different geographical spaces. In Brussels, I stood around the coffee machine talking to people who passed by. These informal conversations gave me a sense of the sociology that was performed when working for the European Union and what this meant on an everyday basis. I also spoke to people in so-called unstructured interviews. I asked about their involvement in the European Social Fund and the projects that it funded, and they were encouraged to speak freely about whatever they wanted to talk about. Some emphasized their role as bureaucrats and spoke strictly about rules and regulations. Others talked about being in Brussels as part of something bigger and expressed a sense of pride about belonging to that something. The interviews that I conducted in Stockholm and Malmö were more traditional interviews in the sense that they were set up beforehand, often via e-mail communication, and I informed my interlocutors about the subject matter beforehand. Some interviews lasted nearly two hours and are recorded and transcribed. The interviews were used interpretively in support of the more general story that emerged along the way, and were thus not an attempt at asserting ‘objective’ facts. To be able to compare and analyse my unstructured material, such as interview transcriptions, policy documents, evaluation reports, and project applications, I used the software programme NVivo. This tool made it possible for me to organize my material and perform different text analyses, such as word searches and word counts. Since all project application forms look the same and include pre-printed headings (e.g., purpose, goals, target group etc.), I was able to create so-called nodes based on these headings. This allowed me to compare how, for instance, the different projects described the project participants under the heading ‘target group’. In relation to the analysis of visual material, my method was less structured and it began with me recording selected promotional films by taking screen shots of each frame and writing down what was said in relation to the visual representations. I was deeply inspired by the work of Gillian Rose (2012), who starts her analysis of visual material by identifying three

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sites at which meaning is made: the site of production; the site of the material itself (i.e., visual content); and the site of the audience (i.e., where the visual material encounters its spectators). I did not fully follow Rose’s method, but rather focused on what the images represented and for whom and why they had been produced. From the backdrop that I have presented, I will now return to the three processes of translation that were developed throughout my research journey, namely framing, calculation, and arrangements of visibility. Framing By framing, I mean the words and grammar used to describe people, problems, solutions, and spaces, as it is through language, says Foucault (1991, 59), that “the limits and the forms of the sayable” can be traced and related to the field in which language is deployed. Beyond purely linguistic usage, the translational act of framing is used within social science contexts to describe the act of turning the meaningful knowledge of one domain, into meaning within another. In this light, framing is also a struggle for meaning that not only describes the world but also brings about particular relations. The process of framing thus involves classification, narration, and representation. The first identified translation in terms of framing, concerns the shifting meaning of ‘unemployment’ in reforms that have influenced the European Social Fund from the 1950s onward. We can trace, for instance, the shift in focus from employment on a general level to employment as it specifically pertains to unemployed individuals. As a result, being employed does not necessarily mean having a job that provides one with a salary on which one can survive, but is rather equated with being productive, instead of inactive or idle. The current discourse of employment (and unemployment) reveals itself both in how people are encouraged to become self-­ employed, and in the constant pressure for unemployed people to enter training programmes. Project-based solutions to unemployment, such as mandatory vocational training and perilous self-employment disguised as entrepreneurship, run the risk of normalizing what Standing (2011) terms “the precariat”. Furthermore, the current framing of unemployment stresses altruistic values and celebrates an ‘entrepreneurial spirit’ when enrolling project participants who are cast as unemployable. In other words: the framing of unemployment has over time shifted focus from the societal level of job creation, to being concerned with the individual

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responsibility to make oneself employable and, thereby, a subject who adds to the supply side of labour. This particular framing is an important background to understanding how the labour market in Sweden has become increasingly governed through labour market projects, or, how labour market projects have become the ‘solution’ to unemployment and its ever-present companion, social exclusion. A second framing—identified in project-related material such as calls, applications, and evaluations—concerns the dependence of projects and the project economy on a certain language—that is, the language of expertise. By this I mean a language that, according to Rose (2004, 92), “translates ethical judgements into apparently more objective, scientific, rational or uncontestable terms”. In project-related material, legitimacy is created by using a common ‘scientific’ language, made up by people who ‘actually know things’. Examples of this are references to  e.g.  the OCN-­ method (Open College Network), SWOT-analysis (Strengths, Weaknesses, Opportunities and Threats) and OnGoing-evaluations. I argue that the use of this ‘expert language’ initially achieves two things. First, it de-­ humanizes the actual activity of combating unemployment, and instead treats project participants, not as unemployed individuals with different knowledges, experiences, and varied reasons for being unemployed, but rather as objects that can be tested, evaluated and assessed by standardized models and methods. Secondly, the use of such language signals that some people have knowledge(s) that other people do not. The language of expertise, frequently used by academics who are paid to evaluate projects, is also used to encourage ‘morally responsible businesses’ to do ‘good things’ for the larger community, thereby facilitating a linkage between business branding and a sense of corporate ethics. An example of this is the widespread concept CSR (Corporate Social Responsibility). This particular framing, in my view, is important to understand when trying to grasp the larger ways in which labour market projects, and perhaps welfare-­ related projects in general, tend to celebrate individual wins rather than societal responsibilities. In the projects analysed here, the sanctioned and normalized language of expertise, and the emphasis on corporate social responsibility, are premised on what Brown (2006, 700) calls “a strange verbal brew” that “mixes the idioms of moral rectitude and entrepreneurial calculation”. The third framing that functions to legitimize the projectification of the labour market in Sweden (and perhaps elsewhere) has to do with what the problems, to use the language of Bacchi (2009), “are represented to be.”

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If a project sets out to solve a problem that is deemed solvable within a certain time frame, has stated deliverables, and a clear price tag, then the starting point must surely be to ask what the problem is. Simply put, in order to legitimize a project and attract project funding, there first needs to be a problem to fix. In relation to the projects that were part of my study, the way in which problems were articulated was through a language which very much connected the unemployability of project participants’ (those whom the projects aimed to help) with references to ‘un-­ Swedishness’, being ‘unmodern’, and inhabiting problematic and segregated urban spaces. Another way of saying this is that economic marginalization (i.e., unemployment), in project descriptions and related evaluations, was explained (and represented) by referring to presumed cultural, ethnic, and religious restraints. The labour market projects were depicted as the solution to these restraints, and as the vehicles for empowerment and hope for marginalized immigrants living in deprived areas. Through the projects, participants would not only make the transition from unemployable to employable, but they would also become decent and modern Swedish citizens. This echoes what Scott (1995, 193) calls “colonial governmentality”, by which he means “those historically constituted complexes of knowledge/power that gives shape to colonial projects”. In summary, when using framing as a tool for analysing labour market projects in Sweden, what becomes clear is the multivalent relationship between colonial and neoliberal rationalities of government, and how compassion (and pity) functions to legitimize these projects and thus makes them morally defendable as ways to govern unemployment under the flag of inclusion and tolerance. Put simply: good people were allowed to do good things for those in need, thereby translating complex issues of unemployment and social exclusion into more ‘fixable’ problems that could be solved in delimited, ‘charitable’ projects. Calculation As a starting point, calculation refers to what Miller calls “calculative practices” (2001). In relation to the European Social Fund and the projects it sets in motion, these are practices through which “human kinds”, a term I borrow from Hacking (1995, 352), are classified, evaluated, counted, and reported. Calculation is accomplished through a variety of measures, such as accounting, by which Miller means “a process of attributing

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financial values and rationalities to a wide range of social practices, thereby according to them visibility, calculability and operational utility” (1990, 316–317). Consequently, Miller’s advice is to direct attention to “the ways in which accounting shapes social and economic relations” (Ibid.), and to the mechanisms through which the choices open to individuals, organizations, and businesses are framed. In other words, we should, say Miller and Rose (2008), take seriously the numerous methods of categorizing and counting that influence the ways in which we administer the lives of others and ourselves. Another way of saying this is, following Robson, that “the relationship between accounting and its social context can be understood as a process of translation” (1991, 550), in which certain human kinds and groups are “couched in the technical and professional discourses of economic representation” (ibid. 552). They are, thereby, turned into calculative objects that can be time-managed, recorded, measured, and compared. One example of calculation that becomes visible in various project budgets, attendance sheets, and the quite complicated conversion of social benefits into co-funding (which is a pre-requisite for getting funding from the European Social Fund), is the translation of numbers of exclusion (cost of social benefits) into numbers of ‘inclusion’ (co-funding from the Fund). This translation can be observed in the accounting of the so-called ‘cost of non-attendance’ for project participants, and in the ways in which costs and sources of income are defined in project budgets. Additionally, when looking closely at the project budgets and subjecting them to scrutiny, what is noticeable is that most of the project funding is actually spent on salaries for project workers and payment for external services from evaluators and consultants, rather than being distributed amongst participants. As previously discussed in terms of framing, the practice of identifying unemployable ‘others’, and justifying the need to help them make the transition into becoming employable, is an essential part of the projects that constitute the empirical site of investigation. However, when adding the layer of calculation to the analysis, it becomes clear that these rationalities feed into and feed on a way of governing in which unemployment for some has become a source of employment for others. The ways in which funding is organized, how the attendance of project participants is counted, how the success of a project is made measurable through evaluations, and, as one informant put it, “how the salaries of project workers were in effect made possible by the social welfare of the project

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participants” (Informant 1), makes one thing quite clear: the ways in which the translational process of calculation operates practically do not create incentives to change the benefit system. Rather, the European project machinery is not operational without people who can supply the system with co-funding. The projectification of the welfare system, here represented by labour market projects, therefore makes economic efficiency and competitiveness dependent on precisely what the system is trying to eradicate, that is, exclusion, unemployment, and welfare dependency. Project participants are used as a means to reach a financial goal, and it is their utility within the European project machinery that is valued. Moreover, this way of organizing project funding feeds on and contributes to a situation in which people in Sweden, as well as all over Europe, are being reduced to enumerable bodies; classified and labelled as ‘immigrants,’ ‘non-­ Europeans,’ ‘outsiders,’ ‘excluded,’ ‘isolated,’ and ‘ill-equipped,’ and, at the same time, become the raw material that is transformed into commodities (i.e., projects). Even though projects cannot be viewed as commodities in the traditional sense, I use the concept, as suggested by Krause, to highlight “the ways projects are produced, paid for, and involve labour” (2014, 40). Through these calculative practices, which I argue are examples of what Brown calls “neoliberal political technologies” (2006, 701), people receiving social benefits are transformed into good entrepreneurial subjects. This transformation is not only related to what is actually counted in the projects, but is also related to the translational process in which various practices have become normalized within the idiom of neoliberal governmentality. This is the condition within which the vision of the responsible, active, and innovative entrepreneur blossoms and it is dependent on the language and practice of calculation to do so. Arrangements of Visibility By arrangements of visibility, I mean, following Edenborg (2017, 34–35), “a specific staging or organization of what can be seen, heard and felt in the public sphere”. The projects in question have all been subject to arrangements of visibility through various kinds of promotional material. The main idea behind these promotional artefacts is to offer inspiration, tips, and examples of new ways of getting a job (Svensson, 2008). Moreover, media consultants and PR experts are hired to promote

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‘successful projects’ through films, posters, magazines, webpages, and cartoon strips. The excessive production of promotional material, alongside the requirement to make these kinds of projects public at all times, has led me to conclude that the promotional/branding aspect of projects of this kind is an essential part of the European project machinery—a conclusion that is confirmed by one informant who noted, “showing off good projects is a strategy to create legitimacy for an EU-membership” (Informant 2). Another informant adds, “it has to be made clear who the sponsor is” (Informant 6). As was previously pointed out, I took my lead from Rose (2012) when subjecting the promotional material to scrutiny. What becomes clear from such an analysis is that the project funder is often portrayed as the saviour who stepped in to help people turn their lives around. According to the promotional materials in question, these people would never have had a chance at a decent life had it not been for the funder’s intervention. The promotional stories follow a narrative structure in which individuals and their previous circumstances are presented, both before and then after receiving help, a structure which has clear similarities to an extreme makeover, and to deeply religious metaphors of transformation, salvation, and conversion. The message in this body of material is clear: people all over Europe simply are not employable in their current state. This is due to, according to the discourse, bad choices, state of mind, attitude, badly dealt cards, lack of education and skills, or other difficulties. In other words, the unemployed are exercising the wrong kind of freedom. Within this narrative, the European Social Fund is framed as a saviour, who came to aid these people and turned them away from a life in decay to a life of possibilities, productivity, and the ‘right’ kind of freedom. I term the phenomenon of showing off successful participants to a wider audience catwalk empowerment; that is, empowerment that requires visual recognition to be deemed meaningful. The project participants, much like models on a fashion catwalk, are shown off in order to attract the gaze of others, and, additionally, more project funding. Through the use of extreme makeover narratives and by putting successful project participants on the catwalk, projects not only translate their participants— who are often defined in relation to an imagined un-Swedishness, but apparently transform them from being melancholic migrants into what Ahmed (2014, 9) terms “happy objects”. Bad feelings are transformed into good feelings. Representations of this ‘happy multiculturalism’ fit with Sweden’s self-image of being tolerant and welcoming, and they are, I argue, essential for the political economy of the projectification of the

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welfare state to work. The arrangements of visibility, as they are produced by the European Social Fund, can thus be viewed as a translational process in which unemployable ‘ethnic others’ become eligible for recognition according to neoliberal norms of inclusion. This is accomplished when, for example, the promotional needs of the Fund are translated into visual representations of successful project participants.

Summary In this final section, a summary of the main arguments will be presented before making a few concluding remarks. First, the project-based governance and management of societal problems is made operable through certain representations of human kinds, spaces, and problems. These representations are sometimes articulated in a type of racial grammar that makes clear that not only are the projects methods through which unemployable subjects might become employable; they can also be read as modernity projects, meaning a moral endeavour to facilitate a transformation from a traditional, anti-modern, and inactive lifestyle of those depicted as ‘unemployable’ and ‘socially excluded,’ to a lifestyle in which they are responsible, active, decent, thankful, and happy Swedish citizens. The paradox here is that, on the one hand, governing through empowering labour market projects assumes free individuals who can be regulated in order to act and change. On the other hand, the sometimes paternal and colonial rationalities of government that become visible in descriptions of people, spaces, and problems, assume that some people are not free or capable of making such choices without help and discipline. Second, governing through and meeting the criteria of EU-funded projects makes doing good and doing business inseparable in at least two ways. First, the will to empower ‘the other’ becomes both the strategy for securing project funding, and a way of creating a labour market for project workers, academic experts, PR-consultants, and evaluators. The perfect marriage between the administration of compassion and pity for those suffering from unemployment and social exclusion, and a market economy that needs the suffering in order to attract project funding, seems to be the basic premise of such projects. Second, and as was illustrated by the example of CSR, labour market projects that are funded by the European Social Fund, also facilitate a linkage between branding and business opportunities, and a sense of corporate ethics. Third, project governance supported by funding from the EU, is made possible through a calculative accounting practice in which numbers of

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exclusion (social benefits) is translated into numbers of inclusion (co-­ funding). For this practice to work, it is required that attendance/non-­ attendance is accounted for, that the budget remains in balance, and that the intended goals of a project are made measurable and achievable, regardless of what is to be measured. The ways in which the project funding is constructed makes economic efficiency and competitiveness dependent on precisely what the system is trying to eradicate yet involved in co-constructing exclusion and unemployment. Project participants become the raw material that is needed to produce a commodity: the project. Projects are, furthermore, needed to produce more projects, and the project machinery functions whether participants become employed or not. Fourth, the ways in which certain EU-funded projects are constructed, is premised on certain arrangements of visibility. In these arrangements, successful participants are put on a ‘catwalk’ to create awareness of and legitimacy for the European Union and the European Social Fund. The staged thankfulness highlights the many dimensions of the mutually reinforcing, reciprocal, and co-dependent relationship between project funding and the project participants, as well as the complex relationship between visibility and recognition.

Conclusion In this chapter, I have argued that projects, especially those aiming to tackle societal problems, become practically operational and morally justifiable and legitimate in the Swedish context through three acts of translation; framing, calculation, and arrangements of visibility. Although these acts of translation are discussed in relation to and exemplified by material related to EU-funded labour market projects, I believe that the analytical concepts can be useful as methodological tools when analysing other projects and projectification at large. What is, or at least should be, evident by now, is that we must acknowledge that we live in a time in which we are governed and managed through different technologies such as administrative systems. These systems, of which projects funded by the European Social Fund are only one example, produce measurable outcomes, set standardized targets, render activities calculable, increase the responsibility of individuals, and thereby influence the ways in which we administer the lives of others and ourselves. What becomes clear when analysing projects from all three dimensions of translation is that the project-management logic has a tendency to

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convert complex problems into short-termed, goal-oriented, and budget sensitive solutions. If the ambition is to unpack and expose the inner workings and logics of projectification in order to make the current project society subject to critique, one must study projects discursively, symbolically and economically. It is only when we learn what—to use the metaphor used in the introduction—makes them tick, that we can question what projectification might lead to in the long run. Scholars have the responsibility not just to seek recognition and gratification from other scholars or to succumb to pressures of impact factors. Our responsibility is also, in the words of Farias (2010, 372), to take seriously the pedagogical task of rephrasing “acquired knowledge in ways that return it to everyday life and ordinary language for democratic discussion”. It is my hope that the processes by which certain constructions become operable are dialogical and, as such, open to revision if we expose them to critique and democratic conversation. We should ask the hard and complex questions instead of being satisfied with the status quo that often comes hand in hand with the idiom of knowledge in which projects are regarded as aspirational and apolitical solutions to complex issues. I believe in this possibility rather than imprisonment.

Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2013 and 2018 and published in the PhD thesis, Mc Glinn, M. (2018). Translating neoliberalism. The European social fund and the governing of unemployment and social exclusion in Malmö, Sweden. [Doctoral thesis, Malmö University]. Malmö University Publications. Translation as a theoretical concept and methodological tool is discussed in Law, J. & Lin, W-Y. (2017). The stickiness of knowing: Translation, postcoloniality, and STS. East Asian Science, Technology and Society: An International Journal, 11(2), pp.  257–269. For further readings on calculation and the impact that systems of auditing and ranking have on the social world, see Shore, C. & Wright, S. (2015). Governing by numbers. Audit culture, rankings and the new world order, Social Anthropology, 23(1). Acknowledgements  I would like to extend my gratitude to Beata Jałocha for insightful comments on a previous draft of this chapter. Your commitment, ­honesty, and humble brilliance have been encouraging and invaluable. I would also like to thank Erin Cory for proofreading this text and making valuable and supportive comments along the way.

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References Abdul Fattah, N. (2014, December 16). Sluta göra oss i förorten till labbråttor. ETC.  Retrieved from http://www.etc.se/ledare/sluta-­gora-­oss-­i-­fororten-­ till-­labbrattor Ahmed, S. (2014). The politics of good feeling. Critical Race and Whiteness Studies, 10(2), 1–19. Bacchi, C. (2009). Analysing policy: What’s the problem represented to be? Pearson. Brown, W. (2006). American nightmare: Neoliberalism, neoconservatism, and de-­ democratization. Political Theory, 34(6), 690–714. https://doi. org/10.1177/0090591706293016 Callon, M. (1984). Some elements of a sociology of translation: Domestication of the scallops and the fishermen of St Brieuc Bay. The Sociological Review, 32, 196–233. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­954X.1984.tb00113.x Czarniawska, B. (2004). On time, space, and action nets (Vol. 11, p.  773). Gothenburg Research Institute. Dikec, M. (2005). Space, politics and the political. Environment and Planning D: Society and Space, 23(2), 171–188. https://doi.org/10.1068/d364t Edenborg, E. (2017). Politics of visibility and belonging: From Russia’s “homosexual propaganda” laws to the Ukraine war. Routledge. Farias, I. (2010). The politics of urban assemblages. City: Analysis of Urban Trends, Culture, Theory, Policy, Action, 15(3–4), 365–374. https://doi.org/10.108 0/13604813.2011.595110 Farias, I., & Bender, T. (2010). Urban assemblages. How actor-network theory changes urban studies. Routledge. Fogh Jensen, A. (2012). The project society. Aarhus University Press. Foucault, M. (1991). Governmentality. In G. Burchell, C. Gordon, & P. Miller (Eds.), The Foucault effect. Studies in governmentality. University of Chicago Press. Hacking, I. (1995). The looping effects of human kinds. In D.  Sperber, D.  Premack, & A.-J.  Premack (Eds.), Causal cognition: A multidisciplinary debate. Oxford University Press. Krause, M. (2014). The good project. Humanitarian relief NGO’s and the fragmentation of reason. The University of Chicago Press. Latour, B., & Woolgar, S. (1979). Laboratory life: The construction of scientific facts. Sage. Law, J. (2004). After method: Mess in social science research. Routledge. Marcus, E. (1995). Ethnography in/of the world systems: The emergence of a multi-sited ethnography. Annual Review of Anthropology, 24, 84–100. Mc Glinn, M. (2018). Translating neoliberalism. The European Social Fund and the governing of unemployment and social exclusion in Malmö, Sweden. [Doctoral thesis, Malmö University]. Malmö University Publications. Retrieved from https://mau.diva-­portal.org/smash/get/diva2:1404314/FULLTEXT01.pdf

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Miller, P. (1990). On the interrelations between accounting and the state. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 15(4), 315–338. https://doi. org/10.1016/0361-­3682(90)90022-­M Miller, P. (2001). Governing by numbers: Why calculative practices matter. Social Research, 68(2), 379–396. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/ stable/40971463 Miller, P., & Rose, N. (2008). Governing the present. Polity Press. Rabinow, P. (2003). Anthropos today. Reflections on modern equipment. Princeton University Press. Robson, K. (1991). On the arenas of accounting change: The process of translation. Accounting, Organizations and Society, 16(5/6), 547–570. Rose, N. (2004). Powers of freedom. Reframing political thought. Cambridge University Press. Rose, G. (2012). Visual methodologies: An introduction to researching with visual materials (3rd ed.). Sage. Rose, N., & Miller, P. (2010). Political power beyond the state: Problematics of government. The British Journal of Sociology, 6(1), 271–303. Sassen, S. (2001). The global city: New York, London, Tokyo (2nd ed.). Princeton University Press. Sävenstrand, A., Svensson, L., Holmström, P., Forssell, R., & Fred, M. (2012). Pärlbandsprojekt: projekt som verktyg i en långsiktig utvecklingsstrategi. SPeL – Strategisk påverkan och lärande. Scott, D. (1995). Colonial governmentality. Social Text, 43, 191–220. https:// doi.org/10.2307/466631 Standing, G. (2011). The precariat. Bloomsbury Academic. Svensson, G. (2008). Makt att förändra. En samling inspirerande projekt om hur man kan bryta utestängande normer och strukturer. Swedish ESF-Council.

Informants Informant 1: Senior academic who has been involved in the evaluation process related to two of the eight selected ESF-projects. Interview conducted on August 19, 2015 at Malmö University. Informant 2: Senior management within the Swedish ESF-council. Interview conducted on September 4, 2015 at the local ESF-office in Malmö. Informant 6: National coordinator for the Swedish ESF-council. Interview conducted on November 18, 2015 in Stockholm.

CHAPTER 6

The Janus Face of Participatory Projects Kanerva Kuokkanen

Introduction Since the 1990s, public administration has increasingly emphasised the role of citizens, residents and customers in the formulation and implementation of public policies (Papadopoulos & Warin, 2007; Polletta, 2016). In this ‘participatory governance’ (Fischer, 2012), the initiative for participation stems from public authorities rather than social movements, and the focus is on cooperation rather than protest (Warren, 2009). Researchers are divided on how they see this development. From an ‘optimistic’ perspective (Kübler & Schwab, 2007), participatory governance has been presented as a solution to the problems of representative democracy, such as declining electoral turnout, and as a means to empower civil society actors and to develop more participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. However, from a ‘pessimistic’ perspective, participatory governance is a ‘post-political’ phenomenon, focusing on forms and tools of participation rather than on the opportunities of citizens to influence existing

K. Kuokkanen (*) Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_6

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policies (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014) and leading to a professionalisation of persons carrying out participatory initiatives (Bherer et al., 2017). Research on public sector projectification can equally be divided into optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints. From an optimistic perspective, projects are targeted, efficient and innovative, and they enable networking, stakeholder involvement and the crossing of administrative boundaries (Jensen et  al., 2007; Sjöblom, 2009). From a pessimistic viewpoint, projects remain limited and detached from permanent public administration, they are inefficient in problem solving (Forssell et  al., 2013), and their dispersed nature undermines the welfare state and leaves significant social groups behind (Sulkunen, 2006; Pinson, 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). The starting point of this chapter is that participatory governance overlaps with public sector projectification. These two administrative megatrends have meant a rise in what I have labelled as ‘participatory projects’, or projects that have the issue of citizen, resident or customer participation as their primary focus or central element, often taking place at the local level. The aim of this chapter is to further assess this phenomenon with the help of previous literature and an empirical case study (see also Kuokkanen, 2016a). As a framework, I use the divide into optimistic and pessimistic viewpoints and combine the study of participatory governance with the projectification literature. My main research question is the following: Does the reality of participatory projects give support for an optimistic or a pessimistic interpretation? To answer the question, I delve into the role of citizens and civil society actors and the understanding and framing of participation in these projects as well as their effectiveness and long-­ term impact by analysing a specific project from the Helsinki metropolitan area (HMA). Ultimately, I reflect whether participatory projects succeed in developing new kinds of democratic participation or, alternatively, lead to ‘post-political’ forms of participation and public policies.

Participatory Governance and Public Sector Projectification This study focuses on participatory governance and projectification from the viewpoint of political science. The central thesis is that these two administrative megatrends are tightly enmeshed with each other. I have developed the umbrella concept of ‘participatory projects’ to describe an

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empirical category of publicly funded projects that have the issue of citizen, resident or customer participation as their primary focus or central element. This concept does not arise from the project management literature, which often focuses on the different types of projects, but stresses instead the aims and contents of these projects. All participatory projects have some ‘family resemblance’ (Wittgenstein, 2001 [1953]), but they can focus on, for instance, empowerment, co-creation or democratic innovations (described more in detail below). While both participatory governance and projects are widely deployed in the Global South and have led to a critical scholarly discussion on the topic (Cooke & Kothari, 2001; Onali, 2021), this study focuses on the Global North, particularly Finland and the other Nordic and European Union (EU) countries. Moreover, although projectification occurs in several policy fields (Brunila, 2011; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022), this study focuses on regional and urban policies. In this section, I summarise the broad literatures on participatory governance and projectification before focusing on participatory projects at the crossing of these two phenomena. Participatory Governance The participation and involvement of citizens, residents or customers has been strengthened during the twenty-first century as a guiding principle for public administration, often referred to as ‘participatory governance’ (Fischer, 2012). The initiative for participation stems primarily from administration (Warren, 2009), which seeks to involve citizens in the planning and implementation of public policies and services. Broad societal developments in the background include decreasing voter turnout, declining membership rates in traditional mass movements and political parties, growing individualisation and technological development (ibid.). While the involvement of citizens is not a new phenomenon, the novelty in the current wave of participatory governance lies in its scale, reliance on information and communication technology and close connection to public administration (Polletta, 2016). According to an optimistic view, participatory governance is coupled with broader ideals stemming from democratic theory (Kübler & Schwab, 2007; Papadopoulos & Warin, 2007). Here, scholars refer mainly to participatory democracy, which stresses the importance of direct citizen participation (Pateman, 1970), and deliberative democracy, which emphasises dialogue and consensus building as the core of a functioning democracy

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(Habermas, 1984). At the same time, the optimistic literature underlines the importance of active citizenship, the empowerment of marginalised groups and the role of community building (cf. Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022; Barnes et al., 2007). Participatory governance is also motivated by the knowledge of the citizens on their own needs, the local environment or the functioning of public services (Bäcklund, 2007). From this perspective, participatory governance is connected to the effectiveness and knowledge base of public administration (Hertting & Kugelberg, 2018). From a pessimistic perspective, participatory governance can be defined as ‘post-political’ (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). According to this viewpoint, the scope of participation is often defined by the administration, without room for criticism or dissent (ibid.). The focus is on the tools of participation rather than on the actual participants or the issues they want to influence (Nonjon, 2012). Participatory governance leads to the creation of a labour market for ‘public participation professionals’—facilitators, consultants, non-governmental organisations (NGOs) and public officials responsible for participatory matters (Bherer et  al., 2017). Participatory governance is also seen to benefit groups that already have opportunities to participate (Sørensen, 2005) and have a complex relationship with representative institutions (Hertting & Kugelberg, 2018). Projectification Projectification can be seen as another megatrend in public administration. An increasing part of public activities is based on projects and a broader ‘project logic’ (see Fred’s chapter), reflected in the projectification literature (e.g., Jacobsson & Jałocha, 2021; Hodgson et al., 2019). Public sector projectification is related to the New Public Management reforms of the 1980s and 1990s that applied market-based practices to the public sector, but it also reflects newer administrative trends such as partnerships, networks and participatory governance (Pinson, 2009). The EU has impacted the increase in project-based activities and the mainstreaming of projects in national and local policies (see Büttner, 2019; Godenhjelm et al., 2015). From an optimistic perspective, projects are a targeted, efficient and innovative form of action (Sjöblom, 2009). They enable networking, stakeholder involvement and boundary crossing inside administration and between the public sector, market and civil society (Jensen et al., 2007), much in line with the ‘boundary spanning’ literature in organisational

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studies (Lehtonen & Martinsuo, 2008). Furthermore, experiments and pilots are usually project-based (Bailey et al., 2019), allowing small-scale testing before deploying policy measures more widely. According to a pessimistic view, projects often continue after one another, but they remain detached from permanent public administration (Sävenstrand et al., 2012). They are inefficient in solving long-term societal problems (Forssell et al., 2013) and create their own project funding market (Fred & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2019). Project-based policies become dispersed and particularistic and thus undermine the universalism of the welfare state (Sulkunen, 2006) and exclude significant social groups (Pinson, 2009). Luc Boltanski and Ève Chiapello (1999) have used the concepts of ‘big and small ones’ in what they call the ‘projective city’. The big ones, or those who succeed, can create and maintain networks, act as mediators and move between projects, while the small ones lack these qualities and remain immobile when projects end. Participatory Projects Participatory governance and public sector projectification are interrelated, and participatory policies often take the project form (Hertting & Kugelberg, 2018, 2). However, these ‘participatory projects’ vary in their aims and contents. ‘Empowerment projects’ (Eliasoph, 2011) are targeted at disadvantaged groups and aim to strengthen their capacities in society or the labour market. Other projects consist of the co-creation and co-­ production of public services or urban planning proposals together with citizens, residents or customers (Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022; Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018). Projects are equally used to develop new forms of citizen, resident or customer involvement (Kuokkanen, 2016b, cf. Bäcklund, 2007, 19), referred to as ‘democratic innovations’ (Smith, 2009). These categories are not exclusive, as the theme of participation and citizen, resident or customer involvement is cross-cutting in several types of projects (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022). The projectification of participatory governance can depend on several factors. First, participation policy is a new policy field, not established in institutionalised policies (cf. Saukkonen, 2020, 169–173). Second, there is an affinity between the current wave of participatory governance and the older and more established idea of stakeholder management in project administration, meaning that these two can easily be combined. Finally, many participatory projects are conducted in the framework of urban and

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regional policies (Kuokkanen, 2016b)—in the EU member states, often funded via the highly projectified Cohesion policy (Vento, 2020). Recent studies on participatory governance have nevertheless noted some institutionalisation of previous project-based activities in the permanent administration, particularly at the local level (Hertting & Kugelberg, 2018; Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2017). A combination of the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives of the participatory governance and projectification literatures leads to the following positions. From an optimistic viewpoint, participatory projects lead to more participatory and deliberative forms of democracy. The focus on networks and stakeholders in projects contributes to the empowerment of citizens and civil society actors, promotes collaboration instead of adversarial politics and broadens the knowledge base of public administration. Participatory projects allow creativity and innovation, they are targeted and effective and they can be used as pilots in mainstreaming participatory practices. From a pessimistic perspective, participatory projects reduce participation into ‘post-political’ tools and models rather than promote citizens’ opportunities to influence public policies. The projects have a predefined purpose that the participating citizens and civil society actors cannot influence, and the politicisation of issues not belonging to this framework is not allowed. Participatory projects create a new group of public participation professionals enmeshing with the project market. The activities started in participatory projects end after the initial project funding has run out or continue in other projects. Projects have limited impact on the permanent structures of public administration, leading to dispersed public policies. In the empirical part of the chapter, I will analyse through a case study how much the reality of participatory projects corresponds to the above-­ mentioned optimistic and pessimistic perspectives. Before the empirical analysis, I will address the methodological considerations related to the topic.

Methods and Data The empirical data come from a case study on Citizen Channel, a participatory project from the HMA (Kuokkanen, 2016a). Methodologically, the research belongs to the tradition of interpretive policy analysis (IPA), which builds on a qualitative, holistic and interpretive perspective (Yanow, 2000). Inside IPA, my research represents what Hendrik Wagenaar (2011)

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calls qualitative policy research, meaning a hermeneutical study aiming to understand what is behind a specific policy, based on the policy actors’ experiences. My data consist of policy document analysis and 29 semi-­ structured interviews with the administration of the Urban Programme for the HMA funding the Citizen Channel project, the project’s steering and management groups and project managers, and the participating resident activists. Moreover, I participated in two events organised by the project, although I gathered background information rather than conducted classic participant observation. In the study, I focused on the role of citizens and civil society actors in the project, the understanding and framing of participation in it, and its long-term impact. These themes were also visible in my interview guide and in the perspective from which I approached the policy documents and project events. Methodologically, my aim is to show how case studies combining document analysis with a broad range of interviews and elements of participant observation can go beneath the surface of the official project documents and offer a ‘thick description’ (Geertz, 1973) of the phenomenon. The formal project documents usually present an idealised picture of projects—in particular, if they are written to acquire project funding, as participation and similar concepts are used as catchwords in funding applications (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022). Project evaluations can provide more information on project contents, but they tend to focus on measurable indicators. As projects are often used as pilots for future activities, it is also important to address their long-term impact. Citizen Channel was conducted approximately 15  years ago, so this impact can now be assessed. This assessment is based on two background interviews conducted in 2022, secondary data such as websites and policy documents and my other research on participatory projects in Helsinki and Finland (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022; Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022). By having a longer perspective than usually in projectification studies, the aim is also to contribute to existing research from this viewpoint.

Citizen Channel, a Participatory Project I use the Citizen Channel project implemented in the HMA between 2005 and 2007 as a case for analysing participatory projects. The project was part of the Urban Programme for the HMA, an inter-municipal development programme involving the municipalities of the area, state

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representatives and inter-municipal organisations. It was carried out by Helsinki’s district associations’ umbrella organisation, Helsinki Neighbourhoods Helka. I have structured my empirical analysis around three broad themes: the actors involved in Citizen Channel, the understanding and framing of participation in the project and the effectiveness and long-term impact of the project. Citizens and Civil Society Actors in Citizen Channel One way to assess participatory projects is to evaluate how much room for manoeuvre they give for citizens and civil society actors and who those actors are. While the Urban Programme for the HMA was dominated by municipalities, an NGO, Helsinki’s district associations’ umbrella organisation Helka, was responsible for Citizen Channel. During the years, Helka has developed from a traditional advocacy organisation to a partner of the City of Helsinki, particularly in the field of urban planning and projects. However, it has a connection to the neighbourhoods via its members, the district associations, which are NGOs representing residents in Helsinki neighbourhoods. In my interviews with the programme and project administration and the participating residents, the interviewees irrespective of their background emphasised Helka’s simultaneous connections to municipal administration and residents and its professionalism in project management and resident participation. The central role of NGOs in projects has also been noted in other Finnish research (Pyykkönen & Martikainen, 2013; Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022). NGOs have shifted during the last decades from advocacy and sites for volunteering towards service provision, making them more dependent on project funding than before (Särkelä, 2016; Ruuskanen et  al., 2020). While projects provide resources and collaboration opportunities, they also make NGOs shift their priorities towards those of the funders (Pyykkönen & Martikainen, 2013). While Helka was in charge of the practical project management, Citizen Channel’s steering and management groups included municipal and state-­ level officials, planners, representatives of NGOs and researchers, reflecting the idea of networking and stakeholder involvement that is often highlighted in the project literature (Jensen et al., 2007). All these actors, together with the NGO Helka, could be labelled as public participation professionals (Bherer et al., 2017). In the interviews, these professionals underlined that it was not only paid work for them but rather a ‘dream’ or ‘mission’, as they desired to develop residents’ participation opportunities

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and open up administrative procedures. They also emphasised that the freedom and intern logics of civil society could not be reduced to mere administrative models. The project participants were residents in the selected pilot areas. While some events organised in Citizen Channel attracted a wider range of residents, the most active participants were neighbourhood association activists—often key figures in their neighbourhoods and many of them involved in municipal politics. From their perspective, the project was just one part in their broader local activism. In concentrating on these active residents, Citizen Channel differed from the more socially oriented ‘empowerment projects’ aimed towards disadvantaged groups (Eliasoph, 2011), who are often targets in EU-funded projects (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022) and in participatory projects in the field of social policy (Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022). The Understanding and Framing of Participation Participatory projects can also be analysed from the perspective of how participation is framed and understood in them. Citizen Channel combined the development of resident participation with an inter-municipal perspective to fit in the framework of the Urban Programme and get funding from it. During the project, the original aim of developing a joint interaction model for the municipal administration and the residents in the HMA shifted towards the development of a practical participatory ‘toolkit’, as the municipalities found the creation of a joint model too binding. The project took place at pilot sites in the border areas of the municipalities belonging to the HMA.  The tools tested in the project included local forums, meetings between residents and municipal officials, interactive maps and other online tools, workshops for schoolchildren, guidelines for the self-evaluation of customer feedback and a SWOT analysis (strengths, weaknesses, opportunities and threats) of residential areas. In the case of Citizen Channel, the understanding and framing of participation depended on the position of the actors in the project. While the formal goal of the project was to develop participatory tools, the resident activists emphasised everyday issues related to their neighbourhoods, such as transport connections and local services in the border areas of municipalities, which they also chose to discuss in the project events. It was the task of the project administration to create a transferable model or toolkit as a result of the project, and the impact of residents on this part of the

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project remained minor. The idea of transferable models or tools is common in participatory projects, as the aim is to get long-term results that can be mainstreamed or adapted to other contexts (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022). However, the distance of the residents from the project management distinguished Citizen Channel from some of the later projects in Helsinki where residents had a more crucial role in running the project (Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018). Among the Citizen Channel project administration, the differing interpretations about the aim of the project were generally not seen as a problem. These interviewees saw that the development of participation was not ‘selling enough’ to attract residents, and it was their deliberate decision to focus on tangible local issues with the residents. While the project administration did not take a stance in these issues, they hoped that the residents could work on them by themselves with the help of the tools and networks acquired during the project. The Effectiveness and Long-Term Impact of the Project Participatory projects can also be assessed by looking at their effectiveness in actually promoting participation and their impact beyond the initial project phase. The tools of participation and interaction tested in Citizen Channel were published online and as printed brochures and presented in various seminars. Citizen Channel also initiated some local-level collaboration and small-scale practices (e.g., events with residents and urban planners in a library) that remained after the original project. The participating residents were nevertheless somewhat confused about the discontinuation of most of the activities at the end of the project. The project administration, in turn, continued in new projects on similar themes, thus reflecting the division into ‘big and small ones’ in the ‘projective city’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). However, the project administration also felt frustrated, as the project results were not directly implemented in the municipalities of the HMA.  The municipal officials, from their side, saw that projects could only have a limited effect on permanent municipal institutions (cf. Forssell et al., 2013). This was further complicated by the inter-municipal framework of Citizen Channel, as the issue of metropolitan governance was highly politicised and conflictual at the time. Some interviewees from the project administration felt that in this context participation was a secondary theme, outsourced to fixed-term NGO-run projects having little impact on municipalities. Others saw that Citizen Channel belonged to a network and continuum of simultaneous and consecutive projects (cf.

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Pinson, 2009; Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999). These projects as a whole could gradually change attitudes and organisational culture in municipalities, and their results could only be visible after several years. Since Citizen Channel, conducted approximately 15  years ago, an abundance of participatory projects has been carried out in HMA and elsewhere in Finland. The EU and its subsequent programming periods are central drivers in one group of projects, many of which focus on the empowerment of vulnerable groups (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022). Other projects have developed local democracy and participation, such as the Democracy Pilots of the City of Helsinki conducted in 2013 (Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018) or the Democracy Experiments carried out by the publicly funded high-profile think tank Sitra between 2019 and 2021 (Kallioniemi & Vahti, 2021). Helka was active in several projects after Citizen Channel, but in recent years, it has had a lower profile in this field, partly due to increased competition. Recently, some previously project-based participatory initiatives have been institutionalised and targeted to the residents of Helsinki as a whole (cf. Hertting & Kugelberg, 2018). This is mainly due to the 2015 reform of the national Local Government Act, which led to the development of a new participation and interaction model for Helsinki, gradually taken into use since 2017. The impact of ideas tested in previous participatory projects is visible in the model. First, participatory budgeting, tested in the abovementioned Democracy Pilots (but not in Citizen Channel), was included in this model. Second, in my study of Citizen Channel, the interviewees emphasised the need for local coordinators of participation. Such coordinators are now in the core of the new model and work in each major district. Third, Helsinki changed its policy towards resident activism in the 2010s, interpreting more liberally than before the regulation related to resident-led activities such as flea markets, community gardening, unofficial pop-up restaurants and neighbourhood events (Mäenpää & Faehnle, 2021). A need for such change was mentioned by the interviewees from the Citizen Channel project administration. They saw that participatory projects could incrementally change the administrative culture of Helsinki, which one of them described as ‘dating from the Czar era’,1 dominated by high-level officials. It is difficult to assess how much projects have contributed to the current change, but they have potentially had a gradual impact. 1  Between 1809 and 1917 Finland was an autonomous part (Grand Duchy) of the Russian Empire.

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Discussion and Conclusion The main research question of this study was whether the reality of participatory projects gave support for an optimistic or pessimistic interpretation. This broad question was addressed by analysing the role of citizens and civil society actors, the framing and understanding of participation and the effectiveness and long-term impact in the case of a participatory project, which was also used to illustrate the phenomenon more broadly. The last sub-question, whether participatory projects succeed in developing new kinds of democratic participation or lead to ‘post-political’ forms of participation and public policies is further addressed in the following section. This study gives support for elements from both the optimistic and pessimistic perspectives depending on how the results are interpreted. The metaphor of a Janus face (cf. Swyngedouw, 2005) can be used to illustrate this finding. From an optimistic perspective, participatory projects provide room for manoeuvre for civil society actors, particularly the NGOs conducting them. In Citizen Channel, Helsinki’s district associations’ umbrella organisation Helka worked in a policy field otherwise dominated by municipalities and benefited from its expertise in resident participation. There was collaboration and even some kind of deliberation between the different partners, although at an organisational level and not conducted by citizens as in the theories of deliberative democracy. The study showed that an NGO could act as a boundary spanner (cf. Williams, 2002) between the municipalities and the residents. Participatory projects are coherent with the mission and values of such NGOs and other public participation professionals, giving them the opportunity to provide alternative ways of thinking in public administration and promote the issue of participation. While the role of citizens or residents in these projects remains more limited, they are able to influence some of their contents, such as the neighbourhood events in Citizen Channel. Earlier research has also shown a variation among projects, some allowing a stronger impact for citizens, residents or service users than others (Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022). From a pessimistic viewpoint, participatory projects create a joint market for project actors and public participation professionals (see also Bherer et  al., 2017; Mazeaud & Nonjon, 2017; Fred & Mukhtar-Landgren, 2019). Professionals can move between projects and influence their contents, which are nevertheless also defined according to the objectives of

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the funders, as in the case of Citizen Channel. Projects mean a shift from the traditional role of NGOs as sites of advocacy and voluntary work towards service provision, which can happen in the field of participation because of NGOs’ traditional connection to the grassroots level (see also Nonjon, 2012). Participatory projects give limited wiggle room for citizens, who often remain targets of these projects rather than equal partners. Projects concentrate on creating generalisable and transferable models and tools of participation instead of enabling citizens to make a difference in tangible issues. In Citizen Channel, while residents participated in the activities of the project in the pilot areas, the modelling part of the project remained the task of the project administration. This dilemma of participation—as a way to impact tangible issues, as the residents saw the project, and as a development object, as was the formal objective—was never totally resolved. These findings support the view that participatory projects do not correspond to the high-level ideals of participatory and deliberative democracy present in democratic theory but rather to the picture of ‘post-political’ participation (Wilson & Swyngedouw, 2014). However, if participatory projects are perceived as pilots, the idea is not to only to concentrate on their qualities here and now but on how the models, tools and forms of action developed in them are used and possibly mainstreamed in the long term. In the case of Citizen Channel, the results are ambivalent. The project can be seen as an illustration of the ‘big ones’ (Boltanski & Chiapello, 1999)—the actors and organisations represented in the project administration—moving from one project to another, while the ‘small ones’—the residents—have few opportunities for that. The possibility to affect permanent public administration by these projects remains modest: in Citizen Channel, some interviewees saw that the issue of participation was outsourced to NGO-led projects having limited impact on permanent municipal administration. However, according to the optimistic perspective, while individual projects end, they lead to at least tacit and small-scale results that remain. The entity formed by several simultaneous and subsequent participatory projects can gradually impact the permanent administration, both in creating institutionalised forms of participation and in changing the organisational culture. Sometimes this institutionalisation requires a ‘policy window’ (Kingdon, 1984), a timeframe with an exceptional opportunity to influence a policy process. In Helsinki, the new participation and interaction model, enabled by the reform of the national Local Government Act, has increased the opportunities for residents to

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participate directly in municipal affairs and partly has its background in previous projects and pilots. Participatory projects can also have a more subtle impact in affecting the administrative culture, and such change has occurred in Helsinki during the recent years. Methodologically, the strengths of the research are the same as its limitations. While it provided a “thick description” (Geertz, 1973) of a specific project, it was, after all, a single case study from the HMA, although many of its findings have been confirmed in my studies with a broader selection of Finnish projects (Kuokkanen, 2016b, 2022; Kuokkanen & Palonen, 2018; Meriluoto & Kuokkanen, 2022) and in other research. In further studies, a balance between the depth and the breadth should be further assessed. A cross-country comparison could be fruitful in distinguishing between the local and national context and the more general trends in participatory projects.

Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2007 and 2016 and published in the PhD thesis Kuokkanen, K. (2016a). Developing Participation through Projects? A Case Study from the Helsinki Metropolitan Area. Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. ‘Empowerment projects’ are studied in Eliasoph, N. (2011). Making Volunteers: Civic Life after Welfare’s End. Princeton University Press and public participation professionals in Bherer, L., Gauthier, M., & Simard, L. (eds.) (2017). The Professionalization of Public Participation. Routledge. On IPA, see Yanow, D. (2000). Conducting Interpretive Policy Analysis. Qualitative Research Methods, Volume 47. SAGE and Wagenaar, H. (2011). Meaning in Action: Interpretation and Dialogue in Policy Analysis. M.E. Sharpe.

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CHAPTER 7

HRM and Projectification: Moving Beyond the ‘Project-Based Organization’ Concept Karin Bredin

Introduction Temporary endeavours within or across organizations, guided by a task or a goal and performed by constellations of people with diverse and specialized knowledge, are mainstream in today’s landscape of work and organization. This proliferation of projects—projectification—has driven fundamental changes in, for example, managerial practices, actual work settings, and employment regimes (Lundin et  al., 2015). As a consequence, firms and other organizations are undergoing profound transformations as traditional, bureaucratic ideas of management and organizational structure become obsolete. The projectification of society, work, and organizations gives rise to a variety of organizational forms in which projects make up the value-­ creating activities. Such organizations have been studied under names

K. Bredin (*) Department of Management and Engineering, Linköping University, Linköping, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_7

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such as project-based, project-intensive, project-oriented, or projectified organizations. (Miterev et al. [2017] count at least nine different names for this organizational form.) Broadly speaking, they are defined as permanent organizational settings in which core activities are performed in projects, and hence project work is the routine (see, e.g., Bredin, 2008a; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011b; Lindkvist, 2004; Miterev et  al., 2017).1 These organizations are, in most cases, highly knowledge intensive, and the people that inhabit them are providers of the main strategic resource: human resources. Therefore, the systems and practices for managing people—human resource management (HRM)—also stand out as particularly vital for these organizations. Over the past 20 years, project management scholars have conducted a range of empirical studies that have contributed to increased knowledge about challenges for HRM in project-based organizations. More research is needed, not least from scholars within the HRM field of research (Samimi & Sydow, 2021). I suggest that moving ahead with research on what projectification means for HRM requires moving beyond the concept of ‘project-based organizing’ (and equivalent terms), which has dominated this stream of research. In this chapter, I discuss the limitations of this overarching concept for the study of HRM. As an alternative, I articulate a set of traits that are accentuated in organizations where projects play an important part and that challenge conventional ideas of HRM.  The main argument is to move beyond the broad and blunt project-based organization concept and to shift our attention to the main reasons why projectification requires particular attention from HRM-oriented research. HRM and Projects: A Brief Overview In an increasingly projectified landscape of work and organization, working in projects is mainstream. This means that traditional systems and practices for managing human resources need to be transformed to reconcile with project-oriented forms of organizing. HRM is a key component of organizational management systems, not least in knowledge-intensive industries, since it focuses on attracting and engaging competent people, 1  The concept embraces both whole organizations and parts within a larger organization (cf. Miterev et al., 2017), but it does not include temporary, ephemeral, or ‘disposable’ organizations, which cease to exist after the completion of a specific task within a specific timeframe (Bakker et al., 2016).

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training and development, workplace learning, feedback and appraisal, compensation and benefits, and health and well-being. Strong and contextually adaptive HRM systems are argued to play a critical role not only in a firm’s performance but also in social sustainability within an organization, as well as beyond organizational boundaries (Beer et al., 2015; De Stefano et al., 2018; Kramar, 2014). Conventional models of HRM have been criticized for their tendency to assume relatively stable and homogeneous organizations without temporary elements and with a clear set of defined boundaries within which work takes place and HRM systems are applied (see, e.g., Kinnie & Swart, 2019; Raja et al., 2013). Project management scholars have identified a range of challenges for HRM in project-based organizations (e.g., Bredin, 2008a; Huemann et al., 2019; Keegan & Den Hartog, 2019; Söderlund & Bredin, 2006; Turner et al., 2008b). Such challenges include achieving long-term competence development, maintaining depth in specialized knowledge, designing adequate career structures and performance review systems, managing a mix of internal and external employees, and supporting work-life balance. Some studies also show the complexity of delivering HR practices at operational levels due to changes in role structures and shifts in responsibilities among line managers, project managers, HR specialists, and project workers themselves (e.g., Bredin & Söderlund, 2007; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011a; Huemann et al., 2019; Keegan et al., 2011). Many of these challenges stem from the fact that people perform their work in projects, perhaps even being co-located with temporary project teams, while HRM systems tend to be tied to the permanent line structures. Moreover, the short-term project logic tends to clash with the more long-term logic of HRM. Early contributions with an interest in HRM in project-based organizations showed that introducing temporary projects in permanent organizational settings sets a new stage for the design of HRM systems and the delivery of HRM practices, which were created for more traditional organizational settings in the first place (Bredin, 2008a, b; Keegan & Turner 2003; Söderlund & Bredin 2006; Turner et  al., 2008a, b). For some reason, projectification and project-based organizing have been largely neglected by scholars within the field of HRM, despite the undisputable importance of projects in contemporary work and organization (e.g., Lundin et al., 2015; Samimi & Sydow, 2021; Schoper et al., 2018). There are still many questions at the intersection of projectification and HRM that have not yet been addressed, and as argued by Samimi and

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Sydow (2021), HRM researchers could make important contributions, not least in exploring how HRM can “make these notoriously fragile forms more resilient” (p. 70) but also to “clarify the way in which sustainable HRM can be achieved in this context” (p. 71). The Deceptive Idea of ‘Project-Based Organizations’ as a Single Form Much of the existing project management research with a focus on HRM shares a tendency to focus on project-based organizations as the context for study. It also tends to treat the concept as if it denominates one single form of organization, while it is arguably an overarching concept for a variety of organizational solutions that only have two defining traits in common. First, they combine permanent and temporary forms of organizing (Bakker et al., 2016; Samimi & Sydow, 2021), which means that they are matrix organizations that attempt to draw benefits from both functional structures and project organization (Galbraith, 1971; Larson & Gobeli, 1987). Second, they give prominence to projects as the routine way of organizing core, value-creating activities (Bredin, 2008a; Miterev et al., 2017). The concept of project-based organization has indeed been helpful for revealing and exploring general HRM challenges within this broad category of organizations. It is also natural that a research field should initially focus on finding similarities, but I suggest that the time has come to address the variations in project organizing. The way projects play out and how people work in projects differ greatly within and across organizations, and these variations have important implications for HRM. The existence of variation in project organizing has been discussed by several scholars. For example, previous research since at least the 1980s has provided a series of useful frameworks for different ways to combine projects and functional forms of organizing (e.g., Hobday, 2000; Larson & Gobeli, 1987; Lundin et al., 2015; Whitley, 2006). The importance of such variations in the study of HRM has not, however, attracted much scholarly attention to date. The research reported on in Bredin (2008a) and Bredin and Söderlund (2011b) addressed the need to contextualize HRM in relation to the actual work setting. These studies particularly highlighted the importance of better understanding variations in how individuals work in projects when designing purposeful HRM systems. Existing frameworks for types

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of project-based and matrix organizations are indeed helpful for categorizing organizations in terms of degrees of project-orientation. However, in reality people within the same organization often have very different project work settings depending on, for example, whether they work full-time on one project or contribute to a variety of projects, which c­ ompetences/ expertise they have, whether or not they are co-located with the project team, or whether they are internally employed or externally hired. Drawing on Barley and Kunda (2001) and Lundin et al. (2015), I argue that one has to study how actual work is organized in order to figure out how HRM systems can be transformed to reconcile with the project work setting. In sum, while the concept of project-based organization has surely been imperative for furthering project management research into HRM, I suggest that it is not particularly useful for framing future studies of HRM in contemporary work and organization. In fact, it might instead cause lock-ins and limitations: firstly because the concept is too broad to be useful, and secondly because it creates unnecessary limitations in the study of what projectification means for contemporary HRM. Many of the challenges that previous research has identified regarding HRM in project-­ based organizations are equally relevant for any matrix organization that combines permanent and temporary structures; they are not particular to project-based organizations (even though they are likely to be more accentuated there). Articulating Traits Driven by Projectification and Game Changers for HRM I suggest that we leave the concept of project-based organization behind and shift our attention to traits that tend to become more accentuated in work settings that include project work. Drawing on previous research into HRM in project-based organizations (e.g., Bredin, 2008a; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011b; Huemann et al., 2007; Huemann et al., 2019; Keegan & Den Hartog, 2019; Keegan et al., 2018; Samimi & Sydow, 2021), I suggest three such traits that also seem to explain important HRM-related challenges: temporariness, cross-functionality, and blended workforce (see Fig. 7.1). These traits are often somehow addressed in mainstream research within project-based organizing and matrix management. However, they are not explicitly addressed as a set of traits that are augmented by projectification and that shape variations in work settings. My argument is that

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Temporariness Temporary structures and processes

Blended workforce

Crossfunctionality

Permanent and temporary forms of employment simultaneously

Integration of specialized knowledge

Fig. 7.1  Traits accentuated by projectification and central to HRM

clearly articulating this set of traits can be useful when going beneath and beyond the broad label of project-based organizing and for getting a better understanding of what projectification means for contemporary work settings and the management of human resources. It also allows for a more nuanced understanding of variations in work settings, since these traits can be more or less impactive for different groups of employees. Temporariness Temporariness is presumably the most obvious trait that comes with organizing by projects, since projects are temporary by definition. It also has a large impact on HRM.  When project work is routine rather than the exception, temporary projects are the building blocks in people’s careers and competence development. There is, however, an inherent conflict between meeting project deadlines in the short-term and long-term development of competencies and careers. Getting the right competencies in projects today is simply more urgent than building the right competencies for the future, even though most would agree that both are equally important. Moreover, people’s everyday work is driven by project deadlines and

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deliveries, which increases the risk of stress and decreases the time for reflection and learning. Temporariness is also visible in collaboration and work relations; since projects are “characterised by the temporary constellation of people they entail” (Prencipe & Tell, 2001, 1374), “new human encounters and relationships take place whenever a new project is started” (ibid.). People move in and out of teams on a regular basis and will need skills for swift socialization and swift trust (Meyerson et al., 1996) to make a team of relative strangers perform well as quickly as possible. From an HRM perspective, temporariness generally calls for adequate practices for managing how people and competencies flow in and out of project constellations over time, while at the same time managing the long-term development of employees, their careers, and their well-being. However, temporariness does not necessarily mean the same thing in all project work settings. For illustration purposes, let us consider three project workers in product development. These characters, Anna, John, and Kim, are based upon authentic examples from my previous empirical research (i.e., Bredin, 2008a; Bredin et  al., 2017; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011b; Enberg & Bredin, 2015), and they represent common examples of project work for engineers. They have been slightly modified for simplification and confidentiality reasons. Anna belongs to a functional unit and is allocated full time to a project that is planned to last for two years. She is co-located with the project team during the project, but attends unit meetings regularly. John belongs to a functional unit and is allocated to three parallel projects. Each project is planned to last for one to three years, but John’s assignments are four to six months long. He does most of his own work from his home unit, but attends project meetings frequently to integrate his work. Kim belongs to an agile team. The team is one of several agile teams on a project that is planned to last for two years. Kim’s team plans and carries out project tasks in a series of so-called ‘sprints’, which are normally two weeks long. The team is not dissolved after the end of a project or project assignment; it is simply assigned to another project.

All three characters have a work situation in which temporariness is present, but it affects HRM in very different ways. For Anna, each cycle of ‘assignment to project—employment on project—dispersal from project’ (Huemann et al., 2007) is significant, since the assignments are long and the project team will be the closest colleagues for a long time before the team is dissolved and everyone moves on to new projects. Assigning team

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members before the project starts; managing the team cycle from creation to dispersal; handling assessment, salary, training and development, and so on during the project; and planning for future project assignments as well as career and competence development opportunities are all issues that an HRM system will need to handle. A conventional HRM system which is tied only to the line organization and does not have a built-in capacity to deal with these large and decisive project cycles for employees like Anna will most likely not be very successful. For John, temporariness is also a strong feature of the work setting. However, here it is expressed in terms of relatively short assignments in several parallel projects. John moves in and out of project constellations quite often, but is never a core member of a project team. Deadlines in different projects might be close to each other, creating periods of high workload. Changes, delays, and unforeseen difficulties in one project might also affect John’s contributions in other projects. The parallel multiple project cycles might make it difficult to follow a career development plan and to find ‘softer’ periods in between projects with time for competence development and reflection (cf. Zika-Viktorsson et al., 2006). Each assignment might not be decisive for John’s career, but the chain of assignments over time is what will build his career and competence development. An HRM system will hence need to constantly handle the inherent conflict between projects’ short-term need for adequate competence at the right time and the permanent organization’s need for competence and capacity building in the long term. For Kim, the temporariness is—in comparison—not a salient feature of the work setting, despite the project-orientation. It is certainly present in the deadline-driven work process in time-boxed iterations. However, the short iterations with small increments and continuous improvements decrease the impact of temporariness in favour of incremental development and adaptation. Moreover, Kim does not move in and out of project team constellations, and does not have parallel project assignments or a risk of colliding deadlines. Opting for stable teams is typical for settings that work according to an agile project management approach (see, e.g., PMBOK® Guide, PMI, 2021), and overall it is a way to decrease the level of temporariness while maintaining a high degree of agility and flexibility. The idea is to allow team members to get to know each other, build trust and effectiveness, and improve team performance over time. Hence, for employees like Kim, temporariness is not a strong driver of HRM challenges.

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The temporality trait explains the need for an HRM system to adequately manage the flow of people in and out of projects, adapt competence and career systems to mitigate the conflict between short-term and long-term needs, and develop people’s abilities to establish relationships quickly, understand socialization processes, and manage uncertainties (Bredin et al., 2017; Bredin & Söderlund, 2011b). However, as the illustrations show, temporariness may take various expressions in different work settings and for different groups of employees, often within the same organization. An important task for HRM systems is hence to achieve responsiveness to these variations. Cross-Functionality One reason for organizing by projects is to achieve the integration of specialized knowledge in a flexible and efficient way (e.g., Galbraith, 1971; Sydow et  al., 2004). Hence, projects are often cross-functional arenas. People increasingly perform their work in cross-functional settings, while functional line units become a home post and a resource pool for specialists and specialized knowledge (Enberg & Bredin, 2015, see also Mintzberg, 1983 on ‘adhocracies’). Conventional HRM systems tend to be designed according to functional line structures. That is, the structure of the HRM system primarily relies upon line managers and support structures that follow the line structure (e.g., local HR support or HR service centres that provide support on demand to line managers with personnel responsibilities). Practices for recruitment, competence development, career development, performance management, and so on also tend to be tied to the line organization. As employees increasingly perform their work in cross-functional projects, the role and function of the line organization and line managers become less clear (Larsen & Brewster, 2003). Project management research has shown that operational HRM becomes a key function for the permanent line organization to handle, and the roles of line managers increasingly evolve into roles with more focus on HRM and less focus on task and technology (e.g., Bredin & Söderlund, 2007; Huemann et  al., 2019; Keegan & Den Hartog, 2019). To get more insight into how the cross-functionality trait might be expressed differently in different settings and for different employees (even within quite similar operations), let us return to Anna, John, and Kim:

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Anna’s primary competency is safety critical software. Most of the 20 colleagues at the unit are dispersed across different projects and co-located with their project teams. A few experts contribute to up to three projects at the same time and have their workstations at the unit. The unit meets for one hour every two weeks, and they have a joint coffee break every Friday morning. John is a fuel systems engineer with a strong reputation for his deep expertise. They are 17 colleagues at the unit, and most of them work from the unit and collaborate on project deliveries. One colleague at the unit is co-located with the core team for a product development project. Another colleague works together with another product organization but belongs formally to the fuel systems unit. Kim is a software developer. The agile team is cross-functional, and besides Kim there are also another developer, two test engineers, one deployment and operations specialist, and one customer case and support specialist. The work might require more or less of different competencies at different stages. Kim has learned to do quite a lot of testing and verification tasks, and takes on customer support cases when needed.

All three characters work cross-functionally in projects, but the trait is expressed in different ways. In Anna’s case, cross-functionality is very prominent. Her everyday work is with project team members with competencies other than hers, and she rarely works together with disciplinary peers. For employees like Anna, cross-functionality hence creates a need for an HRM system to handle employees working and performing in projects, while the functional line is more of a dispersed network of disciplinary peers. Research has shown that while core activities are performed in temporary and cross-functional projects, HRM practices mostly remain with the functional line (Bredin, 2008a; Huemann et al., 2019; Keegan & Den Hartog, 2019). As an effect, HRM—particularly competence issues— becomes the focus for line managers (Bredin & Söderlund, 2007). However, since employees are dispersed among projects, HR practices such as performance management, competence, and career development are complex and require input from—and often negotiations with—project managers. In work settings such as Anna’s, HRM systems also need to find ways to build specialized competencies for the future, even though people are not organized for collaboration among functional specialists (Enberg & Bredin, 2015). The point of cross-functional collaboration is to integrate different specializations, which requires access to individuals with

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specialized knowledge (Grant, 1996). However, the dispersal of disciplinary peers in favour of cross-functional work inherently impairs the opportunities for joint learning and experience-sharing through collaboration, joint problem-solving, and socialization among specialists. This, in turn, might have consequences for the long-term building of strategic specialist knowledge for future projects. For John, on the other hand, cross-functionality is present but not very impactive. John collaborates mostly with disciplinary peers at the unit, and the line manager can follow the work and performance of the employees— except for the two colleagues who are located elsewhere and have a work setting similar to that of Anna. Employees like John need to deliver solutions that can be integrated into the project, and they hence need to be able to interact with specialists from other areas to understand how their solutions can fit. Since they are organized primarily for collaboration among disciplinary peers, an HRM system might need to address the need for T-shaped ability profiles among specialists (Iansiti, 1993), where deep expertise is combined with broad understanding of other areas of expertise. Finally, for Kim, cross-functionality is a crucial characteristic of the work setting. There are no functional lines that serve as home posts for specialists. In work settings like these, the permanent organization consists of cross-functional teams, sometimes grouped in product areas. One key issue in such settings is where HRM resides when there is no functional line organization to tie it to. In our research, we have seen that a team manager is often appointed for a group of teams, assuming HRM responsibilities and facilitating team collaboration (Enberg & Bredin, 2015). Since the employees reporting to such a team manager are not dispersed, this might be a less complex task compared to that of Anna’s line manager. An HRM system would also need to handle the lack of formal organization for specialists. The situation involving constant cross-functional work is similar to that of Anna, but for employees like Kim, the cross-functional team is the permanent setting and there is no organizational backbone for specialist competencies. Moreover, work within the agile teams requires members to broaden their skillsets so that, when needed, they can take on tasks that are not within their primary expertise. An HRM system hence needs to address how to assess and build strategic specialist knowledge for the future when the work setting relies exclusively on cross-functional work and promotes a broadening of skillsets rather than specialization. Previous research has identified a range of emerging alternative solutions for sustaining and developing specialist competencies in agile settings, and

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communities of practice is one such solution (Enberg & Bredin, 2015). Many of the identified solutions were informal and devised at the initiative of specialists themselves. To conclude, cross-functionality is a trait that explains several HRM-­ related challenges that come with projectification. Firstly, cross-­ functionality sets a stage where conventional line-based HRM systems are obsolete and where key roles for delivering HRM practices on an operational level need to be redefined and collaborative practices reinvented (Bredin & Söderlund, 2011b; Keegan & Den Hartog, 2019). Secondly, cross-functional work requires people to have both specialist and generalist competencies. Since cross-functionality can take different forms in different settings and for different groups of employees, an HRM system will need to consider how to sustain and develop both these competencies when some work settings are designed to promote one and some the other. Blended Workforce Projectification is closely intertwined with fundamental shifts in the labour market and nature of work, where the types of employment regimes become more and more diversified (see e.g., Ekstedt, 2019). As argued by Ekstedt (2019, 269), “The work organization is challenged from the inside as well as the outside. It comes in the first hand from project work and in second hand from work performed with loose forms of employment contracts”. The increase in short-term contracts, freelancing, and intermediary agencies is not a direct consequence of projectification alone; there are many reasons behind this development. Regulatory and legislative changes, new opportunities brought by digitalization, and employers’ wishes to reduce costs and increase numerical flexibility are just a few. Nevertheless, it is clear that temporary projects trigger temporary forms of employment, which means that projectification tends to increase the fragmentation of employee groups in terms of employment. The result is a so-called blended workforce, in which regular employees and workers with temporary affiliations and different employment arrangements (e.g., consultants and independent contractors) work side-by-side, integrated into work teams and performing similar jobs (Camuffo & De Stefano, 2016; Davis-Blake et al., 2003). With projectification, organizations tend to become arenas for a blended workforce with multiple forms of employment. This means that firms might need to reconsider their definitions of an ‘employee’ and the

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focus of HRM practices (Swart & Kinnie, 2014), since they “manage people they do not directly employ … Clients become involved in the HRM practices of the employing organization” (Swart & Kinnie, 2014, 292). Researchers have called for more scholarly attention to boundary-­spanning aspects of HRM (Kinnie & Swart, 2019, MacDuffie, 2007), with some even suggesting a move beyond employer-centric conceptions of HRM (Kost et al., 2020). As with temporariness, the blended workforce trait might take different expressions. Let us return to Anna, John, and Kim to learn more about their work settings. Anna is employed by the company she works at. At her unit, 15 colleagues are regular employees and five are consultants. Most of them are hired from an engineering consulting firm that is a strategic partner of Anna’s company. Anna’s manager would like to decrease the number of consultants, but the workload is high and there is a constant shortage of personnel resources, so a couple more consultants will be joining the unit. John’s unit has 14 regular employees and three external consultants. Two of them are independent contractors, and one is hired from an engineering consulting firm. John is an independent contractor, but he has had assignments at this client firm for almost 20 years. He has been offered permanent employment many times, but he is quite happy with the situation as it is. He is better paid as a contractor, he knows that the client needs his knowledge and experience, and he does not need to engage in internal change and development processes or feel the pressure to take on management duties. Kim is employed by the company where he works. One of the six team members is an independent contractor. Within the teamwork, Kim does not experience much difference between team members, but there are some internal activities and meetings that the contractor is not allowed to take part in, for example product strategy meetings. Sometimes, differences between being employed and being a contractor also come up as a topic during coffee breaks.

Anna has several colleagues who are external consultants employed by a consulting firm. They are dispersed among projects, just like the other colleagues at the unit, so the blended workforce trait is also prominent in their project teams. For units such as Anna’s, the blended workforce trait is an indication of the complexities for an HRM system involved in maintaining a workforce that meets the urgent resource needs of projects while

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at the same time building competencies for future projects. Moreover, it means that the HRM system must span boundaries, since some internal HRM practices—such as performance reviews, training, etc.—might be delivered to external consultants, and the client company taps into the consulting firm’s HRM system through evaluations, feedback, and resource dialogues with the consulting manager (Swart & Kinnie, 2014). John has chosen a career as an independent contractor, but the working relationship with his client is anything but temporary. Perpetual contractors like John rely on the high strategic value of their firm-specific knowledge (e.g., Lepak & Snell, 1999) to build long-term relationships with their clients. They have no organizational home post other than the client, and they are almost like regular employees. Hence, contractors like John do not accentuate the blended workforce trait much in the work setting. There are, however, contractual differences in comparison with other colleagues that they work side-by-side with, not least in terms of pay. HRM systems might need to mitigate the risk that regular employees with strategic and firm-specific knowledge will opt to become independent contractors instead, to increase their salary and independence. The blended workforce trait in this case also raises questions regarding the extent to which practices such as employee development dialogues, competence development, and career development should include these quasi-­ permanent employees. Employees like Kim have a work setting where the blended workforce trait is prominent in everyday work. Regular employees and external resources work side-by-side within the team. While there are no apparent differences between team members in everyday work, there are differences in terms of which information they access and which meetings they are allowed to attend. The temporary affiliation of external resources is also somewhat contradictory to striving for stable, agile teams, since some team members are clearly less stable than others. In work settings like Kim’s, the blended workforce trait puts pressure on an HRM system to handle employees having different affiliations and different timeframes in affiliation work side-by-side, and being expected to perform at the same level and build an effective team with high trust. As with the other examples, the blended workforce trait also raises questions regarding who is included in HRM practices and how these are performed (MacDuffie, 2007). To conclude, blended workforce is a trait that fundamentally challenges the conventional idea of HRM systems as being internal and only focusing on regular employees. As seen in the illustrations above, the blended

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workforce trait requires an HRM system to reconsider the definition of an ‘employee’. Depending on how the trait is expressed, an HRM system might need to be responsive to differences between employees working side-by-side and to the boundary-spanning aspects of the HRM system. There is a relatively large stream of research on knowledge workers and boundaryless work (examples of seminal work include Barley & Kunda, 2004; DeFillippi & Arthur, 1994; Garsten, 1999; Saxenian, 1996). Some HRM researchers have recently started a discussion on what boundaryless work means for HRM systems (Kinnie & Swart, 2019; Kost et al., 2020; Swart & Kinnie, 2014) and indicate a need for more studies in this area. Such research would also be highly beneficial for developing the body of knowledge on what projectification means for HRM.

Concluding Discussion In this chapter, I have argued that future research on HRM and projectification needs to go beyond and beneath the concept of ‘project-based organization’ and instead shift its attention to temporariness, cross-­ functionality, and a blended workforce. These are put forth as salient traits of organization and work that are accentuated by projectification, and also are game changers for HRM. The traits are by no means unique to organizations that rely on projects, but projectification tends to augment them and make them coincide. This chapter has illustrated and discussed how these traits affect HRM aspects such as managing the flow of people in and out of projects, competence and career development, assessment and performance management, building strategic competence, and boundary-­ spanning HRM. The chapter has also indicated that the relative salience and the expressions of these traits can vary greatly in different work settings and for different employees. Variations often exist within the same organization and even within the same unit or project team. The discussions hence highlight the need for HRM systems to be not only contextual but also responsive to variations within and across organizations with regard to these traits. I suggest that using these traits as a tool for analysing actual project work settings provides a more fine-grained understanding of contexts for contemporary HRM and guidance in the transformation processes of management and work models driven by projectification. To conclude, there is a bright future for studies on HRM and projectification—there are many issues to address, as the landscape of work and

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organization is increasingly about projects and temporary forms of work. Exploring the intersection between HRM and temporariness, cross-­ functionality, and blended workforce offers a range of fertile paths forward for future studies, within both project management and HRM research.

Further Reading This chapter is based on qualitative research conducted between 2003 and 2017 and published in a number of scientific articles, books, and book chapters. I will here particularly mention the PhD thesis Human Resource Management in project-based organisations—challenges, changes and capabilities (Bredin, K, 2008a,  Linköping University), the books HRM in Project-Based Organizations: The HR Quadriad framework (Bredin, K. and J.  Söderlund, 2011b,  Houndmills, Basingstoke Hampshire: Palgrave Macmillan) and Sustaining and Developing Disciplinary Expertise in Project-Based Organizations: Balanced and Integrated Solutions (Enberg, C and K.  Bredin, 2015,  Newtown Square PA: Project Management Institute, Inc.), and the book chapter “Knowledge integration at work: Individual project competence” (Bredin, K. et al., 2017, in F.  Tell, C.  Berggren, S.  Brusoni, & A.  Van de Ven (Eds.), Managing Knowledge Integration Across Boundaries (pp.  206–226). New  York: Oxford University Press). Acknowledgements  I would like to thank Jonas Söderlund for collaborating on most of the research that this chapter draws on and for valuable comments on a previous draft of this chapter. I would also like to thank Cecilia Enberg for collaborating on one of the empirical studies that this chapter draws on.

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CHAPTER 8

The Road to Isolation of Public Health Policy Projects: Consequences of Demarcating the Project by Its Task, Time, Team and Transition Erik Söderberg

Introduction Projects are used with the intention to solve organisational challenges, such as to work across boundaries to tackle complex problems of government policy implementation and service delivery (Hodgson et al., 2019). Within the public sector, project funding often serves as a mean to target areas of development and increase innovation (Jacobsen, 2022; Jensen et  al., 2019). Projects are also widely introduced in the management of public health issues, which has traditionally been characterised by a firm belief in top-down management. An example of the top-down

E. Söderberg (*) School of Public Administration, University of Gothenburg, Gothenburg, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_8

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characteristic within the health sector is that policy decisions and centrally developed recommendations and guidelines are intended to meet challenges with lifestyle-related diseases and improve the health of the general population (Statens Folkhälsoinstitut, 2013:03). This is obvious not only in Sweden but also globally, where many public health actors implementing policies neglect the fact that converting scientific results into public health programmes is a complex social process (Breton & De Leeuw, 2011). However, a reason for this more traditional top-down view of management might be that public health comes from the tradition of healthcare, where the field of implementation science emerged from the field of evidence-­based medicine and the frustration over difficulties in getting the everyday decision-makers, such as doctors and other health professionals, to follow knowledge-based guidelines (Garpenby, 2010). Often, the implementation focuses on compliance with central decisions and guidelines, as opposed to the bottom-up perspectives, which provide more space for local reinterpretations of central policy decisions (Lipsky, 2010). Management through policies, starting from national objectives, appears to be a natural point of departure for public health performed in regions and municipalities. Through the policies, the rhetorical message from politicians is that public health is important. Who does not want to improve the health of the population? In a global context, there are numerous examples in the health literature, where the concept of policy is not defined at all or is merely seen as ‘the law’ or ‘plan’. Health promotion tends to materialise public policy and take it to be the only representation of the policy and not as an abstraction (Breton & De Leeuw, 2011; Bernier & Clavier, 2011). Rather than management through polices, it becomes important to understand the strategy by going to professionals on the ground, responsible for most of the strategic initiatives (Mintzberg, 2012). Besides a top-down perspective, public health interventions are often organised in projects with the aim to improve the health of the population. Typical examples include to implement activities that are supposed to increase physical activity or promote healthy eating habits. However, while public health projects are situated in various organisational contexts, they regularly need to involve different administrative levels in the welfare sector, such as the state, regions and municipalities (Burke & Morley, 2016) with different professional identities, interests and power structures (von Danwitz, 2018).

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Consequently, public health projects need to be integrated, not demarcated, into the permanent organisation. The traditional definition of the boundaries constituting a project—task, time, team and transition—has led to projects being viewed as separated islands with little interaction with their environment (Engwall, 2003; Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Söderlund & Sydow, 2019). Lundin and Söderholm (1995) described these four basic concepts as a way to show how various boundaries act to demarcate projects from its environment. This definition, and common understanding of what a project is, has also served as an explanation to why it is difficult to transfer a project’s results to permanent organising (Sjöblom, 2009; Forssell et al., 2013; Fred, 2018). A reason for the difficulties can be that the policy does not lead to a changed mindset of actors in the permanent organisation, for example, the ideology the policy is based on does not transfer to the permanent organisation. Thus, a key question is how a project can balance isolation and interactions to achieve its intentions. This chapter aims to show how the common understanding and definition of a project often leads to failures in policy-implementing projects. Specifically, this chapter will explain why the objectives of public health projects have difficulties in integrating public health aspects into permanent organising.

The Challenge of Balancing Between Isolation and Interaction in Public Health Projects While ordinary activities in the public administration are associated with routine, hierarchy and stability in a cyclical and repeated way, the project organisation stands in contrast with a logic of discontinuity, flexibility and innovation (Hodgson et  al., 2019). Within this context, public health activities are supposed to cut across organisational boundaries to tackle complex problems; however, at the same time, they are situated in contexts that traditionally handle issues within boundaries. Not surprisingly, projects are widely used to organise public health interventions and to gain temporary resources to be able to work across these boundaries. However, despite the growing research interest and increased societal importance of projects, our progress in understanding the integration of projects into organisational or even wider social contexts is still limited. If context is addressed, the project is often treated as “a black box”, with little concern for how interior processes in the project interact with the

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wider context (Söderlund & Sydow, 2019). In addition, there is no discussion of how the increased projectification of the field of public health can affect the public health interventions. Most of the studies focusing on the management of public health at the local level focus more on finding barriers and enablers for interventions targeting lifestyle-related diseases (Weiss et al., 2016). Despite the identified challenges to manage complex problems in the form of short-term projects, the use of project organisations tends to increase (Jacobsen, 2022; Jacobsson & Jałocha, 2021). Fred (2015) even describes public health as the projectification of an entire policy field because temporary projects are used as the organisational solution to public health issues. For example, a common conclusion is that if only politicians and professionals would have the right knowledge and competence for developing and implementing concrete health-promoting action, then the municipality would get the financial and political support needed (Weiss et  al., 2016). In addition, public health projects are often more ideologically driven compared to projects in an industrial or commercial context. This comes with consequences regarding the adaptation between temporary and permanent, and the complication of managing these public projects is not sufficiently understood (Voros Fregolente et al., 2022). In order to achieve organisational change in the short run, followed by an institutional change in the long run with public health projects, it is important that the understanding of the boundaries constituting a project— task, time, team and transition—be discussed from the perspective of integration, instead of the often preferred, isolation. This will allow for an understanding of how these boundaries are affected between project and permanent organising.

Why the Boundaries Constituting a Project Can Lead to Demarcation and Thus Isolation of Public Health Projects Lundin and Söderholm (1995) describe four basic concepts to show how boundaries associated with these concepts act to demarcate projects from its environment. These concepts can be seen as criteria to demarcate the project from regular activities ongoing in the permanent organisation, which is supposed to be affected by the policy intervention. Although much has happened since they launched their theory, these criteria are still

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a foundation for project research and often used as explanations to challenges with project implementation (Jacobsen, 2022). However, as opposed to projects being viewed as a “task that must be accomplished” and as demarcated towards the environment (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995, 441), the focus needs to be on understanding the organisational context in which most of the public health interventions take place. Within these often bureaucratic and since long institutionalised contexts, such as schools and social services, the goals of the project are not readily accepted and do not influence the permanent organisation (Godenhjelm, 2013; Godenhjelm et al., 2019). In addition, context is also highlighted, together with dimensions like time and strategy, as important to consider achieving change with projects in the public sector (Jensen et  al., 2019). Project integration can be understood as a continuous process linking the project to its context, which involves the re-embedding of the concepts constituting a project—task, time, team and transition—into present contexts of project organising (Manning, 2008; Jensen et  al., 2019; Söderberg & Liff, 2023). Another characteristic of public health projects is the demand for longer-­term perspectives in terms of outcomes, in contrast to the inherent temporariness of projects (Marsden et al., 2012). In addition, the innovation from the project needs to balance the more bureaucratic structure in the permanent organisation, which can create temporal tensions between short-term versus long-term goals (Kim et al., 2019). Further, while project studies often focus on relations within the project team, the team’s ability to interact and involve actors in the project’s environment is also important (Jensen et al., 2013). Finally, transition can be understood as ‘the actual transformation in terms of the distinctive change between “before” and “after”’ (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995, 443). Transition puts focus on the final outcome, which the project must achieve within its time frame. For projects operating in the same context dealing with coordination matters between the cooperation organisations, for example, to install a new method of working (IT-project) or large-scale construction projects, it is not as important for these kinds of projects to manage the wider social context, to have an ideological impact (Ligthart et al., 2016; von Danwitz, 2018). In contrast, public policymaking projects need to consider the wider social context to be relevant for long-term policy implementation (Godenhjelm et  al., 2019). Further, public health projects are different from construction projects in that they also try to have an ideological

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impact, for example, inspiring more healthy eating habits or increased physical activity (Söderberg & Liff, 2023). Consequently, public health projects need to be more oriented towards including an ongoing interpretation of the context and beyond the idea that projects are only influenced by its context (Näsänen & Vanharanta, 2016; Vuorinen & Martinsuo, 2018; Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020; Söderberg & Liff, 2023. Rather, these projects also intend to affect and change the context and behaviours of the actors in the permanent organisation. This is also in line with the significance of contextual dimensions (Godenhjelm et al., 2019) and the call for more research on how projects relate to various, more permanent, contexts in which they are embedded (Bos-de Vos et al., 2022; Söderberg & Liff, 2023). The contextual dimensions are essential for ideologically driven public health projects to balance between isolation and interaction to achieve its intentions. Next, I briefly present the study and thereafter analyse and discuss my field material starting from the boundaries constituting a project to explain, in relation to these four boundaries, why public health projects have difficulties to integrate public health aspects into permanent organising.

Presentation of the Study of a Public Health Intervention Conducted in Two Primary Schools The public health project in this chapter was a collaborative project between a regional government organisation and a municipal organisation. The aim (why) of the project was to reduce the percentage of obese and overweight children, which was approved in an agreement between the region and the municipality. The project’s main objective, what, is described in the agreement between the Purchasing board and the Providing board to ‘promote physical activity and healthy eating habits among children in primary schools and act as a link between the focus of medical treatments in healthcare and the health promotion perspective in the municipality’. The project was approved by the municipality. The project’s how was not developed in detail in the agreement but expressed as ‘the project team needs to develop a process that includes both general and specific achievements’. The study followed an embedded case study design (Yin, 2015), following two primary schools in the municipal organisation. The schools were of average size, comprising around 350 students and employees. The

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idea was to compare two similar schools engaged in implementing the same project, with the same project organisation. The data is based on earlier studies and consists of interviews, observations, field note documentation from meetings and activities as well as text documents, which illustrate the course of the project at different organisational levels during the three years. Specifically, 17 interviews were conducted with 28 respondents. In addition to documents and interviews, the meetings of the project steering and project leader team were observed. In total, these teams had 22 meetings, lasting between 45 and 120 minutes during the three years. While studying the project teams, the formation of activities at the local level in the schools was documented by the operational project manager, according to a developed template. This documentation of activities in the primary schools mainly focused on capturing the process and content of the meeting. Altogether, 67 meetings and activities took place (28 in school A and 39 in school B) to develop and implement the project at schools.

Expressions and Explanations of the Difficulties in Integrating Public Health Projects into Permanent Organising Task: The Isolation of the Project’s Task Strengthens the Top-Down Perspective The first year of the project was all about setting up and discussing the infrastructure for the project, for example, recruiting project staff and participating schools. The aim (why) and the main objective (what) of the project that were politically decided did not seem to guide the project manager on how to initiate and manage the project: –– Well, it is difficult to know what we are supposed to achieve; it is, and has been, very unclear (project manager). The politically decided task and time frame can be important to isolate the task and allocate resources to get an intervention going in the bureaucratic structure of the permanent organisation. Yet, at the same time, it can also strengthen the top-down perspective and, as in this case, result in project managers and participants at the schools who do not feel involved or

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committed, meaning that they do not contribute their time and expertise to implement the project’s intentions. Although this is a traditional way of working in politically controlled organisations, namely the political committee stating the aim and goals and leaving the how to the local level, it seems to be somewhat more challenging with time-limited projects compared to more ongoing and regular activities in the permanent organisation. Rather than centrally developed recommendations and guidelines are intended to guide and respond to challenges concerning the health of the population, it seemed to be important in the project to involve the project manager at an early stage, as well as consider the interaction and negotiations between actors in the policy process. These interactions between actors in different organisational contexts were shown to have implications for the project design and the time required for the possible implementation of the project’s task. The work to co-create project goals and communicate and clarify project intentions in a project’s initial phase (Liu et al., 2019; Zwikael & Meredith, 2019) needs sufficient time to enable an adaptation to the context by each actor. Time: Limited Project Time and Different Time Frames Pose Challenges for the Interactions Between Temporary and Permanent Organising This project, like many other public health projects, had a long-lasting ambition, namely, to improve the health of the population, involving multiple organisations. The project organisation was based in the regional organisation, and the primary schools, as the target for the interventions, were in the municipal organisation. The long-lasting ambition was a contrast to the normal, albeit relatively short, time frame of the project, especially considering that the time to set up the project and its organisation consumed nearly one out of three years of the project time. In addition, the different time frames, regarding the school year from August to June compared to the annual goals and deadlines in the regional organisation, made the temporal alignment more challenging. Furthermore, the different goals and strategies, as well as local conditions in each school, made it important, but also challenging, for the project managers and staff in the project to connect the intervention to ongoing activities within each school. Even though the headteachers were happy to take part in the project and expressed it as being “well aligned with our commitment to work on health and sustainable development”,

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they also highlighted the difficulties with “all great projects” that are supposed to be carried out in the school environment. In fact, as the project developed, this turned out to be a difficult balancing act—the project being receptive to local conditions and motivation in each school, and still maintaining its innovative working methods in relation to physical activity and healthy eating habits (Söderberg, 2020). Team: Focusing on Relational Processes and Including Actors Outside the Project Team Is Important to Carry Project Intentions Forward In contrast to the other boundaries constituting a project, namely task and time, the team focuses on individuals and often the relations and competences within the project team. However, the results of the public health project pointed to the importance of being able to create and work with relational processes outside the project team. This is in line with that it is essential to expand the organisational context beyond actors directly involved in the project (Godenhjelm et al., 2019). Further, the work in the project to carry project intentions forward involved relational processes. For example, the project managers tried to facilitate collaboration and work through boundaries by setting up teams with teachers and kitchen staff. The project managers’ competence to work with questions concerning the different culture and motivation at each school and different professional boundaries seemed essential: –– In each of the teams with teachers, there are people who have a strong interest in health work and appreciate the meetings, but there is also an atmosphere that makes the less motivated not really have the strength to continue to follow-up on agreed efforts and initiated processes. (Annual report from the project) Thus, the composition of the project teams needs to focus more on team members’ ability to work with such processes—rather than choosing members based on their different fields of knowledge. This focus on team members and their competences within the team contributes to demarcation issues towards the surrounding organisations (Stjerne et al., 2019), rather than focusing on relational processes and actors outside the team— which can make it easier to integrate the public health project into the local context.

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Transition: The Project Actors Need to Be Able to Interpret the Consequences of the Wider Social Context While task, time and team specify and help to demarcate the project from its surrounding environment, transition focuses on the output of the project and the transformation that hopefully happens within the given time for the project. In this study, integrating the project was challenging at both schools, which was characterised by the headteachers’ expression about the amount of work they were willing to put into the project: –– We think it’s good if it doesn’t become such a big job for the teachers/staff; more like just a thought that you know what it is and that you know why because otherwise, it can become a bit overwhelming, and affect their own health and well-being. (Headteacher School A) Within a public context, it is argued that the initial phase is crucial in determining the outcome of the project (see for instance Godenhjelm et al., 2015; Söderberg, 2020) but also the activities following the termination of the project, such as knowledge transfer and indicators for measuring outcome (Godenhjelm et al., 2015). As Bakker (2010) points out, there are few studies based on the concept of transition, which can be related to the difficulties of describing a project as separated from its context. In this study, the interpretation of the context is essential to understand the results of the project. Despite the same politically decided policy intentions and the same project manager, the project developed in different directions at the schools. This indicates that the actors interacted with and constructed their understanding of the context. For example, it was easier to align the project’s aim and intentions with the kitchen staff in one school compared to teachers in the other school. This was done in different steps, where the project manager, by introducing concrete instrumental actions to the kitchen environment, like noise-reducing material placed on walls and floors, could create a narrative for healthier eating habits and also for health ideological aspects. This was in contrast to the other primary school, where the work started with health ideological aspects, by setting up regular meetings with teachers with the aim to discuss, support and inspire their work to engender healthier eating habits and increased physical

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activity in their classes. The transformation and change were more obvious in the school focusing the kitchen environment; thus, it seemed easier to influence the ideology, starting from instrumental aspects rather than from ideological aspects. This indicates not only the project actors’ ability to interpret the wider social context (Godenhjelm et  al., 2019), but also more specifically how actors need to relate to different contexts in which the project is embedded (Bos-de Vos et al., 2022; Söderberg & Liff, 2023.

Conclusions This chapter aimed to show how the common understanding and definition of a project often leads to failures in policy-implementing projects. Taken together, the contributions showed that by demarcating policy-­ implementing projects based on the boundaries of task, time, team and transition, the project can run a significant risk of being isolated, instead of integrated, thus not having the expected impact. Although several years have passed since Lundin and Söderholm (1995) launched their theory on the boundaries constituting a project, the four basic concepts have been and still are important foundations for project research. In fact, what they predicted and stated already then, namely that ‘the basic concepts are almost axiomatic and provide a foundation upon which any discussion of temporary organizations has to rest’ (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995, 450), still holds true. However, almost 20 years later, they reminded us that ‘every and each theory should be considered as a child of its time, meaning that theories are inspired by the circumstances under which they are developed’ (Lundin & Söderholm, 2013, 588). For example, the idea of what a project is differs in various contexts. What they point to is something that strengthens the importance of reconsidering the effects of established theories under new circumstances, just like in this case of policy-implementing public health projects in relation to the common definition of projects. Yet, to learn from the findings from this public health intervention, there are some conclusions to consider on our view of projects, to increase the chances of integrating public health aspects in permanent organising. First, rather than transition, integration seems to be important in projects dealing with an ideological impact to understand how policymaking actors can interpret the different professional contexts as part of the project. For example, the study showed how project actors act to influence the context, not only through ideological efforts, but also through

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instrumental efforts, like concrete actions to the kitchen environment. The different outcomes of the projects in the primary schools were related to the policymaking actors’ dynamic interplay with the context, which follows the results of earlier studies (Näsänen & Vanharanta, 2016; Vuorinen & Martinsuo, 2018; Martinsuo & Geraldi, 2020; Söderberg & Liff, 2023). Given that public sector projects are more influenced by politics and ideology (Lundin et al., 2015), this places special requirements on the policy actors involved in project performance. For example, the study showed how the organising of public health projects runs the risk of demarcating themselves from the organisational context they need to influence. Rather, the capacity of policy actors to work with the integration of both instrumental and ideological perspectives seems important for long-term policy implementation. This contributes to knowledge on the effects of context specific management approaches on the project’s outcomes (Bos-de Vos et al., 2022), rather than transition as a concept highlighted in earlier research. Second, the time-related boundaries of projects overlook the temporal aspects of the fact that projects need to be oriented to the experience of the actors before the project’s start. Furthermore, the actors need to consider the project as relevant, not only to previous experience but also to present challenges and future visions (Söderberg, 2020). In addition, the time-limited task stands in contrast to the demand for a long-term perspective (Marsden et al., 2012), which is important to be able to improve, for example, increased physical activity or healthy eating habits. The boundaries of time and task also relate to the project-based funding, creating project-based organisations, and the lack of funding initiatives after the project end (Voros Fregolente et al., 2022). For example, the logics behind the concepts constituting a project can in many ways be seen as opposite to the logics constituting the permanent organisation. For instance, the project’s limited time frame compared to survival in the long run, or the project’s focus on transition, compared to the focus on production, in the permanent organisation (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). Finally, the contribution together showed how the basic concepts that make up a project can and need to be understood in different ways, depending on the context in which the project operates. The specific- and time-framed task, combined with a team of experts within the policy field, contributes to a high degree of demarcation towards the organisation that is supposed to be influenced by the project. However, the concepts serve well as a foundation for discussion, even though they need to be filled with another content, to guide the action for public health projects.

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Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2013 and 2023 and published in three  different papers (Söderberg & Wikström, 2015; Söderberg, 2020; Söderberg and Liff, 2023. The PhD thesis was defended in June 2023 at the School of Public Administration, Gothenburg University. For reading related to theoretical ideas on the boundaries constituting a project presented in this chapter, I recommend the seminal paper of Lundin RA and Söderholm A. 1995. A theory of the temporary organization. Scandinavian Journal of Management 11(4): 437–455. Further, in the PhD thesis and published papers, boundary work and framing strategies are used as concepts to analyse the process of integrating a temporary health promotion project in more permanent organisational contexts. Here, I recommend Goffman, E. 1974. Frame Analysis: An Essay on the Organization of Experience. Harper & Row, New York, NY and Langley A, Lindberg K, Mørk BE, et al. 2019. Boundary work among groups, occupations, and organizations: From cartography to process Academy of Management Annals 13(2): 704–736.

References Bakker, R. M. (2010). Taking stock of temporary organizational forms: A systematic review and research agenda. International Journal of Management Reviews, 12(4), 466–486. Bernier, N. F., & Clavier, C. (2011). Public health policy research: Making the case for a political science approach. Health Promotion International, 26(1), 109–116. Bos-de Vos, M., Deken, F., & Kleinsmann, M. (2022). Navigating multiple contexts to integrate system transformation programs. International Journal of Project Management, 40(3), 290–311. Breton, E., & De Leeuw, E. (2011). Theories of the policy process in health promotion research: a review. Health Promotion International, 26(1), 82–90. Burke, C. M., & Morley, M. J. (2016). On temporary organizations: A review, synthesis and research agenda. Human Relations, 69, 1235–1258. Engwall, M. (2003). No project is an island: Linking projects to history and context. Research Policy, 32(5), 789–808. Forssell, R., Fred, M., & Hall, P. (2013). Projekt som det politiska samverkanskravets uppsamlingsplatser: en studie av Malmö stads projektverksamheter [Projectification as a response to political demands for collaboration: A study of projects in the City of Malmö]. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17(2), 37–59.

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CHAPTER 9

Interfaces in Project-Based Innovation Governance: Can Hackathons Hack into Policy Processes? Peeter Vihma

Introduction Digitalization is profoundly changing how we work, innovate, and organize in various fields of life. As a part of this trend, organizational forms such as hackathons, accelerators, and incubators, originally applied to develop digital solutions in the business realm, are increasingly applied in the public sector to tackle societal challenges, including those posed by transition towards sustainability (Kangro & Lepik, 2022). These dynamic, fast-paced, and focused ways of organizing are often interlinked to form open innovation systems. The aim of innovation systems is to creatively bring together dispersed expertise on a specific project and quickly advance from an innovative idea to its application in policies or practices. I argue

P. Vihma (*) University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland Tallinn University of Technology, Tallinn, Estonia e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_9

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that this digitally inspired innovation system is a case of projectified governance the functioning and consequences of which is still not fully understood. Especially salient are the connectivity challenges emphasized in the projectified governance literature (Godenhjelm et al., 2019) because projects conceived at hackathons and developed in accelerators are expected to inform and influence policies and practices through interaction with permanent organizations such as ministries, and they are expected to do so very quickly. What makes this interaction difficult is the highly conflicting values, goals, and operational logics of organizations involved. In this chapter I analyse hackathons and accelerators as interfaces between projects and long-term processes. Interfaces structure interaction between the projects and the permanent policy actors (Vihma & Wolf, 2022). I argue that attention to interfaces is crucial for understanding to what extent projects in the public sphere can induce institutional change because interfaces regulate three central challenges of innovation governance: legitimacy of problem definitions and solutions, proximity needed for creativity and the integration of knowledge, and flexibility of knowledge management. In this chapter I ask “how do interfaces consisting of hackathons and accelerators answer to these challenges and thus shape the potential of projects to induce institutional change?” The answer relies on a case study of an Estonian forestry-related hackathon project that developed a solution for buying carbon and biodiversity offsets from local forest owners. Analysis of innovation in the field of sustainability is especially fruitful because it makes the inter-organizational conflicts highly visible. I analyse how interfaces shaped the potential of the project to influence Estonian environmental policy. The results suggest that although digital-­ inspired project governance tools are indeed capable of producing promising disruptive ideas, the eventual outcome of the project depends on how interfaces position them vis-à-vis the larger policy network.

Digital Optimism in Project-Based Innovation Systems Using digital-inspired tools can be seen as an extension of the project-­ based approach which builds on the optimism and hype of the digital success (Richterich, 2019). Organizing project-based innovation with the help of hackathons (stemming from the words “hack” and “marathon”) first emerged in the software development in the IT-business realm of the

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mid-2000s. Hackathons are intense collaborative workshops where people with different professional backgrounds work on a project of their choosing for a defined, usually very short period (e.g. 48 hours) to produce a prototype or a working solution (Kollwitz & Dinter, 2019). The attractiveness of this method of organizing innovation lies in bringing together a variety of expertise, engaging complex issues in a practical, focused manner, and quickly creating new business opportunities for existing or new organizations. Hackathons are praised for their flexibility and openness to ideas, which are seen as key to disruptive innovation (Kivimaa et al., 2021). Hackathons rarely operate on their own, but are part of a holistic, open innovation system (sometimes referred to as an ecosystem) (Bogers et al., 2017; Soltanifar et  al., 2021). This system consists of an array of interlinked programs, temporary and semi-permanent organizations such as incubators and accelerators (Pustovrh et al., 2020). The aim of this system is to provide support to the project conceived at a hackathon or elsewhere until it is institutionalized. For example, accelerators are programs that help promising project ideas to “create their products or services, identify promising market segments and obtain the necessary resources—including both financial and human ones” (Szczukiewicz & Makowiec, 2021, 4). The idea behind the “open” innovation system (compared to a “closed” one) is that instead of secrecy and compartmentalization, outsider involvement and exchange of ideas are encouraged as beneficial for creativity (Bogers et al., 2017). Hence, the organizational network functions as a linking mechanism—conceptualized here as interfaces—between “crazy” project ideas and their subsequent institutionalization. Civic or social hackathons are meant to tackle societal challenges and develop public services (Johnson & Robinson, 2014; Kangro & Lepik, 2022). The idea is to treat societal problems as technical, harness the focused energy and cooperation of participants, and develop novel solutions fast in the same way that has brought success in the field of IT. While the focus in the public sector innovation systems is often on software and other IT-based solutions (in some cases, government agencies allow the use of their databases in exchange of new digital solutions (Johnson & Robinson, 2014), this is not a strict rule and largely relies on the specific expertise of participants. Compared to the business realm, open innovation in the public sector is more problematic because of the contradictory values and operational logics of diverse parties engaged in the open innovation network. The reason behind this is that innovation in the public sector differs from

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innovation in the market economy (Köhler et al., 2019; Schot & Geels, 2008). While market forces can institutionalize promising new inventions through consumer demand, public sector innovation often goes “against the grain” of the guiding forces of supply and demand. This elasticity of demand is especially visible in transition to sustainability (e.g. Chang et al., 2019). When ideas need to be attached to the policy cycle, it creates friction between top-down and bottom-up inputs (Mergel & Desouza, 2013). In other words, the public sector innovation necessarily includes shifts in the policy beliefs and network. The role of government should therefore extend beyond fixing market failures and must take an active role in producing new knowledge and solutions (Karo & Kattel, 2016). As a result, connectivity and interaction between different parts of the system in order to induce policy learning (Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013; Heikkila & Gerlak, 2013) is the ever more immediate concern. In the following, I will describe these theoretical challenges further.

Interfaces Between Projects and Permanent Organizations In order to understand the potential of institutional change using projects, it is important to consider how permanent organizations interact with cross-sectorial and multi-level projects in order to solve complex, wicked problems. This is done through interfaces, the linking mechanisms that structure interaction (Vihma & Wolf, 2022). The concept of interfaces has been used to study the interaction with a project team within an organization (Morris, 1983). However, this concept deserves a wider application, considering the significance of inter-organizational interaction in public sector innovation (de Vries et al., 2014; Faissal Bassis & Armellini, 2018). Governing interaction is central in the theories of collaborative (Ansell & Gash, 2018), experimentalist (Sabel & Simon, 2011), and adaptive (Chaffin et  al., 2014) governance. Parallel to this, knowledge management literature pays significant attention to how new, innovative knowledge moves within organizations, especially in project-heavy organizations (Bakker et al., 2011; Costa & Monteiro, 2014; Nonaka, 1994). Inspired by these considerations, Vihma and Wolf (2022) have developed the concept of interfaces to allow a more detailed analysis of the embeddedness of projects in policy networks. Interfaces are simultaneously part of organizing principles and the structure of the policy network

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(Morris, 1983; Sjöblom et al., 2016). Interfaces are created through formal organizing; for example, when a parent organization creates a hackathon program, it lays down a set of rules that formalizes requirements for a project application, management, funding, and deliverables. Interfaces are also created by organizational structure, that is, through assigning people in specific roles. Additionally, interfaces are created informally, through practices. For example, while certain knowledge management requirements may be prescribed by a program’s guideline, participants’ decisions shape if and how these are put to action. Earlier literature cited above suggests that interfaces face three interactional challenges between projects and permanent organizations: there needs to be legitimacy between policy actors involved in the process, projects need to achieve suitable cognitive and organizational distance that allows both creativity and integration of knowledge, and the linkages between actors need to be flexible to channel highly specialized knowledge into policies and other institutions. Firstly, the main aim of hackathons and accelerators is to foster creative projects. Tight administrative rules, ruling out certain pathways, succumbing to oversight and control is detrimental to creativity (Boschma, 2005). However, at the same time, learning and making use of the novel creation requires exactly the opposite—tight geographical, organizational, and cognitive engagement (Bakker et  al., 2011). Hence, studies have shown the importance of dynamic proximity—being open to innovation during the beginning of the project and engaging closely during the later phases of the project (Vihma & Wolf, 2022). Especially the latter period is crucial, because institutional inertia offers resistance to change (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). In many otherwise experimentalist projects the final “re-coupling” phase is significantly under-emphasized (Godenhjem, 2013). This is arguably the gap that accelerator programs and similar support mechanisms aim to fill. Second, projects require legitimacy (Suchman, 1995). Legitimacy is crucial in all phases of the project, from defining the problem to acquiring resources for the development of the initial idea and learning from project results in the later phases. The latter is especially importantly in the public sphere, because for policy makers to learn, the “teacher” should be “certified” (Dunlop & Radaelli, 2013), that is, there should be some structural credibility for the conveyor’s new information. Governance theories suggest that credibility can be established by creating an arena for deliberation and exercising facilitative leadership (Ansell & Gash, 2008, 2018). In the

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case of a project this would entail creation of a steering body consisting of personnel from both project and permanent organization. Entrepreneurial theories stress the importance of strategies and skills of entrepreneurs (i.e. project managers) in the process of legitimation (Drori & Honig, 2013; François & Philippart, 2019). As a method, co-creation has been described as suitable for balancing old and new, or user- and producer-side knowledge (Osborne et  al., 2016; Torfing et  al., 2019). Thus, a significant aspect of interfaces are the legitimation mechanisms that can either support or hinder deliberation, and benefit either adherence to existing institutional norms or openness to new norms. Third, when a project creates new knowledge, it is often highly specific and needs to be applied quickly; otherwise, it is easily lost. To complicate things, creative engagement is rarely a straight-forward process, and discoveries may diverge from prior expectations (Gong & Janssen, 2012). Since project partners have little time to develop informal relationships based on trust, they must rely extensively on formal rules and agreements (Bodin, 2017). Therefore, interfaces need to provide enough flexibility to react to changes. Flexibility of knowledge management is part of the absorptive capacity of an organization (Costa & Monteiro, 2014). An important dimension of this is the specificity of expectations that is projected towards the temporary organization (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). This refers to how narrow (technical) or wide (fundamental) results are expected from the project. Further tensions arise from different operational logics in knowledge management. The hierarchical bureaucracy has clear vertical power relations aimed for stability and predictability (Michels & Meijer, 2008). This can run contradictory to temporary organizational forms that horizontally cut across sectorial and organizational boundaries. Post-bureaucratic principles that empower employees to take decisions and encourage horizontal interaction within an organization can support flexibility (Hodgson, 2004). Also, intermediaries between projects and organizations influence the flexibility of knowledge sharing (Kimble et al., 2010). These knowledge management considerations further indicate how deeply embedded in organizations projects actually should be.

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A Case Study of a Carbon and Biodiversity Offsetting Project in Estonia In the remainder of this chapter, how interfaces regulate legitimacy, proximity, and flexibility will be analysed in a case study of a carbon and biodiversity offsetting project (pseudonym Offsetting Project) that emerged in a state-organized hackathon (pseudonym WoodHack) in Estonia. This allows for understanding how the potential of the project to induce lasting shifts in Estonian environmental policy depended on the interfaces that the project had with permanent organizations and ongoing processes. Data for this case study is collected using interviews (N = 9) and document analysis. Estonia offers an excellent context for the study of public sector hackathons for two reasons. First, Estonia is known for its digital success story (Kattel & Mergel, 2019). It has successfully implemented a range of e-governance tools and systems into its public administration, and digitalization is often seen as a precondition for the good functioning of the society. Partly based on the well-functioning digital infrastructure, Estonia has a lively scene of start-ups and other temporary or semi-permanent organizations focused on—mostly digital—innovation. While hackathons were first used in the business sector, they are now increasingly adapted to tackle societal challenges. There are no statistics available for hackathons, but arguably the first public sector event (“DigitalState hackathon #1”) was organized in 2019, and several others, on various topics and often crossing sectoral boundaries (e.g. circular economy, future of cities, future of sea), followed. Hackathons form part of a larger innovation system, curated by the Ministry of Economic Affairs and Communications, as the Ministry outsources organizing hackathons and hosts its own accelerator program. Second, carbon and especially biodiversity offsetting are intensely debated solutions for engaging the private sector in conservation and climate change mitigation efforts (Josefsson et al., 2021). Also in Estonia, offsetting and forest policy in general is a field of criss-crossing relationships of conflict and collaboration (Vihma & Toikka, 2021). While sustainability concerns are on the forefront of public debate, importantly related to the Green Transition policy objective of the EU, the timber industry has a big influence on the policy objectives. Therefore, while in rhetoric, political debate supports sustainable use of forests, felling volumes in Estonia have more than doubled since 2008, and environmental

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organizations are concerned by the lack of innovation towards sustainability. To this backdrop, a series of hackathons (WoodHacks) were organized with the aim of producing “efficient and sustainable solutions for maintaining and increasing the value of our forests.” Challenges of Dynamic Proximity At the first WoodHack, teams were given three focal topics: digitalization in the construction of wooden houses; sustainability, circular economy, and efficiency in forestry and wood industry; and new solutions in wood processing, design, and architecture. Creativity was encouraged. Mentors at the hackathon were professionals from various fields, supporting the variety of approaches. The Offsetting Project stood out because neither offsetting nor privately financed conservation existed in Estonia previously. As they explained: While most of the other teams were trying to build carry-on homes and other things that you make out of timber, we said that the most valuable part of wood is when it is a forest. Everybody was like: Wow, that’s a very innovative way of looking at the trees! /.../ We have to find ways how to compensate forest owners for not clearcutting forests, because that’s the only way that we can actually create systematic change. /.../ It would be something that could be tied to the entire economy. /…/ We won this hackathon because people were actually very intrigued by this new concept. (Offsetting Project, Team Leader)

Note how the project idea was distant from both existing forestry practices and policies showing potential for disruptive innovation (Kivimaa et al., 2021), and their ambition for systemic change. As part of the prize for the winner, the team was offered the support of the Ministry of Economy-run Accelerator program, which functioned as an interface between the winning team and the public sector organization of their choice—the Ministry of Environment. The cooperation agreement between them was open-­ ended and, according to the climate specialist at the ministry, “built on experimenting and exploring.” However, the enthusiasm of the initial cooperation soon cooled off. Part of the difficulty in cooperation was organizational distance. While the Accelerator program was designed to provide proximity to the Ministry, this was not fully achieved. Instead, Ministry directed the team to cooperate with one of the subordinate organizations, pseudonym the Agency,

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and the Ministry and the Offsetting team distanced themselves from each other. The reason behind this was that the Ministry had recently supported the Agency to hire a person to develop a comprehensive plan for the carbon market in Estonia. It was assumed that this person would cooperate and absorb the potential of the Offsetting initiative. However, the Agency was not interested in outside interference. While in theory the carbon management solution offered by the Agency was open to initiatives by non-state actors such as Offsetting Project, in practice the Agency saw the project as an unnecessary interference in their work. When the proximity issues emerged between the Biodiversity project and Ministry, the leader of the Accelerator program attempted to intermediate. He recognized that attention was required from the leadership of the Ministry. However, admittedly inexperienced in this kind of arbitrage, his efforts did not produce significant change, especially because the necessity for closer communication was discovered in the later stages of the Accelerator program. What further complicated the interaction was that the Accelerator program was part of the Ministry of Economic Affairs while the beneficiary was the Ministry of Environment. The problem of “siloed” public sector organizations emerged (c.f. Lukszo et al., 2021), and in the words of the head of Offsetting Project, this was the “lethal component in the mix.” The two important Ministries had no formal agreement for cooperation, and the communication relied on informal accords which were unable to mitigate tensions in such a short time span. The attempts to engage the project with the Ministry more closely failed. Hackathons and Accelerators as Legitimation Mechanisms Projects in the public sphere rely on multiple sources of legitimacy (Godenhjelm et al., 2019). Currently in Estonia, the issue of legitimacy of various actors and approaches in the field of forest policy is especially salient. According to the leader of the Accelerator program, this was another “elephant in the room” that the Project was unable to navigate. For the Offsetting Project team, the judging process of the hackathon which included prominent endorsers such as the President of Estonia legitimized their solution. However, the hackathon lacked the engagement of the Ministry of Environment. While officially partners of the WoodHack, their civil servants did not feature among mentors or participants. Therefore, the Offsetting Project’s novel solution had not been legitimized in the eyes of civil servants. Also, as noted previously, the

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subsequent Accelerator did not create an arena for deliberation with the high-­level decision makers of the Ministry, which would have increased proximity. Therefore, the ideas by Offsetting Project did not achieve legitimacy even then. While the project was aiming to offer a new solution regarding climate goals and biodiversity loss, civil servants were concerned that offsetting would increase carbon leakages into other sectors and that it would diminish the availability of biofuels for reducing the energy production carbon footprint. Additional hurdles in engagement with the Offsetting Project’s solutions were attributed to limiting formalities of public procurement. Traditional public procurement regulation in Estonia did not allow procuring the solution from the same entity that described the problem. 1 While public administrators stressed the unfortunate managerial and administrative problems, project-related people saw this as a good excuse to cover up the deeper discrepancies and lack of interest between their ideas and approaches of the Ministry. Reflecting on these legitimacy issues, the leader of the Accelerator program recognized that the interfaces should include the role of the public sector employees in “problem definitions.” This would ensure the legitimacy of approaches in an early stage and remove the potential difficulties in the later stages of project development. This observation aligns with the situated learning (Lave & Wenger, 1991) and co-creation literatures (Osborne et al., 2016; Torfing et al., 2019). However, it remains questionable whether the engagement of ministry’s civil servants at the early stages can endorse not only technical solutions but also more sweeping ideas. Nevertheless, the question of legitimacy highlights the difference of formal and informal interfaces. According to the head of the Accelerator program: “One thing is what is written in development plans and strategies in nice writing, all based on compromises. The second thing is what the civil servants really want to do.” This suggests that individual engagement of civil servants with creative ideas at the hackathon may indeed trigger changes in the policy processes.

1  Due to the legislative encouragement by the European Comission, the issue of public procurement was subsequently recognized and addressed in Estonia by making amendments to the procurement regulation. See the European Union’s guidelines for Innovation Procurement, Commission Notice from 18.6.2021 https://ec.europa.eu/docsroom/ documents/45975

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Limited Flexibility of Knowledge Implementation Parallel to proximity and legitimacy issues, project ideas may eventually be institutionalized if the interfaces of the innovation system can be flexible enough to find suitable points of impact in the existing institutional order. Flexibility includes the ability to (re)define problems, solutions, and opportunities for change, as well as doing this in limited time (Gong & Janssen, 2012). What makes it difficult is the top-down decision-making process that limits information input from lower-level project managers and civil servants. Also, different temporalities create tensions between short-term projects and long-term planning of permanent organizations (Munck af Rosenschöld & Vihma, 2022). The case of Offsetting Project highlights these challenges as interfaces link projects with the hierarchical organization of the Ministry. The project solutions must move to the next stages in an orderly fashion (from team to civil servants, from civil servant to undersecretaries, from Ministry to Parliament) in order to eventually find their formulation in a law or policy. However, the project ideas emerged from hackathons and entered the accelerator phase at a random moment in comparison to the ministry’s regular time pattern based on annual planning cycle, or relevant policy discussions in parliament. The accelerator phase lasted for only three months. As the hackathon team had not passed over their ideas to higher-­ ranking civil servants during the short period of their operation, the subsequent window of opportunity (Kingdon, 2014) was missed. None of the civil servants were engaged enough in order to pursue the goals after the Accelerator program had ended. Note how in the following interview excerpt, the civil servant is referring to incongruent temporalities of the project and the Ministry: We, the state, are ten steps behind the [Offsetting Project]. /…/ [They] can take it further, if they want to take that risk, but we cannot guarantee at the moment that the state will be able to create a platform that they can get attached to in the same tempo. (Ministry of Environment, Undersecretary of Climate)

In the limited timeframe, the team of Offsetting Project failed to inspire the civil servants to take the idea of an alternative solution for the state carbon market. Interfaces lacked the temporal flexibility in redefining problems, creating a wider commitment in high-level decision makers, and attaching the promising idea to policy processes. Therefore, the

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project was not able to address conflicts and tensions of the larger context of environmental governance and sustainability transition.

Discussion and Conclusion Hackathons first emerged as tools for solving technical problems in the IT sector. Witnessing the success of this kind of open innovation in the business sector, the same approach is increasingly used in the public sector, which previously was already relying on projects as vessels for innovation, and policy development. Ensuing open innovation system consists of an array of organizations or programs (hackathons, accelerators, and incubators) that act as interfaces between an innovative project and a permanent organization who are the gatekeepers in the process of institutionalization. I studied what is the potential of such project-based systems in producing institutional change in the public sector? The results above allow to make three conclusions. First, the dynamic proximity between the project and the temporary organizations is required for combining contradictory requirements of creativity and implementation. Hackathons are praised for supporting creativity by being removed from existing processes. The case of the Offsetting Project team is a good example of how “thinking outside the box” brought recognition and eventual winning of the competition. However, if there are no linkages to significant organizations in the policy network (e.g. civil servants are part of the team) or ongoing processes (e.g. the development of the carbon market in Estonia), these creative engagements will not achieve close engagement required for implementation. We can wonder if civil servants were engaged in the earlier stage of the project at the hackathon, had it helped to prepare the organization for emerging ideas, or, instead, had it discouraged creativity and hence limited the strength of the “open” approach of the hackathon. Be that as it may, the proximity issues highlight the active role of the innovation system in securing the engagement of permanent organizations. Second, answering to the frequent calls for “accelerating” transition to sustainability (e.g. Edwards et al., 2022; Gliedt et al., 2018), the appeal of hackathons is in their ability to quickly legitimize ideas by bringing together expertise from various sectors. However, the case of Offsetting Project highlights that success in hackathons alone does not secure legitimacy. Rather, it is the way in which hackathons and subsequent accelerators create deliberative arenas and how they empower actors in relation to

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significant permanent organizations (such as ministries) that influences the legitimacy of creative ideas. While securing legitimacy for sweeping reforms based on a hackathon project may be too challenging, theories of experimentalist and adaptive policy making (Chaffin et al., 2014; Sabel & Simon, 2011) have suggested that, instead, innovative solutions may be applied in a limited scope. In this way, interfaces have the potential to link creative solutions to concrete outputs. In the case analysed above, this was never considered. This aligns with studies that bring out narrow feedback and policy learning mechanisms in Estonian innovation governance (Karo, 2011; Karo et al., 2015). Iterations based on limited institutionalization of creative ideas and adaptive feedback mechanisms can overcome these obstacles. This relates, thirdly, to the flexibility of interfaces. In the fast-paced and dynamic innovation process, interfaces to projects have only a limited timeframe to influence decision-making. This makes linking to high-level policy makers and processes problematic, yet essential for projects that produce broader, more substantive solutions (Vihma & Wolf, 2022). Both external communication between public sector organizations (the “problem of silos”) and the internal communication in hierarchical organizations can be obstacles for interfaces. Studies of post-bureaucratic organizations and their increased absorptive and adaptive capacity (Denning, 2019; Johnson et al., 2009) may hint potential development opportunities to overcome these challenges, although there have also been cautionary voices in this regard (e.g. Budd, 2007). This chapter shows that, despite the wide-spread optimism, the deployment of hackathons and other tools of open innovation in the public sector is not unproblematic. The main challenge comes from structures of interaction between the promising project and permanent public sector organizations that function as gatekeepers for policies and practices, conceptualized here as interfaces. Although hackathons certainly have merit, their potential should be considered from the standpoint of their relation to permanent organizations and ongoing processes of institutionalization. For academics, this chapter poses some important questions about the relations projects have with larger political networks and processes, and their consequential innovative potential. Practitioners may expand their scope beyond individual projects or programs to a more holistic view of project ecosystems.

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Further Reading This chapter uses the concept of interfaces developed in my PhD thesis: Vihma, P. (2022) Interfaces in Estonian Forest Governance. Opportunities for reflexive institutional innovation through experimental and adaptive projects, University of Helsinki. For a broader discussion on the opportunities and challenges arising from the embeddedness of projects in the public sphere, the chapter by Godenhjelm, S., Sjöblom, S., & Jensen, C in D. Hodgson, M. Fred, S. Bailey, & P. Hall (Eds.), The Projectification of the Public Sector by Routledge is an excellent read. For a critical account of hackathons, see Richterich, A. (2019). Hacking events: Project development practices and technology use at hackathons. Convergence: The International Journal of Research into New Media Technologies, 25(5–6), but for a more optimistic account, see Toros, K et al. (2022) Co-creation of social services on the example of social hackathon: The case of Estonia, International Social Work 65 (4). Acknowledgments  Financial support of the Academy of Finland grant no. 338553 is gratefully acknowledged.

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CHAPTER 10

Stepping on the Throttle While Hitting the Brakes: Project Organisations and Governance Sebastian Godenhjelm

Introduction Over the past few decades, contemporary public policy and governance have been transformed in response to both local and supra-national demands. Geopolitical instability, climate change, the COVID-19 pandemic, the global financial crisis and economic recession have caused policy makers to focus more attention on the need for innovative actions that yield quick outputs and value for money. They continuously seek efficiency gains and innovativeness when designing and implementing public policy and the delivery of public services (Osborne, 2013, 418; Sjöblom et al., 2019). In addition, citizens increasingly require tailor-made solutions to contemporary problems and demand greater levels of power and influence over service delivery (Klijn, 2008, 515). This has changed the

S. Godenhjelm (*) Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_10

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politico-administrative system and given rise to critical attitudes towards government, accelerating the need for effective governance of the public service delivery system (Osborne, 2013, 418). Consequently, the state has become more dependent on a wide range of policies, the inclusion of actors from various fields as well as collaborative arrangements that produce public service and results (Andrews, 2013, 282, Donahue & Zeckhauser, 2011, 288). Thus, governments have become more dependent on societal actors with potentially conflicting values to achieve their goals (Klijn, 2012; Sørensen & Torfing, 2007). The need to stay clear of ‘wicked problems’ and organisational silos has become increasingly important (Head, 2019). Despite different collaborative arrangements, governments are still held accountable for the outcomes produced (Pierre & Peters, 2000). This puts pressure on governments to find suitable solutions and new ways of legitimising public interventions by involving the interests being affected in the decision-making processes. As a result, policy-related issues have become more complex, and the politico-administrative system is in a state of flux (Christensen & Laegreid, 2013a). Clear-cut solutions for how best to tackle societal and wicked problems are rare. Public problems seldom fall neatly within specific jurisdictions or agencies (Bevir, 2011). The choice of an organisational form that enables effective, dynamic, flexible arrangements and opens creative spaces for innovations to emerge when implementing public policy and public service delivery has become highly attractive. Benchmarks, standards, partnerships and networks are examples of such informal governance instruments (Peters, 2006, 31). This chapter argues that one of the most profound expressions brought on by the so-­ called shift from government to governance is the adoption of temporary governance mechanisms or project organisations. Increasing attention is also being put on finding solutions to contemporary problems by creating hybrid organisations or by enabling different co-creation processes and forms of anticipatory innovation governance (AIG) that are believed to lead to better results and more value (Ansell & Torfing, 2021; Godenhjelm & Sjöblom, 2021; OECD, 2022a, b). Many of these new solutions take the form of projects at all administrative levels. However, the increased administrative complexity raises question about the impact of such temporary projects. To what extent can their presumed added value be measured, and can new policy instruments and collaborations produce

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innovative results that make coherent and long-term contributions to public policies and achieve sustainable results? The main argument in this chapter is that temporary governance mechanisms and project organisations in particular are calling for increased speed in their experimentation and searching for new innovations without necessarily thinking about the consequences. However, while project organisations as temporary public-sector governance mechanisms can potentially yield significant benefits and might play a vital role as both horizontal and vertical interlinking mechanisms between administrative levels, it is important not to become blinded by the speed of their implementation. The increasing use of projects in the public sector includes several challenges that have yet to be fully understood. This suggests that a slowdown in pace is needed. The overarching aim of the chapter is to discuss the benefits and challenges related to temporary governance mechanisms in a public-sector context. What are the consequences of project proliferation in terms of key governmental values, such as coordination and continuity in a situation where both increased speed and slowdown are needed?

Project Organisations and Governance from a Theoretical Perspective Contemporary political-administrative systems encompass a complex ecology of actors with varying beliefs, principles and resources. Understanding how these actors produce public services and influence policy outcomes is crucial (Peters, 2013, 362–363). Activities in the public sector are increasingly being organised as projects, and processes are often both presented and understood as projects (Abrahamsson & Agevall, 2009; Sahlin-­ Andersson & Söderholm, 2002). Consequently, the project, that is, a temporary endeavour undertaken to create a unique product, service or result (Project Management Institute, 2004), is often seen as an attractive organisational form for implementing public policy and is believed to play a central role in delivering the innovations that drive modern society (Brady & Hobday, 2011; Morris et al., 2012). The increasing use of projects has been referred to as projectification and has received increasing scholarly attention during previous years (Hodgson et al., 2019; Jacobsson & Jałocha, 2021). Public-sector projectification is believed to originate from project use in the private sector,

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where project management is widely considered an effective and flexible form of organising (Midler, 1999). However, a certain lack of clarity exists regarding the use of projects in industries where projects have not traditionally been used (Carden & Egan, 2008; Voros Fregolente et al., 2022). Even though public-sector projects are embedded in a political-­ administrative structure framed by a complex web of norms, rules, strategies and governance principles (Wirick, 2009), they often rely on tools designed for traditional project management fields. The management of projects in a public-sector setting where coordination and continuity are emphasised should, therefore, not be taken for granted. This chapter highlights three interrelated strands of research that are especially relevant to our understanding of contemporary societal developments and the conditions under which temporary project organisations are expected to function, namely the New Public Management (NPM) discourses, theories of governance as well as project management ideals and Governance of Projects (GoP). Linking Projects with Public Administration and New Public Management Discourses The increasing challenges and complexities within the public sector have triggered NPM discourses associated with public-sector policy formation and implementation since the 1980s. The discourses focus on how public organisations have adopted new organisational forms through devolution, managerialism and performance management (Christensen & Laegreid, 2013b; Klijn, 2012). The central elements of NPM reforms relate primarily to an increased efficiency drive, downsizing and decentralisation, the search for excellence and a public service orientation that relies heavily on the adaptation of market mechanisms (Ferlie et al., 1996). Governments have tried to legitimise their existence in this way through their outputs (Peters, 2013, 361). NPM principles have been characterised as organisational instruments and arrangements for improving the performance of public organisations (Peters & Pierre, 1998, 65), thereby challenging the assumption that elections are the only means of influence between the people and the polity. This suggests that the state has been rolled back in the search for greater synergy and more effective governance mechanisms by relying on resources and actors outside of its formal hierarchical control (Sjöblom, 2006). These developments have, at least to some extent, undermined the

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capacity of the political leadership to exert control (Björk et al., 2003). The increasing focus on performance management and efficiency as well as reliance on outputs highlighted in the NPM debate resonates well with the ideals portrayed by project organisations, whose unique and temporary nature is believed to lead to quick results and achievements that stay on budget. Proponents of NPM see decentralisation and downsizing as remedies for public-sector problems and assume that the partitioning or isolation of issues will simplify public-sector agendas by facilitating new single-purpose organisations that follow professional standards. Accountability is to be based on the results that the actions produce. NPM developments arguably rely on neo-liberal movements and public choice theory driven by economic values and norms, which are expected to yield more freedom of choice and increased channels of influence. The reliance on private-sector tools is believed to be controlled by elaborate contracts and monitoring systems. In recent years, the traditional NPM debate has evolved into the prevailing NPG debate, according to which more significance should be given to coordination, integration and the use of softer steering instruments than was the case with previous management ideals. Despite this evolution, the underlying NPM rationalisation principles can still be seen today (Sundström, 2022). The extent to which the resulting partnerships meet the requirements of legitimate governance and the suitability of new organisational forms of public service delivery as well as their sustainability in upholding public values such as coordination and continuity are key issues that still need to be addressed. In sum, the NPM discourses have resonated well with the context in which projects operate and has provided answers to why the public sector has gone through changes and clarified the drivers for the increasing use of projects in the public sector. The NPM debate can be used to explain the rationale behind the desire to reduce complexity and enhance efficiency by introducing new private-sector tools and ideals in the public sector. In other words, it provides the rationale for ‘stepping on the throttle’ and moving from points A to B in a straight line. Understanding Projects Through Theories of Governance Governance is often referred to as a new process of governing where the boundaries between the public, private and voluntary sectors and the role

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of the state have changed (Pierre, 2000; Pierre & Peters, 2000; Rhodes, 1997, 2012). It is ultimately concerned with the conditions under which ordered rule and collective action take place by raising questions about how the process of governance functions, who is involved and what are the consequences of various patterns of action for society (Peters, 2012; Stoker, 1998). Theories of governance often focus on practices of governing and on dilemmas relating to problems of representation, the political control of bureaucracy and the democratic legitimacy of the institutions to which they give rise (Fredrickson, 2007). Such theories are highly relevant in terms of policy implementation because they focus on forms of action and the ensuing performance. In contrast to NPM discourses, where the point is to improve the existing bureaucracy and public organisations, governance theories open a broader view onto a more ‘horizontal’ way of governing in which governments work together with a variety of public and private actors (Hill & Hupe, 2014; Klijn, 2008). Theories of governance are well suited to analysing the processes, interactions and forms of collaboration through which social interests and actors jointly produce policies as well as the practices that affect governing (Bevir, 2011). The idiosyncrasies of governance theories are often related to actors taken from within and outside the governed institutions where power dependences in collective actions are hidden and need to be identified (Stoker, 1998). Governance arrangements are often hybrid, meaning that they require combining administrative systems with market mechanisms (Vakkuri & Johanson, 2021). These mechanisms are often multijurisdictional in that they combine actors and institutions across policy sectors and various levels of government. They involve a plurality of stakeholders, which means that non-state actors can become participants in governing. In addition, they are often linked together in networks, which are believed to be an optimal design for solving contemporary governance problems. Successful governance requires giving increased attention to goal selection, goal reconciliation and coordination, implementation, as well as feedback and accountability (Peters, 2012). These developments resonate well with the myths regarding project management ideals, according to which agile projects enable actors to function across different levels and jurisdictions in a creative way (Hodgson & Briand, 2013). A significant portion of recent governance developments arguably stem from advancements in the EU (Büttner, 2019). European, national and sub-national actors are involved in discussions about major issues ranging

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from the future direction of the EU to technical criteria for allocating EU structural funds and managing and developing EU programmes (Bachtler et al., 2013; Klijn, 2008, 516). The EU’s structural policy has engaged EU Member States, sub-national governments and private actors with the European Commission more than any other EU policy (Marks, 1996, 399). Authority has, in this sense, been relocated from states to their regions, which has reinforced a downward trend towards the fragmentation of national government in favour of sub-national entities, a contrasting upward trend towards the regional and global levels, and a sideways trend towards private and voluntary actors. In this case, project organisations play an important part in facilitating the trickling down of supra-­ national demands to locally implemented initiatives. Despite several advances, new governance still poses significant dilemmas for current administrative and democratic practices, requiring the development of new forms of public action or even new political ideals (Bevir, 2011, 16). Some scholars even argue that the term governance as a function of state power has substantially outgrown its scope of operations (Müller, 2012, 297). While the term originally described the ‘steering’ of countries, it is nowadays also synonymous with steering corporations, their operations and projects in general. The concept of governance is no longer used exclusively to refer to public-sector issues and is frequently used in relation to the management of organisations in the private sector (Peters, 2012). This shift in use does not mean, however, that governance is everywhere. Several tasks and services still rely on a bureaucratic setting, and many governance network functions depend on explicit managerial functions as well as the overall political nature of governance processes (Klijn, 2008). The challenge lies in creating organisations and institutions that strike a balance between the ability to make changes in a complex society and fostering a degree of permanency (Jacobsson et  al., 2015, 131–132). This challenge highlights the need to capture the added value created by temporary governance tools, such as projects, as well as the need to ensure that the results are implemented and long-term outcomes are achieved. In sum, theories of governance complement the NPM discourses by illustrating the complexity associated with contemporary policy implementation. The discussion highlights the need for collaborative organising mechanisms that cut across different levels and sectors and produce quick, sustainable responses in rapidly changing environments but leave open the repercussions of project management ideals as they confront public-sector

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values and governmental ideals. Theories of governance highlight the conditions under which the process of governing functions, draw attention to the consequences of contemporary policy changes in the public sector and reveal the collaborative conditions under which the process of governing is expected to function as well as the challenges of creating organisations and institutions that can operate in a complex society while still fostering a degree of permanency. The theories also emphasise the need to assess the repercussions of new management ideals as they confront embedded public-­sector and governmental values. In other words, recent developments still suggest the need to ‘step on the throttle’ but at the same time reveal some bumps in the road. Project Management Ideals and the Governance of Projects The changing role of the state and emphasis on new governing arrangements have introduced several new organisational forms in contemporary public policy service delivery and implementation. Single-purpose organisations, delimited organisations and partial organisations have often been referred to in this respect (Ahrne & Brunsson, 2010; Andrews, 2013; Boston, 2013; Brunsson, 2013). Projects are closely related to a hyper-rational logic and dream of achieving efficiency, clarity and unambiguity (Sjöblom et  al., 2013). As previously mentioned, projects are increasingly being used outside of traditional project management fields, such as industry and technology. Consequently, increasing attention is being directed towards the creation of value and benefit for multiple stakeholder groups instead of a narrow focus on core stakeholders (Bakker, 2010; Grabher, 2004; Hodgson, 2004; Winter & Szczepanek, 2008). Projects do not emerge in a vacuum but through interactions with one or more of the permanent institutions or temporary organisations that they rely on (Grabher, 2002). They are expected to provide permanent organisations with surplus compared to traditional forms of organisation. Projects should therefore not be regarded as ‘islands’, as they are highly likely to be embedded in more permanent organisational or social contexts (Engwall, 2003; Grabher, 2004, 1492). Contemporary public service delivery systems require an additional differentiated approach to their management and governance that takes context and their organisational embeddedness into account.

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All in all, the rationalistic ideals associated with projects have placed normative pressure on public authorities to use project management as a tool for pursuing various goals. Some argue that much public-sector project research has been dominated by ‘cooking books’ that follow a positivist, normative character, which has limited debate about the core aspects of project management (Löfgren & Poulsen, 2013, 62; Morris et  al., 2012). Measuring public-sector project performance is complicated because of various overlapping oversight agencies that follow different rules and processes (Wirick, 2009). Project management research has discerned a connection between project management ideals and trends in NPM and governance. The isolation of issues, focus on efficiency and action, and monitoring of results all emphasise this connection, contributing to a greater understanding of the drivers behind the increasing use of projects in the public sector. It highlights the perceived advantages associated with project management as well as the need to understand the consequences of using project management standards that, to a great extent, apply private-sector ideals to the public sector. In sum, the existing research on project management ideals and GoP has provided an understanding of the significance of timely planning and execution, efficiency, flexibility, knowledge and expertise, as well as the ability to decouple and simplify agendas so that they can be executed more easily. Project management and GoP research describes underlying project principles and further highlights the need to study the interactions between temporary and permanent structures to determine the extent to which projects can make a coherent contribution and achieve sustainable long-­ term outcomes. This places emphasis on the need to better understand what role the state should play and the importance of determining the extent to which projects are able to line up with the overall governance structure. In other words, ‘hitting the breaks’ is needed given the obstacles ahead.

Benefits and Challenges Related to Temporary Governance Mechanisms in a Public-Sector Context The bulk of the analysis and findings included in my research have focused on three issues. First, it identified the participatory procedures in projects; second, it highlighted the implications of different project management

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practices; and finally, it discussed the consequences of projectification in the public-sector environment. Several questions related to the above three issues are elaborated upon in the remainder of the chapter. How Can the Added Value Created by Projects Be Measured? One key question has to do with the extent to which projects can deliver sustainable and long-term results. In my research on the European Fisheries Fund (EFF) programme in Finland, and a meta-evaluation of its projects (907), I found that the project results obtained by the programme, the measures corresponding to ideal project qualities, such as results relating to innovation and new operational models, as well as project outputs that have a positive environmental impact were included in the evaluations (cf. Godenhjelm, 2013). Many of the funded projects indicated that their projects had produced such results. Utilisation of the project results, however, was hindered by the need for evaluations, which follow a rational logic of organisation lacking measurement specificity and clarity. The instrumental evaluations employed may therefore inhibit learning and discovery as well as the identification of long-term effects. The analysis showed that the evaluation criteria focused on outputs rather than outcomes and that the long-term effects of projects as a policy implementation tool cannot fully be assessed. The evaluation approaches employed were mostly based on highly standardised quantitative evaluation criteria, which are insufficient insofar as they only capture the achievements and added value of project-based policy implementation to a limited extent. The results indicated that the connection between the evaluation system and project management logic remained weak. While projects have the potential to yield valuable outputs, current project and programme evaluations are unable to harness the added value. This finding confirms the fact that project evaluations focus on output measurements that follow a linear and instrumental approach and suggests a potential mismatch between the operational logic of projects and the prevailing evaluation system in the public sector. The extent to which information about added value can be gathered and used for future purposes and contribute to strategic goals is therefore questionable.

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Can Long-Term Outcomes Be Achieved Through Temporary Outputs? The tension between short-term and long-term perspectives is often neglected in both the practical and theoretical debates. Consequently, there is a need to understand the conditions under which temporary organisations produce results, as well as the mechanisms behind the creation of action and change that are expected to surpass what permanent organisations can achieve. As demonstrated by the research focusing on developing a theoretical understanding of the consequences of projectification in an EU context, and in the public sector in general, many differences exist between standardised project management procedures in traditional project settings and their operational logic in the public-sector environment (Godenhjelm et  al., 2015). More specifically, prior studies have described how the embeddedness of temporary organisations in the public sector affects the project sequences of a project’s lifecycle in ways that deviate from predictions about project sequences in traditional project contexts. The EU project system requires a delicate balance between political-administrative structures and entrepreneurial discretion to secure policy coherence as well as project autonomy. The potential for commitment building during the execution phases of the project is restricted by the proximity of permanent organisations and is determined by the strategic and political priority given to temporary organisations. Current knowledge transfer mechanisms associated with the institutionalised termination phase in public-sector projects therefore need to be complemented by a phase that emphasises institutionalised recoupling to create better long-term outcomes. This phase would add a new dimension to the projectification debate by offering a descriptive and conceptual discussion of the consequences of public-sector projectification in the EU. Such a discussion would complement the existing theory about temporary organisations by taking the first step towards devising a theory that can be applied to projectification in the public sector. Do Collaborative Project Procedures Lead to Innovative Results? The potential benefits of increasingly using projects for policy administration and service delivery are central. When considering the vast number of actors involved in contemporary public policy, clarifying the extent to

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which collaborative procedures and project actions can become prerequisites for achieving innovative results is of particular importance. However, the ideal perception associated with projects, as well as the drivers of and barriers to collaborative innovation in a project setting, is often unclear. The complexity associated with the term innovation is often underestimated. More discussion is needed on how the suggested requirements for achieving innovations can be applied to public-sector projects, which is of particular importance given the increased focus on temporal and spatial horizons for strategic action from which innovations are expected to emerge. Despite the widely acknowledged ability of projects to bring about creativity that meets the requirements of innovation, the focus on projects as collaborative spaces has been surprisingly neglected. This neglect can be seen in EU regional development strategies that rely heavily on the capacity of projects to produce innovations. A social network analysis of 275 European Regional Development Fund (ERDF) innovation projects in Finland showed that projects include staff, a steering group and stakeholder members from a variety of occupational backgrounds and that projects employ a wide range of collaborative features to inform and activate stakeholders (cf. Godenhjelm & Johanson, 2018). However, despite policy makers often regarding projects as wellsprings of innovation, the qualitative content analysis of the projects’ innovative results showed that relatively few projects produce outputs that match more stringent innovation definitions. The project staff and steering group composition as well as the network of stakeholders included in projects all influence project innovation. The stakeholder networks formed by projects and the various collaborative efforts employed during projects also play a role in predicting possible project innovations. However, not all network linkages among various project actors increase the odds of innovation. The logistic regression analysis of the 275 ERDF projects also revealed that collaborative procedures involving the inclusion of stakeholders decrease the odds of innovations occurring. The inclusion of large numbers of stakeholders is thus no guarantee of innovation. Stakeholders might be included in response to a need to establish legitimacy in the eyes of the funder rather than for the purpose of innovation. In addition, project staff members who have previous experience with innovation projects decrease the odds of innovation. The sometimes overly optimistic view of collaboration as a remedy for a lack of innovation in the public sector can therefore be questioned. The importance of staff selection as well as the role played by regulatory

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agencies in approving project staff members is, nonetheless, crucial. More attention should be paid to the significance of functioning regulatory agencies that are able to detect productive project staff linkages while at the same time providing projects with enough room to manoeuvre. While the need to identify beneficial social partners and useful actions intended to achieve innovation in EU structural fund projects is vital, project leaders face limitations in terms of the extent to which collaborations can be regarded as a prerequisite for innovation and in terms of identifying the benefits of various collaborative procedures and project actions.

Concluding Discussion The expected benefits of using project organisations in a public-sector setting are often related to a hyper-rational logic fuelled by normative project management ideals. There are limitations, though, to how much such a rationality logic can be applied to projects in the public sector. Project coordination and monitoring mechanisms that can take advantage of acquired knowledge and achieve sustainable results in a public-sector project context are vital. The rational logic and linear approach used in project evaluations to create long-term outcomes based on project outputs can, however, be questioned, accentuating the need for well-functioning evaluation mechanisms, without which projects risk becoming isolated incidents of knowledge acquisition. In such cases, valuable information and accumulated knowledge will be lost. The approach also highlights the importance of contextually sensitive interlinking mechanisms linking temporary organisations with permanent structures such that long-term outcomes from temporary outputs can be created in a political-administrative context. Without well-functioning mechanisms, projects not only risk losing their flexible and innovative management qualities but may also fragment the ability of permanent organisations to maintain entrenched public-sector values, such as transparency and democratic accountability, policy coherence, coordination and continuity. This highlights the delicate tension that exists between flexibility and coordination. Ideal interpretations of collaborative governance and the ability of projects to achieve innovative results are overly optimistic. This does not mean that collaboration might not include other advantages that could lead to better project outcomes. It does underline, though, the significance of regulatory agencies and the skills needed by project managers to both find and include the right project stakeholders as well as broker vital

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information. Given the magnitude of projects still being funded by the EU and their ability to create hybrid organisations, of spaces that enable co-­ creation, foster anticipatory innovation governance and produce quick outputs, it can be concluded that projects have far-reaching consequences that affect the ability of states to exert control. These trends emphasise the paradox of stepping on the throttle while at the same time hitting the brakes. As two of the most significant researchers on temporary project organisations (Lundin & Söderholm, 2013) put it: ‘Every theory is a child of its time and in need of reconsideration and reconstruction.’ Time also gives us the benefit of looking back. By evaluating the consequences of project proliferation and public-sector projectification, this chapter will hopefully contribute to this reconsideration and reconstructive effort.

Further Reading This chapter is based on research pertaining to the doctoral thesis by Sebastian Godenhjelm, entitled Project organisations and governance— Processes, actors, actions and participatory procedures, which was presented, with the permission of the Faculty of Social Sciences of the University of Helsinki, Finland, on 21 May 2016. For further readings related to the ideas presented in this chapter, I recommend the following studies. For a greater insight into the pros and cons of the embeddedness of projects in a public-sector context I recommend Godenhjelm, S., Sjöblom, S., & Jensen, C. (2019). Project governance in an embedded state: Opportunities and challenges. In D. E. Hodgson, M. Fred, S. Bailey, & P. Hall (Eds.), The Projectification of the Public Sector. Routledge. And, for a discussion on the potential value created in projects, as a form of hybrid organisation I suggest Godenhjelm, S. & Sjöblom, S. (2021) Temporary organisations as hybrids—challenges and mechanisms for public value creation. In J, Vakkuri & J-E Johanson (Eds.) Hybrid Governance, Organisations and Society. Value Creation Perspectives. London: Routledge.

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CHAPTER 11

Projects as Vessels for Institutional Change: From Appealing Promises to Some Pressing Concerns Johan Munck af Rosenschöld

Introduction The intuitive appeal of projects is that, on paper, they allow for detaching oneself from one’s daily work, trying out  new things, generating new knowledge, and creating change (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Sjöblom, 2009). The transformative capacity is ostensibly written into the DNA of projects—when confronted with a new problem to which ready-made answers are not available, the solution is often to create a project to address the issue. However, the urgency and “wickedness” of many problems, including inherent uncertainties involved in decision-making and the multiple framings of the problem and solutions (e.g., Dewulf & Biesbroek, 2018), such as climate change, puts additional pressure on managing problems with projects. To address complex problems, it is often necessary

J. Munck af Rosenschöld (*) Finnish Environment Institute (Syke), Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_11

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to generate broader change to break institutional “inertias” or stickiness (Munck af Rosenschöld et al., 2014). This puts the issue of institutional change in the spotlight when studying projects. In this chapter, I intend to critically examine the transformative capacity of publicly funded projects to induce institutional change. Drawing on my studies of two project-led public policy programs, I will argue that the connection between projects and the broader organizational environment is of critical importance for understanding how projects can generate institutional change and what kind of change is produced. My aim in this chapter is not to focus on individual projects, as such, but to discuss institutional change in relation to projectified governance (Munck af Rosenschöld & Vihma, 2022; Munck af Rosenschöld & Wolf, 2017), which I have defined as [a]n arrangement constituted by organizations and individuals across sectors involved in temporary project-driven activities for the purpose of pursuing selected goals as well as the formal and informal institutions that guide these activities (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019, 335).

This entails a shift from focusing on individual projects toward treating projects as parts situated within a larger organizational and institutional setting. I argue that focusing on projectified governance provides novel insights into how projects can induce institutional change. However, one might ask: Why bother adding yet another concept to study projects? My argument is that focusing on projectified governance allows us to do three things in particular. First, by using the concept of projectified governance, we are able to treat “projectification” not just as a process or development toward “something,” but as a substantive analytical object including the broader administrative infrastructure that accompanies project-driven work (e.g., Fred, 2018). Second, it allows us to explore how the different configurations, or styles, of managing projects in the public sector influence the ways in which institutional change comes about. Third, and more generally, it enables us to critically explore the relationship, or “interface” (Vihma & Wolf, 2022), between projects and permanent organizations, in this case public sector organizations. Taken together, these elements provide valuable insights into the study of project-induced institutional change in the public sector.

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A Tale of Two Projectified Governance Arrangements To better situate the discussion on institutional change in projectified governance, I will next describe two quite distinctly different project-led programs that I have studied (Munck af Rosenschöld & Löyhkö, 2015; Munck af Rosenschöld & Wolf, 2017): the Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP) in the United States (US) and the LEADER program in Wales, England, and Finland funded by the European Union (EU). They are of course by no means a comprehensive reflection of all possible types of projectified governance arrangements, but they nevertheless highlight interesting contrasting points, which will be discussed below. The RCPP is a US agricultural conservation program that was created by the Farm Bill of 2014 and implemented by the Natural Resources Conservation Service (NRCS), a conservation agency operating under the United States Department of Agriculture (USDA). The primary aim of the RCPP is to promote regional cooperation to render the implementation of conservation activities more effective, and to create opportunity to generate innovative ideas and resources for conservation on private lands. The RCPP provides funding for projects that address conservation concerns on the watershed and regional level. The RCPP also requires involvement from agricultural producers as well as actors from the private and third sector—farmers are not eligible to apply for project funding on their own. The first RCPP projects were initiated in May 2015, and project applications are evaluated by the NRCS. The RCPP represents an interesting vantage point for discussing institutional change in projectified governance. Since the inception of the NRCS (then called the Soil Conservation Service) in the 1930s, the regime has relied heavily  on centralized and standardized bureaucratic procedures, and simultaneously on voluntary engagement from farmers (Potter & Wolf, 2014). Moving toward less centralized modes of governing, the focus on projects within the RCPP represents a novel pathway in the NRCS regime and highlights interesting tensions between project-driven work involving a greater number of external actors and attempts of the agency to retain their power. I conducted a case study on the RCPP between September 2014 and January 2015. The research process involved collecting and analyzing key policy documents related to the program and conducting semi-structured interviews with USDA and NRCS administrators, NRCS program and

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technical staff, US Congressional committee staff, agri-environmental policy analysts in federal agencies and non-governmental agencies, and project managers. The second program I studied is LEADER, which is a bottom-up-­ driven EU rural development initiative established in 1991. I studied the program in (at the time) three EU Member States: Finland, Wales, and England. The EU is an interesting arena for studying projectified governance, as it can be seen as a forerunner in capitalizing on projects to implement public policies (Godenhjelm et al., 2015), of which the EU Structural Funds represents a good example (Jackson & Roberts, 1999; Roberts & Colwell, 2001). LEADER is argued to have some unique characteristics compared to other EU funding mechanisms (Saraceno, 1999): it is locally driven and focuses on spatially limited areas, it relies on generating ideas from the bottom up, it stresses the freedom of local areas to themselves decide on which projects should be funded, and it relies on Local Action Groups (LAGs) to manage the everyday affairs of the program on the local level. The LEADER program signifies a distinct way of promoting rural development and can arguably be understood as going against the common mode of top-down governing and hierarchical decision-making on funding priorities (Shucksmith, 2010; Wellbrock & Roep, 2015). LEADER thus presents a particular form of EU funding, as it allows a great share of autonomy on the local level. From a projectified governance perspective, the LAGs play a significant part in the LEADER program, as they decide on which projects will be funded in their specific geographical area. While the composition of the LAGs varied across the three countries, they typically involved actors from different sectors on the local level, including representatives from businesses, local associations, and local government, as well as local citizens. As part of this research, I conducted interviews in Finland, Wales, and England with representatives of LAG staff and board members and representatives from LEADER projects, both project managers and participants. I also collected and analyzed national and regional rural development plans, EU legislation, and LEADER project websites. These two programs provide an interesting contrast between what can be seen as centralized and decentralized steering. On the one hand, despite an increasing amount of bureaucratic control directed at the program, LEADER has been able to sustain much of its bottom-up, decentralized character, mostly due to the significant role of the LAGs. On the other

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hand, while being touted as an instrument to provide innovative solutions to agricultural conservation, the RCPP is nevertheless situated in a politico-­administrative context that relies heavily on top-down steering and standardized practices. As I will argue below, this division between centralized and decentralized steering has important implications for institutional change.

Institutional Change in Projectified Governance The interest in studying institutions has grown exponentially over the last couple of decades. Equally so, different interpretations of what constitutes an institution abound. In this chapter, I see that an institution “may take the form of rules or codified social arrangements, norms of conduct, or cognitive structures that provide understanding and give meaning to social arrangements” (Suddaby & Greenwood, 2009, 176). In a projectified governance setting, institutions can include “higher-level” institutions such as public policies, national legislation, and decision-making norms and practices, but also local informal codes of conduct. What does institutional change mean, then? In the literature, change can be conceived in various ways. In its most general and intuitive sense, institutional change involves changing, altering, or disrupting existing institutions. However, beyond this general description, things get more complicated. First, change can be either internally or externally driven, or differently put, endogenous or exogenous. In the former case, change is induced from within the institutional field (DiMaggio, 1988), for example as public administrators within a public agency drive a change in the rules or regulations of their own organization. In the latter, change is induced from the outside, for example by external shocks such as radical changes in the general political and economic landscape that present “windows of opportunity” for change (Baumgartner & Jones, 1993; Mahoney, 2000). In this chapter, the focus will be on endogenous change processes, as my interest lies in how projects, rather than the broader environment, generate change. Second, there is a difference in the scope of change. Incremental change entails changes that are small in scale and do not significantly challenge the status quo. These changes may involve making minor adjustments to existing policies based on new information, for example. Transformational change, in contrast, involves inducing change that puts into question the basis on which institutions are built, such as disrupting energy systems

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from being dependent on fossil fuels to be based on renewable resources. Third, change can occur at different speeds. Not surprisingly, slow change is a change that takes a long time to occur, for example over a time span of years, decades, or centuries. Also unsurprisingly, quick change occurs in a fast manner. From the perspective of this chapter, the scope and rate of change can be expected to vary in different projectified governance arrangements. Projectified governance sets certain interesting boundary conditions for achieving institutional change. The temporariness of projects puts the mechanism through which project-generated knowledge is taken on, learned, and acted on  in the spotlight (e.g., Godenhjelm et  al., 2015; Manning & von Hagen, 2010; Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). I argue that the characteristics of these mechanisms are contingent on the ways in which projects are managed and on the relationship between the projects and permanent organizations, such as public administrative organizations (e.g., Sjöblom & Godenhjelm, 2009; Vihma & Wolf, 2022). Johansson et al. (2007) noted an important dilemma when managing projects relating to the proximity of projects to permanent organizations, for example project funders. Proximity refers here not to the geographical distance, per se, but to the alignment of projects with strategic goals and to the degree of regulatory oversight. The closer the project is to the permanent organization, the smaller the innovative potential of the project result, but the result is expected to be more relevant to the permanent organization. Conversely, the further away the project is from the permanent organization, the greater the room to maneuver and possibility to come up with novel, more radical results, but smaller the chances that the permanent organization has the capacity, or interest, to capture and utilize this result. This apparent trade-off between relevance and innovation in projectified governance is conditioned by, among other things, administrative cultures and traditions and the design of public policy programs. This trade-off raises important questions for the study of institutional change in projectified governance. To better understand how institutional change can come about in projectified governance, I have developed idealized modes of governance arrangements that highlight the different ways in which projects and permanent organizations are connected (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). By positioning my empirical cases within these different modes, variation across cases can be better highlighted and compared, and different processes of institutional change can be identified. Empirically speaking, it is

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not necessarily possible to identify these modes in their pure form, but the strength of this typology lies in its ability to provide an analytical tool to understand the different ways in which projects are managed and the different contexts in which this occurs.

Attaining Institutional Change in Projectified Governance? Next, I will utilize the RCPP and LEADER programs to display how institutional change is envisioned to occur in two different modes of projectified governance.1 Mechanistic Projectified Governance The first of the modes I call mechanistic projectified governance (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). Drawing on the work of Morgan (1997) on organizational metaphors, this mode builds on the notion that organizations can be understood as machines. As the name suggests, this arrangement can be characterized as being rational and highly formalized as well as having a clear structure in which projects operate. The selection of fundable projects is based on clearly defined needs in programs and political strategies, such as development plans or program guidelines, and projects are expected to address and implement these. The role of the strategies devised by the permanent organization is thus central. As expressed by Fred and Hall (2017), projects can be seen to be “not only task- and goal-oriented, but also (perhaps even primarily) politically and strategically oriented” (Fred & Hall, 2017, 189). The core idea of this mode of projectified governance is that projects can “solve” problems through the utilization of sophisticated project management tools (cf. Andersson, 2009). From the point of view of institutional change, the role of the permanent organization is significant, as its strategies decisively guide project activities and, thereby, the type of results the project generates. Ideally speaking, change is expected to occur through the careful implementation of projects (and by extension, the strategy) by following project management tools of monitoring and formal mechanisms of transferring the 1  References to scholarly work mentioned in the section do not entail that these authors adhere to or represent a particular mode of projectified governance; rather the references are utilized to highlight different aspects of the idealized modes of projectified governance.

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project result back into the permanent organization (cf. Godenhjelm et al., 2015). The RCPP shares many of the features of mechanistic projectified governance. As discussed above, the strong tradition of centralized administrative steering of the NRCS produces a tightly coupled relationship between the permanent organization and funded projects. The capacity of projects to generate novel knowledge in this setting is hampered by seemingly rigid guidelines for fundable project activities. In fact, the NRCS provides a list of eligible activities that can be funded, which of course allows for a degree of flexibility for the applicants, but the opportunity to explore new tools, products, knowledge, and understandings of pressing problems can be deemed limited. Although it was too early to tell due to the timing of my case study of the RCPP, it can arguably be assumed that vertical “up-scaling” of project results into the permanent organization is effective, due to the strong permanent organization–project relationship. Taken together, because institutional change in mechanistic projectified governance is based on the alignment between projects and strategies, the scope of change is likely to be incremental in nature. However, the probability of achieving this change is higher, as it can be argued that the permanent organization has an interest in taking the project results on board. Intuitively, it is perhaps easy to sneer at mechanistic projectified governance for being the apparent antithesis to what projects are often applauded for: flexibility, freedom, and spaces for critical and novel thinking. Although this might be the case, there is certainly a role that this form of projectified governance can play. Not every single problem demands transformative and disruptive measures that question the very basis of the status quo of institutions. In reality, many governance arrangements resemble this mechanistic mode, which calls for taking seriously the implications of the mechanistic form of governing. Organic Projectified Governance At the other end of the spectrum, we find something that I call organic projectified governance (Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). As one might expect, this particular mode of projectified governance can be described as the antithesis to the mechanistic one described above. Building on the metaphor that organizations are similar to organisms (Morgan, 1997), rationality and instrumentality are downplayed, while open-endedness and ambiguity become central defining traits of the organization. In a

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projectified governance context, this means that the role of permanent organizations is much less relevant. This lesser role becomes evident by, among other things, a less clear understanding of what projects are supposed to do and how they will do it. Political strategies do exist, but their unspecificity makes the linking of projects to specific strategic goals challenging. This is important from an institutional change perspective—if the link between permanent organizations and projects is weak, and strategies have a small effect on what kinds of activities and results the project produces, the process of scaling up project-generated knowledge is highly problematic. This is in line with many studies that have cast a critical light on the ability of permanent organizations to take on and use project results due to insufficient resources and know-how among permanent organizations (Jensen et al., 2013; Sjöblom et al., 2012; Munck af Rosenschöld & Löyhkö, 2015; Sjöblom et  al., 2013; Vento, 2017). The question thus remains: If permanent organizations are unable to manage, oversee, and measure project results, how is project-driven institutional change then expected to occur? To give an illustration of an organic projectified governance arrangement, I will here refer to the LEADER program. LEADER presents an interesting case that stands in direct contrast to the RCPP discussed above, and further, the mechanistic model. The strong autonomy of both the LAGs and project activities has important implications for the entire program. The significant authority of the LAGs stems from the fact that they are the ones who decide on which projects will be funded. While autonomous, the LAGs are monitored by regional or national authorities, who oversee that the activities of the LAGs are adhering to relevant legal requirements but do not influence the day-to-day activities of the LAGs or strategic emphases vis-à-vis project funding. Each LAG has its own development plan for its own locality, which on paper guides the activity of the LAGs and the projects that they fund. Based on my analysis, the steering capacity of these plans in the studied areas was, however, rather weak, and funding decisions seemed to be based on perceived local needs and the quality of the project proposals. Perhaps due to this, the breadth of project activities that were funded was significant. The LAGs also struggled with systematically keeping track of the projects they funded, and especially in terms of how project-generated results could be utilized within the LAG and beyond. From the point of view of institutional change, the autonomy of LAGs and the apparent incapacity to monitor projects and drawing on results the

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projects produced highlights some interesting issues. While the LEADER program certainly enjoyed more freedom to decide on the local level which project activities should be funded, the evident weak connection between the local level and regional/national level thus calls into question how institutional change driven by projects can be scaled up to higher levels of decision-making. In organic projectified governance, instead of relying on vertical relationships between projects and actors “higher up,” the focus is rather on the horizontal process of institutional change. This means that change occurs not due to a strong connection between projects and permanent organizations, but between projects and the local community (broadly understood). The contextuality of project activities and their strong reliance on local needs makes it hard to “translate” these results beyond the local context. Taken together, the institutional changes that organic projectified governance can generate can be significant, or even transformational, on the local level, but the prospect of mainstreaming this change is challenging. This is not a problem in itself, as changes to local-level institutions can in fact be enough if problems are confined to a specific locality. However, a mismatch occurs when local project-generated results relate to pressing problems with broader relevance but projects fail to produce knowledge and results that are deemed relevant more broadly. This presents a missed opportunity to gain valuable insights from local niches or experiments that could inform decision-making beyond the local level (see, e.g., Turnheim et al., 2018).

Concluding Discussion: Some Pressing Concerns In this chapter, I have discussed two quite distinct programs that fund projects to implement policy goals. The programs highlight very different ways in which projectified governance can be organized across administrative environments, presenting contrasting conditions for inducing institutional change in projectified governance. What should become evident is that neither mechanistic nor organic projectified governance is able to escape the dilemma of project management put forward by Johansson et  al. (2007): Do you favor innovation or implementation of project results? As I have shown, both mechanistic and organic projectified governance come with their own orientations and portray different administrative logics. By themselves, neither of the two modes is objectively “good” or “bad,” and together they showcase the possibilities and limitations of

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project-led governance arrangements in terms of how they are designed and how they  perform. Applying Johansson et  al.’s dilemma to institutional change, it seems to suggest that what can be achieved is either incremental, wider-ranging change or transformational, small-scale change (cf. Termeer et  al., 2016). Depending on the problem at hand, sometimes incremental change on a broader scale in the mechanistic model or more transformational change on the local level in the organic model is enough. However, as we are facing multiple pressing “wicked” problems with crucial societal relevance that require transformational and large-scale changes to institutions, such as climate change, this dilemma poses multiple challenges. From the perspective of projectified governance, the mechanistic and organic models both  seem unsatisfactory for inducing these forms of change. Could one conceive a way to solve the innovation-­ implementation dilemma and, further, go beyond the limitations of the mechanistic and organic model? I have noted elsewhere that one possible solution would be to find a “third way” between vertical and horizontal change. This third mode I have called adaptive projectified governance (see Munck af Rosenschöld, 2019). This mode builds on the notion that it is not the relationship between projects and the permanent organization, or between projects and the broader local community, that is the focal interest. Rather, the role of networks is central. In this mode, projects are viewed as existing within broader social networks of actors operating at multiple levels and sectors, including, for example, local NGOs, universities, private companies, public agencies, and ministries. Projects should, thereby, be understood as temporary nodes of larger project networks that become engaged and activated in different constellations across time. As “no project is an island” (Engwall, 2003), the project participants belong to a larger ecosystem of actors that actively participates in multiple projects over a longer period of time. The projects draw on this network of actors, and contribute to the network through financial means and activity. Adaptive projectified governance has important implications for institutional change. A network-based approach can potentially allow for both re-coupling of project results (implementation) and decoupling of project activities (innovation) by drawing relevant public, private, and third sector actors closer to project activities. In other words, institutional change is the result of capturing knowledge generated in a project by embedding it in the project network within which it exists. As these project networks span sectors and levels, the possibility for projects to spur institutional

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change in a multitude of contexts increases. This does not mean that public actors have no opportunity to influence the project network and the activities that occur in it. Rather, the role of “metagovernance” (Sørensen & Torfing, 2017), that is, political steering of governance networks with the purpose of achieving political goals, becomes increasingly important. This means that while networks are clearly vaguer than strictly hierarchical systems of governing projects, they are better positioned to include a degree of both flexibility and coordination across sectors and levels of governing. For addressing pressing multi-sectoral and multi-level problems that involve significant institutional changes in society, adaptive projectified governance provides an interesting avenue. Being able to combine the experimental elements of projects and taking the implementation of project results seriously provides a good basis for inducing institutional change. However, no approach is perfect, and adaptive projectified governance invites critical investigation into who participates in the networks, the relationships between network actors, and whose interests are endorsed and accommodated (Wolf, 2011). This in turn has important implications for the legitimacy, transparency, and accountability of projectified governance.

Further Reading This chapter is based on my PhD thesis: Munck af Rosenschöld, J. (2017) Projectified environmental governance and challenges of institutional change toward sustainability. Publications of the Faculty of Social Sciences, University of Helsinki. The findings from my PhD thesis were developed further in the following article: Munck af Rosenschöld, J. (2019) Inducing institutional change through projects? Three models of projectified governance. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 21, 333–344. For further reading on the relationship between permanent organizations and projects, please see: Vihma, P. & Wolf, S. A. (2022) Between autonomy and embeddedness: Project interfaces and institutional change in environmental governance. Critical Policy Studies. Acknowledgements  Financial support from the Academy of Finland (grant no. 338553) is gratefully acknowledged.

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References Andersson, K. (2009). Orchestrating regional development through projects: The ‘innovation paradox’ in rural Finland. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 11, 187–201. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080903033796 Baumgartner, F. R., & Jones, B. D. (1993). Agendas and instability in American politics. University of Chicago Press. Dewulf, A., & Biesbroek, R. (2018). Nine lives of uncertainty in decision-making: strategies for dealing with uncertainty in environmental governance. Policy and Society, 37, 441–458. https://doi.org/10.1080/14494035.2018.1504484 DiMaggio, P. J. (1988). Interest and agency in institutional theory. In L. Zucker (Ed.), Institutional patterns and organizations: Culture and environment (pp. 3–22). Ballinger. Engwall, M. (2003). No project is an island: linking projects to history and context. Research Policy, 32, 789–808. https://doi.org/10.1016/S0048-­ 7333(02)00088-­4 Fred, M. (2018). Projectification - The Trojan horse of local government. Doctoral dissertation, Faculty of Social Sciences, Lund University. Fred, M., & Hall, P. (2017). A projectified public administration: how projects in swedish local governance become instruments for political and managerial concerns. Statsvetenskaplig tidskrift, 119, 185–205. Godenhjelm, S., Lundin, R. A., & Sjöblom, S. (2015). Projectification in the public sector – The case of the European Union. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 8, 324–348. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJMPB-­05-­2014-­0049 Jackson, T., & Roberts, P. (1999). Ecological modernization as a model for regional development: The changing nature and context of the Eastern Scotland Structural Fund Programme. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 1, 61–75. Jensen, C., Johansson, S., & Löfström, M. (2013). The project organization as a policy tool in implementing welfare reforms in the public sector. International Journal of Health Planning and Management, 28, 122–137. Johansson, S., Löfström, M., & Ohlsson, Ö. (2007). Separation or integration? A dilemma when organizing development projects. International Journal of Project Management, 25, 457–464. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman. 2006.11.006 Lundin, R. A., & Söderholm, A. (1995). A theory of the temporary organization. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11, 437–455. Mahoney, J. (2000). Path dependence in historical sociology. Theory and Society, 29, 507–548. Manning, S., & von Hagen, O. (2010). Linking local experiments to global standards: How project networks promote global institution-building. Scandinavian

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Journal of Management, 26, 398–416. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.scaman. 2010.09.003 Morgan, G. (1997). Images of organization. Sage. Munck af Rosenschöld, J. (2019). Inducing institutional change through projects? Three models of projectified governance. Journal of Environmental Policy and Planning, 21, 333–344. Munck af Rosenschöld, J., & Löyhkö, J. (2015). LEADER and local democracy: A comparison between Finland and the United Kingdom. In L.  Granberg, K. Andersson, & I. Kovách (Eds.), Evaluating the European approach to rural development: Grass-roots experiences of the LEADER programme (pp. 13–31). Ashgate. Munck af Rosenschöld, J., & Vihma, P. (2022). Achieving social-ecological fit in projectified environmental governance: Exploring vertical and horizontal dimensions. Environmental Science & Policy, 136, 127–135. https://doi. org/10.1016/j.envsci.2022.05.013 Munck af Rosenschöld, J., & Wolf, S. A. (2017). Toward projectified environmental governance? Environment and Planning A, 49, 273–292. https://doi. org/10.1177/0308518X16674210 Munck af Rosenschöld, J., Rozema, J.  G., & Frye-Levine, L.  A. (2014). Institutional inertia and climate change: A review of the new institutionalist literature. Wiley Interdisciplinary Reviews: Climate Change, 5, 639–648. https://doi.org/10.1002/wcc.292 Potter, C. A., & Wolf, S. A. (2014). Payments for ecosystem services in relation to US and UK agri-environmental policy: Disruptive neoliberal innovation or hybrid policy adaptation? Agriculture and Human Values. https://doi. org/10.1007/s10460-­014-­9518-­2 Roberts, P., & Colwell, A. (2001). Moving the environment to centre stage: A new approach to planning and development at European and regional levels. Local Environment, 6, 421–437. https://doi.org/10.1080/13549830 12009171 Saraceno, E. (1999). The evaluation of local policy making in Europe: Learning from the LEADER community initiative. Evaluation, 5, 439–457. Shucksmith, M. (2010). Disintegrated rural development? Neo-endogenous rural development, planning and place-shaping in diffused power contexts. Sociologia Ruralis, 50, 1–14. https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-­9523.2009.00497.x Sjöblom, S. (2009). Administrative short-termism—A non-issue in environmental and regional governance. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 11, 165–168. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080903033747 Sjöblom, S., & Godenhjelm, S. (2009). Project proliferation and governance— Implications for environmental management. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 11, 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080903033762

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Sjöblom, S., Andersson, K., Marsden, T., & Skerratt, S. (2012). Introduction: Exploring short-termism and sustainability: Temporal mechanisms in spatial policies. In S.  Sjöblom, K.  Andersson, T.  Marsden, & S.  Skerratt (Eds.), Sustainability and short-term policies: Improving governance in spatial policy interventions (pp. 1–14). Ashgate. Sjöblom, S., Löfgren, K., & Godenhjelm, S. (2013). Projectified politics  – Temporary organisations in a public context introduction to the special issue. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17, 3–11. Sørensen, E., & Torfing, J. (2017). Metagoverning collaborative innovation in governance networks. The American Review of Public Administration, 47, 826–839. https://doi.org/10.1177/0275074016643181 Suddaby, R., & Greenwood, R. (2009). Methodological issues in researching institutional change. In D. A. Buchanan & A. Bryman (Eds.), The SAGE handbook of organizational research methods (pp. 176–195). Sage. Termeer, C. J. A. M., Dewulf, A., & Biesbroek, G. R. (2016). Transformational change: Governance interventions for climate change adaptation from a continuous change perspective. Journal of Environmental Planning and Management, 60, 558–576. Turnheim, B., Kivimaa, P., & Berkhout, F. (2018). Experiments and beyond: An emerging agenda for climate governance innovation. In B.  Turnheim, P.  Kivimaa, & F.  Berkhout (Eds.), Innovating Climate Governance: Moving Beyond Experiments (pp. 216–241). Cambridge University Press. Vento, I. (2017). The evaluation of innovations: How to evaluate the transformative value of the cohesion policy for managing purposes. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 21, 3–22. Vihma, P., & Wolf, S. A. (2022). Between autonomy and embeddedness: Project interfaces and institutional change in environmental governance. Critical Policy Studies, 1–23. https://doi.org/10.1080/19460171.2022.2054841 Wellbrock, W., & Roep, D. (2015). The learning rural area framework: A heuristic tool to investigate institutional arrangements which support collaboration in rural areas. Sociologia Ruralis, 55, 106–124. https://doi.org/10.1111/ soru.12049 Wolf, S. A. (2011). Network governance as adaptive institutional response: The case of multifunctional forested landscapes. Journal of Natural Resources Policy Research, 3, 223–235. https://doi.org/10.1080/19390459.2011.591760

CHAPTER 12

Explaining Project-Based Policy Implementation: Multiple Governance Framework and Causal Mechanisms Isak Vento

Introduction Although a general claim of the project organization being too scarcely studied no longer bears the same validity as some years ago, our knowledge of the field is not yet saturated. In this chapter, I argue that there are some general conceptual ambiguities that deserve more scrutiny. More to the point, the terms “implementation” and “mechanism” may have been taken too self-evidently, specifically by previous research on public project governance. The otherwise laudable efforts of research to situate projects within the politico-administrative governing system and its policy processes have ended up perceiving projects as administrative questions, or opportunities and obstacles for routine administering and discrete public servant decision-making (Frederickson, 2009), rather than as challenges

I. Vento (*) Åbo Akademi University/The Social Science Research Institute, Turku, Finland e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_12

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for putting public policy into practice within a governance system. As a result, research has remained vague concerning the effects of project organization on the governing of contemporary liberal democratic societies. In this chapter, I suggest a research perspective, the multiple governance framework (MGF), for the study of public project implementation. The aim is to make possible the scientific explanation of the causes and consequences of policy implementation with projects. Governance systems are known to elude the conventional conception of the policy process as a cycle of sequential stages from planning to decision-making and implementation (Bengtsson & Hertting, 2014). The MGF offers a solution by theorizing the implementation from a governance perspective and making a theoretical distinction between a framework, or meta-theory, and middle-range theories with assumptions regarding explanations and testable hypotheses (Hill & Hupe, 2014). By applying the MGF for the study of project-based policy implementation, the chapter also systematizes the approach within a critical realist (CR) tradition, with excellent opportunities to combine interpretive and explanatory research. My point is that by agreeing on certain reasonable normative scientific principles and an in-field conceptual foundation, the knowledge from the already flourishing empirical and conceptual research on public project implementation can be amassed to an elevated body of knowledge. The main contribution of the chapter is conceptual development based on a literature review of both empirical and theoretical research on projects with an explanatory objective. Research having an explanatory objective is naturally not a sharp distinction and stretches over different policy areas and countries to different types of projects. However, one quite trustworthy indicator is the use of the term “mechanism” or “governance mechanism” (Sayer, 2010). The chapter in particular makes use of more recent studies of the European Union’s (EU) Cohesion Policy, which is by default implemented with projects. The EU’s Cohesion Policy, which has been said to be the prime source of project-based implementation (Munzi, 1965), is a best case for showcasing the benefits of the use of the MGF for the study of public project implementation. Moreover, the operationalization of the framework will be exemplified by adapting the governance mechanisms of collaboration, quasi-markets, and trust, based on the theories of collaborative governance, metagovernance, and interactive governance. These governance mechanisms would serve as the dependent variables in an empirical research project. However,

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the conceptual framework should be adaptable to any policy field within a liberal democracy, utilizing projects as the organizational form of street-­ level implementation.

The Effects of Project Organization The research with an explanatory ambition for the effects of project organization has gravitated around a few theoretical concepts. Perhaps most importantly, the study of projects in the last few decades has taken an organizational research perspective. The organization theory perspective was set famously by Lundin and Söderholm (1995), and, although encompassing different policy fields and project types, the set of research with an organization perspective has pointed to the temporariness that sets it apart from both traditional organizations (Godenhjelm et  al., 2015, 2019; Grabher, 2002) (see also Godenhjelm’s chapter) and other flexible organizations (Grabher, 2004). The organizational research perspective has been accompanied by management theories asking how temporary organizations condition project management (Lundin et al., 2015). Furthermore, studies from a governance perspective have attempted to situate the public project within the public administration field of democratic governing (see Godenhjelm’s chapter), which also extends to a public policy process perspective when focusing on implementation and evaluation. Moreover, the latter efforts can be said to have introduced modern CR reasoning to the study of public projects within a governance system by identifying certain crucial mechanisms to focus on for explaining the effects of projects on governance (Godenhjelm et al., 2019). Another distinction in research on public projects can be made in terms of epistemology. The abovementioned studies can be said to largely represent a CR perspective, seeking to pose and answer why questions by depicting the mechanisms of causality that generate a certain outcome and not another. Research theorizing causation in relation to different methodologies has shown quantitative and qualitative methods to be perfectly combinable around a shared idea of what a cause–effect relation is and how to study it (Goertz & Mahoney, 2012). However, many have too easily written off the possibility of integrating an interpretivist approach to the same idea of causality. This is important for the study of the effects of projects since a divergent strand of research on public projects has been conducted with a more or less explicit constructivist methodology. In this set of studies, interest has been in the process by which project organization latently

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affects other organizations and agents by infusing a certain action logic on them, a phenomenon labeled projectification (Fred, 2018). Assembling the assumptions in public project organization theory and the conceptual research on the topic, we can make some interesting first conclusions. First, I argue that although one could exaggerate the difference in the implicit epistemological points of departure that are made explicit in methodological choices, they share a broader assumption that project organization is the cause of an effect on public governance. What they say is that project organization can affect public governance either through organizational characteristics, of which temporariness is primus inter pares, or through project action logic (see, e.g., Fred, 2018; Godenhjelm et al., 2015, 2019). In the first strand of research theorizing the effects of project organization, the temporariness that is manifested through the limited-time interventions of projects is, on the one hand, expected to enhance effective policy implementation by setting the activity free from the institutional inertia of permanent organizations and starting with a “clean sheet” to plan the activity and assemble the team for the project in a just-in-time endeavor (Sjöblom & Godenhjelm, 2009). The lack of a past in action and relations can also serve as a platform for a “swift” type of trust to be formed between agents unknown to each other who gather for a common task and serve as a backdrop for creativity (Meyerson et al., 1996). On the other hand, temporality produces uncertainty regarding the activity and its alignment with institutions, policy strategies, and other actions (Sjöblom et al., 2013). Moreover, project organizing entails an organizing principle that enforces a certain action logic on public governance. In practice, this can mean public administration scrutiny over funding and formal rule-based reporting, which can turn out to be bureaucratic measures with effects on governance mechanisms (Fred, 2018). The ideal-type project’s narrow scope and organization for solving a specific problem also hypothetically imposes a certain logic of action on the project agents, which has been assumed to unleash the “fire soul” project manager to creative problem-­ solving and innovation (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). Simultaneously, the project logic of action can be at odds with the logic of other agents coming together in the project with their respective institutional logic in the baggage. This has the potential to produce, for example, misunderstandings, or even disagreements between the project and external agents (Fred, 2018; Lundin et al., 2015).

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As such, temporality and project logic can have both positive and negative effects on the public governance system. The “dark sides” of temporariness and conjoining logics are, however, often overlooked when discussing project-based policy implementation, although they have the potential to be crucial for public governance systems. Thus far, research has discussed the key challenges of project organizing and organization, temporariness, and logic of action for governing project-based implementation without systematically putting them into empirical tests (Godenhjelm et al., 2019).

The Causal Mechanism in Critical Realism The attention given to “mechanisms” in this study refers to the dependency relations and effects assumed in governance research aligned with the CR perspective. The mechanism has already been deemed the appropriate phenomenon for analysis in public governance research with project organization that often results in complex chains of dependencies between different agents and organizations (see Godenhjelm’s chapter). In general, the governance mechanism refers to the process of governing and, in practice, consists of divergent factors and their dependencies that generate or cause a specific outcome or effect and not another (Osborne, 2010). For the policy implementation with public projects, the mechanism can, for example, illuminate how the managing of the project task and team affects the output, or how the administering of the project by the public administrator ensures accountability and coordination in policy implementation. Importantly, the term has epistemological bearings that indicate, among other things, the knowledge value of the findings. By defining the research task in terms of mechanisms, or governance mechanisms, a study embraces the ontological position of society constituted by a physical and a social world, which both need to be addressed to grasp the effects of the action of agents. The realist approach is defined here in terms of Sayer (2010), whose framework is anchored in the realist paradigm worked out by Roy Bhaskar but complemented by readings of interpretivist work, especially regarding hermeneutics. The ontology of CR supposes that social structures and institutions condition, but do not determine, the action of agents, ultimately resulting in events. In distinction from positivism, where causality is configured as constant conjunctions between events, CR projects mechanisms of causality as objects of study (Sayer, 2010). The difference can be

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expressed in terms of inferential logic, where positivism stems from an Aristotelian idea of science progressing through deductive inference or the necessity of consequences following from well-formed logically true theses that show on a law-like dependency relation. In contrast, CR rests on abductive inference, where inference is content with a presumptive cause– effect relation that is logical and observable, although it does not satisfy the Humean critique of causality (Sayer, 2010). In CR, causal mechanisms are assumed to consist of a constellation of structure, institution, and agent, which may generate a particular event; naturally, the mechanism can be said to have some general bearing, where the structure, institutions, and agents are more or less the same (Bengtsson & Hertting, 2014). The restriction in terms of knowledge is that causal mechanisms may or may not actualize and therefore cannot offer predictions. Instead, the causal mechanism ought to be considered a detailed explanation of a phenomenon that states an assumed relation of means and effect. Here, we see that the idea of causality can be related to, or even overlap with, the constructivist idea of explanation through the depiction of meaning-laden relations in the Weberian sense. On some occasions, the causal force ascribed to a mechanism could very well be used interchangeably with Verstehung regarding the meaning of an agent’s action in a certain context that is different from superficially similar actions in similar contexts. The mechanism is a useful term when referring to several, potentially contradictory, theoretical assumptions and is used in this study to signify the assumed relation and effects of the governance theories. To avoid the confusion that often arises from the undefined use of the terms framework, theory, and mechanism, I specify them according to the categorization of Ostrom (2007), who, first, defines a framework as the most general demarcation of a phenomenon, which identifies the constitutive elements for a scientific analysis. Policy process frameworks, for example, point to the factors one needs to consider when formulating questions regarding the process (Sabatier, 2007). As its most basic form, a framework can be a list of factors necessary for inclusion to capture a phenomenon for scientific inquiry, but it can also be more elaborate and, for example, suggest hypotheses. Second, a theory functions to specify the elements of the framework that are relevant to specific questions and to provide assumptions for the question by ordering the relation of specific elements (Ostrom, 2007). As a framework merely defines the parameters necessary to capture a phenomenon, it may very well host several theories competing to explain the

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same question (Sabatier, 2007). This is why a framework can also be called a meta-theory (Hill & Hupe, 2014). Furthermore, a theory can be labeled “middle-range theory” to clarify that it is situated within a framework and seeks to explain only a part of the phenomenon demarcated by that framework. Importantly, the theory suggests dependency relations concerning the structure, agents, and action identified by a framework. In principle, a framework can host several theories that can be either supplementary explanations of a phenomenon or, at least for some periods of time, contradictory. Lastly, a model refers to a formally expressed relation of the hypotheses put forth in a theory (Ostrom, 2007). The MGF, which has been developed explicitly for the study of implementation in a governance context and offers a vantage point for theorizing project-based implementation, is presented next. In the subsequent sections, three theories of governance mechanisms, which are treated as middle-range theories, are discussed, and their causal mechanisms are elaborated on in relation to project organization. The theories are used to specify the roles and actions of agents, their relationships, and their effects in project-based policy implementation. As a result, we should have a set of analytical constellations for explaining empirical questions regarding public policy implementation with projects. Although this study follows abductive logic by applying presumptive relations from governance theories to the governance situations identified with the MGF, the same subject could be approached from the constructivist perspective of projectification by asking how governance mechanisms are formed within project organizations. The normative assumption underlying the CR perspective is that projects and their contexts are inherently independent, and that it is more feasible to think of it as how the organizational characteristics of projects affect the governance mechanisms in putting policy into practice.

The Multiple Governance Framework The meta-theory MGF offers a new take on implementation by theorizing the policy process with its point of departure in governing implementation (Hill & Hupe, 2014). Inspired by the Institutional Analysis and Development framework (Ostrom, 2007), The MGF identifies five key elements that structure the policy process in a governance context and proposes a question with five sub-questions, which in turn borrow from

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the classic Lasswellian perspective of politics: Who acts where, doing what, on what scale, and how (Hill & Hupe, 2014, 127)? The value of the MGF is that it explicitly discards the already-dated stages model underpinning top-down and bottom-up implementation. Instead, the MGF approaches policymaking in terms of key actions that are meaningful for capturing implementation in the elusive process of governance and starts theorizing from implementation, which it defines as operational governance (Table  12.1). Related activities are defined as directional and constitutive governance. Governance on all action levels can be scaled to an individual, organization, or system (Ostrom, 2007). In distinction from other conceptualizations of implementation in governance, such as network frameworks, the MGF defines the distinct types of action and systematizes them to a concise research framework. To take governance seriously, which means acknowledging the possibility of any agent acting at any level and with reverberations on any scale, the identification of agents and their respective actions is left for empirical judgment. Most policies enacted within modern flexible systems of governance involve multiple vertical levels of formal administration and horizontally non-state agents in the process (Parsons, 1995), where decisions are nested within each other (Cairney, 2012). To make the study of implementation in a governance context intelligible, the place and focus of actions need to be specified (Hill & Hupe, 2014). With regard to project-­ based policy implementation, the natural layer for the focus of operational governance is the relationship of management between the public administrator and the project manager. Applying the MGF to the general function of the project model, we can define some initial actions of governance through project organization. We can say that: Table 12.1  The multiple governance framework Action scale/ action level

Constitutive governance

Directional governance

Operational governance

System

Institutional design

General rule-making

Organization

Designing (inter-) organizational settings Internalization of values and norms

Mission and maintenance Situation-bound rule application

Managing trajectories Managing relations Managing contacts

Individual

Source: Hill and Hupe (2014, 130)

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• The public administrator engages in directional governance on an individual scale by making discretionary decisions on project funding. • The public administrators’ unit in the administration governs directionally by formulating project funding calls. • The project manager governs operationally on an individual scale by managing the project team. • By managing the relationship with the public administration and potential stakeholders, the project manager engages in operational governance at the organizational level. These agents and their actions constitute the elementary parameters of governance mechanisms in project-based policy implementation. By identifying the key agents and actions for different types of governance, the MGF raises intriguing opportunities for analyzing the effect of project organization on governance mechanisms in street-level implementation. However, for the postulation of why something would occur, we need to turn to governance theories to specify causal mechanisms. These mechanisms are specified in terms of collaborative governance, metagovernance, and interactive governance theories, which, focusing on the collective action of public and non-state agents and divergent attempts to allow autonomy while maintaining control, can be said to offer complementary explanations for governance in project-driven policy implementation.

Governance Mechanisms of Project-Based Policy Implementation Collaborative governance, metagovernance, and interactive governance theories offer central explanations regarding the mechanisms of governance in policy implementation. Importantly, governance mechanisms focus on different aspects of democratic and effective governing, such as influence over the agenda, resource allocation, and net benefit (Osborne, 2010). Although largely complementary, the theories, especially metagovernance and interactive governance, also consist of mutually exclusive elements that weigh the key values of autonomy and control in their proposed mechanisms of public governance differently (Sørensen, 2012). By operationalizing the mechanisms of public project organization, the aim is to analyze the specific prerequisites and contradictions for governance, and by discussing them from the MGF, we acquire a sense of how these can relate to more general questions concerning politics in the contemporary democratic system of governance (see also Kuokkanen’s chapter).

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Collaborative Governance Theory and Project Application Although collaborative governance emphasizes deliberation and consensus seeking, it can be distinguished from other governance theories based on the presumptive benefit of inter-sectorial collective action (Ansell & Gash, 2008). However, collaborative governance remains largely indeterminate regarding the role of the public administrator in the process (Donahue & Zeckhauser, 2011). The public administrator has been argued to play a vital role in collaboration by bringing important resources and legitimacy to the process, while others have endorsed the importance of uncoerced participation for collaborative gains. The question of collaborative governance with projects is how far the public administrator decreases or increases the putative benefits of collaboration undertaken in public projects for performance gains in implementation. Moreover, if there is a clash in logics, is there an alignment of logics from one part—potentially the institutionally weaker aligning with the logic of the stronger? In the case of governing public project organizations, the public administrator is assumedly often in a strong institutional position. In terms of politico-administrative craftsmanship, taking the logic of action into consideration, the collaborative question for project organization can be articulated as whether the public administrator can play the collaborative game and boost the assumed problem-solving capacity of collaboration or whether the disjunction in logics prevents the public administrator from fruitfully advancing collaboration in projects (Ansell & Gash, 2008). Metagovernance Theory and Project Application Metagovernance focuses on the intrinsic dilemma of control and autonomy, which is central to governing implementation. In managing collective decision-making and implementation, the public administration risks overly strict management that diverts the focus in the lower echelons from external adaptation to internal compliance with the rules set by the upper echelons. Metagovernance taps into this risk and suggests refraining from interfering in operative action by delegating operative discretion to other agents. The metagovernance approach to the balance between autonomy and control in policy implementation emphasizes the potentially productive value of autonomy over the far-going control of the process and output (Sørensen, 2012).

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In the context of project-based policy implementation, metagovernance would mean that the public administrator with discretion over project funding governs the project at a distance, or at arm’s length, leaving the management of the operative activity to the project manager. In terms of the public project model, this can be done by, for example, focusing on drafting funding calls to incentivize project managers to innovate and adhere to formal rules in coordinating the project through the supervision of mid-term and final project reports (Vento, 2020) (see also Vihma’s chapter). However, on the downside of the project’s temporality, the assumed mechanism faces potential problems by rendering a high degree of uncertainty for the project manager regarding the institutional and strategic compatibility of the project activity (Lundin et  al., 2015). In principle, metagovernance is assumed to counter the potential uncertainty by imposing formal control in the form of, for example, competition and steering through rule setting (Sørensen, 2012). However, it remains an empirical question whether this works for the fixed-time activity of the project with a narrow scope to achieve change. The metagovernance theory applied to the project implementation hence begs the question whether steering through formal organizing of a quasi-market guarantees autonomy for the project and incentivizes the project manager to innovate, thus potentially overcoming the disjunction in logics, or whether the uncertainty caused by the temporality erodes the mechanism (Vento, 2020). Interactive Governance Theory and Project Application Interactive governance theory argues for promoting both effective and democratic governing in order to achieve flexibility and dynamic inclusion, thus rendering management intelligent and creating a trusting relationship between agents (Torfing et al., 2013, 3). Interactive governance is typically interwoven in collaboration and network governance, which share the features of negotiated interactions. Characteristic of interactive governance is ascribing a more active role to the public administrator in governing the process of policy implementation, although dynamically, depending on the policy context and the combination of collaborating agents. Applied to project-based implementation, the mechanism of interactive governance can be assumed to consist of back-and-forth communication during the application procedure in the process of implementing the

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project and during the transition phase of results to a permanent organization at the end of the project (Lundin et al., 2015; Vento, 2020). Close interaction is thought to ensure public discretion over the project organization. The traditional trade-off assumption is that close interaction with public administration squanders the added value of autonomy presented by the temporality of the project, for example, by imposing external goals on it (Torfing et al., 2013). Moreover, temporality can also be disruptive for the creation of trust, which takes time and continuous interaction to establish (Vento, 2020). The question of governing by emphasizing control over the temporary project organization is to what extent the project endeavor can be aligned with the public administration’s means for management and long-term policy strategies (Vento & Kuokkanen, 2022). Metagovernance and interactive governance suggest alternative and, at least partially, diametrically opposed governance mechanisms by prescribing divergent roles for the public administrator, a distinction that can also be considered in terms of hands-on and hands-off governance. Therefore, the question is whether the project organization’s temporality amplifies the potential implementation capacity of the metagovernance mechanism and is incompatible with the strive for control by the interactive approach (Peters, 2012; Sørensen, 2012), or whether the lack of institutional inertia stemming from the temporality actually offers a chance for the public administrator to establish trust with the project manager through dynamic management and dialogue that reduces uncertainty and the temporality actually is a cause of problematic uncertainty for the metagovernance mechanism (see Munck af Rosenschöld’s chapter).

Practical Research Examples The literature overview of project theory found that project organization potentially affects governing mechanisms through the organizing principle and the distinct organizational characteristics of temporality and action logic. Based on this, the chapter argues that project-based implementation is unintelligible in a stages model of implementation, which rests on the policy cycle framework that takes processes and agents for granted based on the institutional prescription of the process. Instead, the public project model of external goal formulation and the responsibility of operative action ought to be approached from a governance-based conception of the policy process, the MGF (Hill & Hupe, 2014). By applying the MGF, the project-based implementation was theorized for a governance analysis.

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Furthermore, it provided a unique opportunity to discuss the action in governing project organizations from a policy process perspective and sought to explain the effects of project organization on governance mechanisms. The research has found that project-based public policies typically consist of several rationales, which may turn out to be mutually exclusive aims and goals. Studies have also showed that project organizing entails new forms of bureaucracy, which may frustrate the non-state and especially the inexperienced project manager (Vento & Kuokkanen, 2022). Moreover, the project organization has been found to affect the collaborative mechanism of governance by imposing its characteristic logic of action on the project agent, which stands in contrast to the logic of the public administration (Vento & Sjöblom, 2018). A project manager’s adherence to project logic can diminish the gains of policy implementation in collaboration. Lastly, the temporality of the project organization has been found to increase the uncertainty of the metagovernance approach through a quasi-­ market without capitalizing on autonomy (Vento, 2020). However, temporality also allows for the creation of trust by rendering it possible to focus on the common aims and means of achieving them through interactive governing. This makes it possible to establish both control and autonomy, which, in turn, strengthens the relationship of trust, ultimately potentially resulting in a virtuous circle. As such, the temporality of project organization challenges the metagovernance’s hands-off mechanism for balancing between autonomy and control, while allowing or even supporting the interactive governance’s hands-on mechanism for balancing autonomy and control in public governance. However, a governance mechanism based on trust, as interactive governance suggests, is susceptible to individual departures. From the perspective of governing implementation, this chapter showed that agents’ influence at different levels and on the scales of governance varies depending on the governing strategy, which in turn affects the performance and balance between autonomy and control in governing public projects. As governance arrangements are often open to non-public agents, the analytical construct can identify how project-driven implementation can unintentionally yield more influence on external agents in decisions with a bearing at the system level of governance. To further concretize the benefits of applying the MGF as presented in this chapter, we can exemplify the study of project implementation from a

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CR perspective and the importance of considering the meaning-laden interpretation as an explanation with the case study by Vento (2020) of different governing strategies. The street-level public administrators of EU cohesion policy implementation have some discretion concerning the organization of project governing and can, for example, often choose whether the call for project applications is organized as a “market of projects,” where the applicants are made aware of each other with the purpose of encouraging cooperation but also for spurring innovation with competition. The alternative is to have traditional project calls in which applicants submit their plans for the public administrator to choose the projects to be funded. The organizational choice obviously has effects on the formation of the project and can lead to both intended and unintended consequences (Vento, 2020). To understand why the public administrator has made the choice, one needs to study his or her motives for the action. As Vento (2020) shows, it seems the role of the understanding of the public administrator can be a determinant for such discretionary decisions, although not necessarily for the explicit reason of achieving the observed effects. An administrator with a self-prescribed professional role as a “public official” may opt for the “project market” for the reason of keeping a distance from the funded projects, while the efficiency goal of the arrangement with its potential consequences are more side effects of the choice. The alternative approach of “hand-picking” the funded projects can, in turn, be a result of the public administrator having a genuine interest in developing the region and thinking that he or she is best suited for directing such undertakings, rather than a pursuit for power and control. However, the MGF also more generally explains the same public administrators’ choices with regard to public governance. The specific decision made by the public administrator can be coined directional governance on an individual level (Table 12.1), which can have an impact on a specific applicant and call but is probably not very consequential from a system point of view. However, if the specific choice by the administrator to, for example, organize the project application process as a market is codified into the unit’s or department’s practices, the public administrator’s motives and actions can be deemed directional governance on an organizational level (Table 12.1), which is probably far more consequential. Furthermore, if the choice and its motives are integrated into the more general rulemaking of the administration, the governance action should be seen as directional governance on a system level (Table 12.1). Naturally, the higher the level of governance, the more far-­reaching the

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political consequences that can intentionally or unintentionally follow from the action. As such, the MGF can assist in identifying the political effects of project-driven policy implementation, which, to date, have been considered largely from technical administrative or management perspectives. However, the framework has a few intrinsic problems. The analytical value provided by the MGF is restricted to identifying key agents and actions as constitutive parts of governance. However, the framework seems perfectly capable of hosting more specific theories, such as metagovernance, interactive governance, or collaborative governance theories. The inevitable complexity of the construct needs, of course, to be weighed against the analytical potential from case to case.

Concluding Remarks This chapter has shown that project-driven public policy implementation can be analyzed with an explanatory objective as policy implementation or as part of the public policy process from a governance perspective. To achieve this aim, the chapter theorized the critical junctures of project organization in relation to public administration as a mechanism of governance, defined in terms of the MGF and three more specific theories. The resulting analytical construct was shown to identify the key agents and their actions and postulate assumptions regarding them. Moreover, the objective of providing a shared scientific base for the research on project-driven policy implementation hailing from seemingly different schools of thought can be said to have been advanced. The practical examples demonstrate how the explanatory ambition is perfectly adaptable by both quantitative and qualitative research designs, as well as by certain interpretative approaches. This is important because the broad range of research on the subject can perhaps be amalgamated with a shared set of definitions and ideas. Having analyzed the effects of project organization on governance mechanisms in policy implementation, this study has also provided some empirically informed findings of project-driven public policy. The chapter has pointed out, for example, that administrative and organizational choices can have intended and unintended consequences for public governance but also affect the possibility of innovation and renewal in public projects.

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Future research should take stock by applying a quasi-experimental design, which has recently become increasingly popular in the social sciences. As many public projects are more day-to-day business than innovation and run with external project funding simply because it is available, a natural experiment setup could be feasible. By utilizing natural divisions, such as observing agents applying for project funding and similar agents not applying but putting the activity into practice by internal means, the effect of the public administrator governing the project could be tested reliably. A qualitative study with fuzzy analysis for multiple cases or process tracing for single case studies could also enrich the understanding of the plethora of meanings attached to projects as policy tools. Such systematic empirical studies, to name but a few, would no doubt provide objective knowledge of the meaning of governance processes in contemporary liberal democracies.

Further Reading This chapter is based on research conducted between 2017 and 2020 and published in the following PhD thesis: Vento, I. (2020). The effects of project organization on public governance: Four case studies in the EU cohesion policy in Finland. University of Helsinki. Project-based policy implementation and governance mechanisms are discussed in Godenhjelm, S., Sjöblom, S., and Jensen, C. (2019). Project governance in an embedded state. In D. Hodgson, M. Fred, S. Bailey, and P. Hall (eds.), The projectification of the public sector (pp. 149–168). Routledge. The multiple governance framework for studying policy implementation in contemporary systems of governance is discussed in Hill, M. J. and Hupe, P. L. (2014). Implementing public policy: An introduction to the study of operational governance (3rd edition). SAGE Publications. The combination of qualitative and quantitative research traditions, and the pursuit of explanation in social sciences with the concept of causal mechanisms, is discussed by Goertz, G., and Mahoney, J. (2012). A tale of two cultures: Qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences. Princeton University Press. For situating the logic of inference within a more general debate on philosophy of science and the outline of the realist approach to science, see Sayer, A. (2010). Method in social science. A realist approach (Revised 2nd edition). Taylor & Francis.

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References Ansell, C. K., & Gash, A. (2008). Collaborative governance in theory and practice. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, 18(4), 543–571. https://doi.org/10.1093/jopart/mum032 Bengtsson, B., & Hertting, N. (2014). Generalization by mechanism: Thin rationality and ideal-type analysis in case study research. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 44(6), 707–732. Cairney, P. (2012). Understanding public policy: Theories and issues. Palgrave Macmillan. Donahue, J. D., & Zeckhauser, R. (2011). Collaborative governance: Private roles for public goals in turbulent times. Princeton University Press. Fred, M. (2018). Projectification—The Trojan horse of local government. Lund University. Frederickson, H.  G. (2009). Whatever happened to public administration?: Governance, governance everywhere. In The Oxford handbook of public management (pp.  282–304). https://doi.org/10.1093/oxfordhb/978019922 6443.003.0013 Godenhjelm, S., Lundin, R. A., & Sjöblom, S. (2015). Projectification in the public sector – The case of the European Union. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 8(2), 324–348. https://doi.org/10.1108/ IJMPB-­03-­2014-­0027 Godenhjelm, S., Sjöblom, S., & Jensen, C. (2019). Project governance in an embedded state. In D.  Hodgson, M.  Fred, S.  Bailey, & P.  Hall (Eds.), The projectification of the public sector 2 (pp. 149–168). Routledge. Goertz, G., & Mahoney, J. (2012). A tale of two cultures: Qualitative and quantitative research in the social sciences. Princeton University Press. Grabher, G. (2002). Cool projects, boring institutions: Temporary collaboration in social context. Regional Studies, 36(3), 205–214. https://doi.org/10. 1080/00343400220122025 Grabher, G. (2004). Learning in projects, remembering in networks?: Communality, sociality, and connectivity in project ecologies. European Urban and Regional Studies, 11(2), 103–123. https://doi.org/10.1177/0969 776404041417 Hill, M. J., & Hupe, P. L. (2014). Implementing public policy: An introduction to the study of operational governance (3rd ed.). Sage. Lundin, R. A., & Söderholm, A. (1995). A theory of the temporary organization. Scandinavian Journal of Management, 11(4), 437–455. Lundin, R.  A., Arvidsson, N., Brady, T., Ekstedt, E., Midler, C., & Sydow, J. (2015). Managing and working in project society institutional challenges of temporary organizations. Cambridge University Press. Meyerson, D., Weick, K.  E., & Kramer, R.  M. (1996). Trust in organizations: Frontiers of theory and research. Sage.

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Munzi, U. (1965). The European social fund in the development of the Mediterranean regions of the EEC. Journal of International Affairs, 19(2), 286–296. Osborne, S. (2010). Conclusions—Public governance and public services delivery: A research agenda for the future. In S. Osborne (Ed.), The new public governance? Emerging perspectives on the theory and practice of public governance (pp. 413–428). Routledge. Ostrom, E. (2007). Institutional rational choice: An assessment of the institutional analysis and development framework. In P.  A. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the policy process (2nd ed., pp. 21–64). Westview Press. Parsons, W. (1995). Public policy. Edward Elgar. Peters, B. G. (2012). Governance as political theory. In D. Levi-Faur (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of governance. Oxford University Press. Sabatier, P. A. (2007). The need for better theories. In P. A. Sabatier (Ed.), Theories of the policy process (2nd ed., pp. 3–20). Westview Press. Sayer, A. (2010). Method in social science. A realist approach (revised 2nd edn). Taylor & Francis. Sjöblom, S., & Godenhjelm, S. (2009). Project proliferation and governance— Implications for environmental management. Journal of Environmental Policy & Planning, 11(3), 169–185. https://doi.org/10.1080/15239080903033762 Sjöblom, S., Löfgren, K., & Godenhjelm, S. (2013). Projectified politics  – Temporary organisations in a public context introduction to the special issue. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17(2), 3–11. Sørensen, E. (2012). Governance and innovation in the public sector. In D. Levi-­ Faur (Ed.), The Oxford handbook of governance (pp.  215–227). Oxford University Press. Torfing, J., Peters, B.  G., Pierre, J., & Sørensen, E. (2013). Interactive governance: Advancing the paradigm. Oxford University Press. Vento, I. (2020). Hands-off or hands-on governance for public innovation? A comparative case study in the implementation of the EU cohesion policy in Finland. International Journal of Public Administration, 43(11), 989–999. Vento, I., & Kuokkanen, K. (2022). Mapping the post-bureaucratic landscape: Project managers’ perception of bureaucracy in European Union cohesion policy projects. International Review of Administrative Sciences, 88(2), 587–684. https://doi.org/10.1177/0020852320969801 Vento, I., & Sjöblom, S. (2018). Administrative agencies and the collaborative game: An analysis of the influence of government agencies in collaborative ­policy implementation. Scandinavian Political Studies, 41(2), 144–166. https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-­9477.12114

CHAPTER 13

Where Do We Go from Here? Sebastian Godenhjelm and Mats Fred

Introduction As a phenomenon, projects have been around for a long time and have been used to manage all sorts of social endeavours, changing societies and organisations and in many ways even our way of life. From a research perspective, the notion of ‘the project’ resembles what Pollitt and Hupe (2011) refer to as a magical concept with strong positive connotations, signalling an ability to solve almost all kinds of problems in innovative ways. Therefore, it is no wonder that projectification can be observed in different sectors and various social activities and events. The promise of efficiency and unambiguity can partly be explained by a combination of ‘pull’ factors, taking the form of wishful thinking where ‘the project’ indicates action, flexibility, rationality, urgency, innovation and efficiency, and ‘push’ factors, in the form of enforced procedures. In

S. Godenhjelm (*) Swedish School of Social Science, University of Helsinki, Helsinki, Finland e-mail: [email protected] M. Fred Department of Political Science, Lund University, Lund, Sweden e-mail: [email protected] © The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8_13

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many cases, it is impossible to raise funds without creating a project. Both pull and push factors are key ingredients for the increasing use of projects or ‘projectification’, that is, the increasing reliance on ‘the project’ in contemporary societies and economies (Godenhjelm et al., 2015). However, while projectification can yield significant benefits, at the same time the consequences of such a development, positive as well as negative, should not be taken lightly. Despite society’s reliance on projects to solve contemporary problems, many questions remain. This is particularly evident in public-sector projects, which are often deemed notoriously difficult to manage. Wirick (2009, 57) even refers to the task of managing and integrating all relevant actors as akin to wrestling an octopus. Given the current importance of public-sector projects, the vast amounts of money and resources allocated to them—and the notoriously bad track record of large-scale projects coming in over budget, not meeting deadlines and not delivering the promised benefits—accentuates the need to further scrutinise projectification (see Flyvbjerg & Gardner, 2023). The crucial questions relate both to specific projects and to practical project management, but they also give rise to additional questions about the political and social context of projects and their management. The study of projects involves intimately following their progress, their structure and organisation, as well as their underlying mechanisms. For instance, it involves assessing just who is included or excluded from a project and decisions about its trajectory, as well as addressing questions about how its objective and operations are measured, evaluated and communicated. Studying the proliferation of and increasing reliance on temporary forms of organisation includes understanding (individual, organizational, societal, cultural and discursive) change and the processes used to achieve it, which is, in a sense, like trying to hit a moving target. What and who facilitates or opposes the increase in the number of projects or the reliance on what can be called a project logic? Finally, studying the context and environments of projectification is a broad and necessary undertaking, one that includes making queries into funding and regulatory mechanisms and what types of problems, or solutions, give rise to project work and what problems do not. In what context does projectification occur, and where (if anywhere) is it not evident? In this volume, we have gathered together scholars in an emerging field of research, and as a research field in the making, more work needs to be done, more questions need to be asked, more fields need to be covered and more analyses need to be conducted. In this final chapter of the book,

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we take a step back, zoom out and reflect upon what we now know in theory and what empirical implications this knowledge may have, but we also make a few suggestions about what future research can/should do, thereby paving the way for an increased dialogue across disciplines.

The State of a Continuously Emerging Research Field A reoccurring theme in this volume revolves around public-sector projects and touches upon a variety of different subjects relating to projectification, illustrating how different theoretical perspectives and empirical examples can contribute to a greater understanding of the consequences and significance of various contexts in a projectified society. As demonstrated by the empirical examples covered in this study, ranging from human relations management, to public health, to the isomorphic changes in culture, society and private life, as well as unemployment and innovation development, the impact of projectification is broad and deep, and perhaps more so than traditionally assumed in management and organisational studies. When projects are treated as ‘black boxes’, that is, as technical instruments, apolitical forms of organisation independent of specific contexts, we miss out on important aspects and consequences of such practices that extend well beyond ‘the project’ (Jacobsson & Söderholm, 2022, 318). Projects are not ‘just’ action-oriented vehicles carrying something forward, but techniques and tools representative of a discourse and practice that produce specific effects of their own. The laborious act of constructing, maintaining and understanding the consequences of projectification therefore requires more than what traditional management techniques or leadership models can deliver. The isolated public-sector project is thereby a vital part of the democratic system and of the reproduction and contestation of power relations, resulting in turn in the ‘political constructions’ of power. Public-sector projects in particular include strong elements like the organisation of power, politics and prioritisation. An integrative or participatory project is, for instance, not just about solving a particular problem within a specific timeframe; equally important is the question of who is involved and who gets to set the agenda and decide on the particular problem. Another key question is whether participatory projects succeed in developing new kinds of democratic participation or, alternatively, if they lead to ‘post-political’ forms of participation and public policies.

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We not only need to understand how projects operate, but also their embeddedness in policy networks. If institutional change is to be created, then focus needs to be shifted from individual projects to viewing projects as embedded within larger organisational and institutional networks, highlighting the significance of the interfaces as well as intermediaries that can function in complex institutional settings. Carefully considering how one’s own project is linked to other projects can help practitioners identify synergies and ensure that the project results can be bundled together to increase their impact. There is value in thinking about the persons with whom one collaborates over time on particular projects and finding windows of opportunity through which change can be induced. It is not only a question of where projects are formed, but when they are formed. Identifying how such formative moments are created is central not only to better understanding the consequences of projectification, but also to adapting project actions and capacity-building potential, or a lack thereof, to meet the increased demand for projectification and the associated treatment of project logic as routine work. The question of the long-term effects of projectification remains open. As can be concluded based on the discussion above, answering the question definitively is no simple matter. Several authors in this volume have addressed this issue and have emphasised the significance of functioning mechanisms when implementing a project and the dilemma faced by temporary and permanent organisations with respect to projects. Many of the dilemmas addressed relate to well-known public-sector problems, where, for instance, efficiency should be viewed based on cost-benefit ratios, budget cycles and similar types of evaluations. Sometimes, projects can lead to subtle changes, for example in the organisational culture, and the outcomes might take years to fully take effect. What this volume suggests is that we should focus more on the long-term effects, the potential for institutional learning and the capacity to increase resilience by adapting activities to a project logic required in ‘unconventional’ contexts, thereby ensuring that creative ideas find channels through which they can induce lasting and more sweeping change.

The Future Need for Projectification Research Given the significant amount of research conducted on projects, some might argue that the research field is crowded and that we have reached a saturation point. Although we agree that a significant amount of research

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has been dedicated to looking beyond projects as isolated incidents (Engwall, 2003; Sahlin-Andersson & Söderholm, 2002), there is still a need to broaden our view, and as this book clearly points out, surprisingly many problems still exist. New organisational forms, such as testbeds, policy labs hackathons or hybrid organisations, follow a similar temporary project logic, accentuating the tensions between flexibility and stability, adventure and controllability, as well as coordination and continuity. The answer to the question of whether more work is needed is therefore, unequivocally, yes! As the chapters included in this book clearly indicate, no one-size-fits-­ all, or ‘cooking book’, explanation exists for how to manage projects in the ‘right way’ (Löfgren & Poulsen, 2013) or how to cope with or understand the processes of projectification. Given the numerous and varying contexts in which projects are employed today, the increased societal acceleration in which decisions need to be made (Jensen et  al., 2018; Rosa, 2013) and the focus on outputs rather than outcomes, presenting an all-encompassing solution to the complexities related to projectification is neither possible nor is it the intention of this book. All theories are children of their time (Lundin & Söderholm, 2013), and this book is no exception. The book without a doubt highlights the serious need to consider the consequences of action-seeking behaviour and just what constitutes appropriate actions when addressing the socio-economic challenges faced by contemporary societies. The added value is, in this case, the use of theories traditionally applied outside management sciences and the use of different methodological tools, thereby contributing to a greater understanding of ‘how action should be organised and the mechanisms that are utilized to make the world interpretable in such terms that can guide action’ (Jacobsson & Söderholm, 2022, 317), providing a more pluralistic understanding of projects (Söderlund, 2012). An interesting aspect of projectification research, of which this book is a good example, is its bias towards the northern parts of Europe and the Nordic countries. All the authors included in this volume are from Northern Europe, and each of us conducted our PhD research in this context (with the exception of Anders Fogh Jensen and Johan Munck af Rosenschöld). Is this because projectification is principally a Northern European phenomenon? We think not! In fact, there are examples of research in the context from Africa and South America (cf. Onali, 2021),

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which suggests that ‘theories’ of projectification do travel (and travel well, we believe). However, we do believe that the Nordic countries in particular have a similar political and administrative ‘model’ rooted in the welfare states and rule of law that has apparently created fertile ground for this type of development. The countries have, for instance, adopted New Public Management reforms that have spurred a silo mentality at the same time as they have called for increased collaboration—collaboration that has often been difficult to resolve within the confines of typical permanent organisations (thus generating temporary projects). But the development extends far beyond Northern Europe. As Anders Fogh Jensen points out, post-World War II cultural movements have provided the mould for the projectification of the organisation. The specific northern ‘focus’ or bias in this volume is also a call for researchers from different disciplines to study projectification in other contexts where the Nordic studies can function as inspiration. Even though this volume and this emerging research field include researchers from a number of the social sciences, there is still room and a need for researchers from other disciplines to address the topic. For instance, the gender perspective still remains underdeveloped (Lindgren & Packendorff, 2006). What would happen if a psychiatrist were to explore projectification, or when anthropologists analyse projectification through the lens of underlying belief systems? As noted in this book, there is also a bias towards qualitative and interpretative methods and single (or a small number of) case studies. Hence, there is a need to extend this growing body of literature through the use of mixed methods and quantitative or register data studies, and researchers also need to compare different cases, countries, contexts and/or organisations. This is somewhat ironic since the Scandinavian School of Management made the explicit choice to move away from the traditional project studies and their quantitative bias—we do not want to exclude this focus, but we think a broader pallet is needed to paint a bigger picture of this broad development. We hope that this book inspires students and academics to study projectification and that practitioners will make use of the knowledge offered from different perspectives on projectification. Finally, we strongly encourage all readers of this book to familiarise themselves with the PhD theses that the chapters were based upon as well as the further readings suggested at the end of each chapter.

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References Engwall, M. (2003). No project is an island: Linking projects to history and context. Research Policy, 32(5), 789–808. Flyvbjerg, B., & Gardner, D. (2023). How big things get done: the surprising factors that determine the fate of every project, from home renovations to space exploration and everything in between. Random House. Godenhjelm, S., Lundin, R. A., & Sjöblom, S. (2015). Projectification in the public sector - The case of the European Union. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 8(2), 324–348. Jacobsson, M., & Söderholm, A. (2022). An essay on ‘homo projecticus’: Ontological assumptions in the projectified society. International Journal of Project Management, 40(4), 315–319. Jensen, C., Johansson, S., & Löfström, M. (2018). Policy implementation in the era of accelerating projectification: Synthesizing Matland’s conflict–ambiguity model and research on temporary organizations. Public Policy and Administration, 33(4), 447–465. https://doi.org/10.1177/095207671 7702957 Lindgren, M., & Packendorff, J. (2006). What’s new in new forms of organizing? On the construction of gender in project-based work. Journal of Management Studies, 43(4), 841–866. Löfgren, K., & Poulsen, B. (2013). Project management in the Danish central government. Scandinavian Journal of Public Administration, 17(2), 61–78. Retrieved from http://ub016045.ub.gu.se/ojs/index.php/sjpa/article/ view/2456 Lundin, R. A., & Söderholm, A. (2013). Temporary organizations and end states. International Journal of Managing Projects in Business, 6(3), 587–594. https://doi.org/10.1108/IJMPB-­09-­2012-­0055 Onali, A. (2021). Serving many masters: A Liberian non-governmental organization managing multiple legitimacy audiences [doctoral dissertation]. JYU Dissertations 442. University of Jyväskylä. Pollitt, C., & Hupe, P. (2011). Talking about government: The role of magic concepts. Public Management Review, 13(5), 641–658. https://doi.org/1 0.1080/14719037.2010.532963 Rosa, H. (2013). Social acceleration. A new theory of modernity. Columbia University Press. Sahlin-Andersson, K., & Söderholm, A. (2002). Beyond project management temporary-­permanent dilemma. Copenhagen Business School Press.

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Söderlund, J. (2012). Theoretical foundations of project management. Suggestions for a pluralistic understanding. In P. W. G. Morris, J. K. Pinto, & J. Söderlund (Eds.), The Oxford handbook of project management (pp.  37–64). Oxford University Press. Wirick, D. W. (2009). Public-Sector Project Management: Meeting the Challenges and Achieving Results. Public-Sector Project Management: Meeting the Challenges and Achieving Results (pp. 1–270). Wiley Blackwell. https://doi. org/10.1002/9780470549131.

Index1

A Activity, 20–22, 24–26, 29, 30, 33, 35, 58, 79, 82, 132, 136, 139, 141, 142, 195, 197, 206, 213, 218 Administrative levels, 13, 132, 168, 169 Agile, 172 Ansell, C., 150, 151, 168, 212 Architecture, 19, 28, 29, 35, 154 Assemblage thinking, 10, 57, 59, 61–64, 69 B Bherer, L., 94, 96, 100, 104 Black boxes, 10, 58 Blended workforce, 12 Boltanski, L., 27, 94, 97, 102, 105 Boutinet, J.-P., 20, 21 Bredin, K., 11, 18, 111 Brokers, 65, 69

Brown, W., 69, 82, 85 Bueger, C., 59, 61, 63 Bureaucracy, 43, 48, 51, 63, 70, 152, 172, 215 Büttner, S., 7, 96, 172 C Career, 48 Chaffin, B. C., 150, 159 Challenges, viii, 1, 4, 13, 47, 131, 134, 135, 138, 142, 147–151, 153, 157, 159, 169, 170, 174, 175, 197, 203, 207, 215 Chiapello, È., 27, 94, 97, 102, 105 Clarity, 51, 170, 174, 176 Cohesion policy, 39, 41, 204, 216 Collaborative, 5, 49, 136, 149, 150, 168, 173, 177–179, 204, 211, 212, 215, 217 arrangements, 168

 Note: Page numbers followed by ‘n’ refer to notes.

1

© The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Switzerland AG 2023 M. Fred, S. Godenhjelm (eds.), Projectification of Organizations, Governance and Societies, https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-031-30411-8

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INDEX

Collier, S. J., 59, 61, 64, 66 Competencies, 30 Consultants, 40, 45, 51, 63–67, 84, 85, 87, 96 Context, x, 3–6, 12, 22, 35, 47, 65, 75, 77, 84, 88, 102, 106, 132–136, 138–142, 153, 158, 169, 171, 174, 175, 177, 179, 191, 195, 196, 208–210, 213 Coordination, vii, 1, 25–27, 135, 169–172, 179, 198, 207 Covid-19, 26 Cross-functionality, 12 Czarniawska, B., 4, 45, 47, 79

Expertise, ix, 10, 27, 58, 59, 61, 64, 66, 69, 70, 82, 104, 138, 147, 149, 158, 175

D Dance, 9, 19, 23–25, 29, 33–35 Deleuze, G., 18, 59, 60 Deliberative democracy, 95, 104, 105 Demarcation, 12, 134, 139, 142, 208 Development aid projects, 10, 59, 63 Digitalization, 147 Disciplinary society, 18, 25–28, 32–34 Dispositif, 26

G Godenhjelm, S., xi, xii, 7, 13, 21, 22, 96, 135, 136, 139–141, 148, 155, 167, 168, 176–178, 190, 192, 194, 205–207, 221 Goertz, G., 205 Governance, 6, 11, 13, 14, 39, 45, 60, 75, 76, 87, 93–98, 102, 148, 150, 153, 158, 159, 167–175, 179, 188–192, 193n1, 194–198, 203–218 Governance mechanisms, 13, 168–170, 175, 204, 206, 207, 209, 211, 214, 215, 217 Graan, A., 62, 66, 70 Grabher, G., 1, 174, 205 Guattari, Félix, 59

E Efficiency, viii, 43, 85, 88, 154, 167, 170, 171, 174, 175, 216 Ehrenberg, A., 33, 34 Eliasoph, N., 97, 101 Embeddedness, 3, 7, 18, 22, 41, 42, 136, 141, 152, 170, 174 Empowerment, 97 Engwall, M., 41, 133, 174, 197 Environmental policy, 148, 153, 190 Ethnographic, 10, 45 European Commission, 39, 173 European Union, 80, 88, 95, 156n1, 189, 204 Experiment, 218

F Flexibility, 32, 51, 133, 148, 149, 152, 153, 157, 159, 175, 179, 194, 198, 213 Flexible, 31, 32, 44, 52, 151, 157, 168, 170, 179, 205, 210 Foucault, M., 18, 19, 22, 26, 78n1, 81 Fred, M., xi, xii, 7, 9, 39, 44, 63, 70, 96, 97, 104, 133, 134, 188, 193, 206

H Hackathons, 11, 12, 147–149, 151, 153, 154, 157–159 Han, Byung-Chul, 33 Hill, M., 172, 204, 209, 210, 214 Hodgson, D., 3, 5, 6, 21, 40, 41, 44, 131, 133, 152, 169, 172, 174

 INDEX 

Human resource management (HRM), 2, 11, 112, 115 Hupe, P., 172, 204, 209, 210, 214 Hybrid, 168, 172, 180 I Ideological, 69, 135, 140, 141 Implementation, vii, 13, 14, 41, 48, 63, 66, 68, 93, 95, 131, 135, 138, 142, 157, 158, 169, 170, 172–174, 176, 189, 193, 196–198, 203–207, 209–215, 217 Incremental change, 197 Innovation, viii, 12, 44, 49, 52, 85, 94, 96, 139, 147, 150, 154, 158, 159, 167, 169, 177–179, 189, 191, 192 Innovation governance, 168, 180 Institutional change, 13, 42, 134, 148, 150, 158, 187–189, 191–198 Institutional logic, 40, 206 Instrumental, ix, 13, 140, 142, 176 Integration, 75, 76, 133–135, 141, 148, 151, 171 Interaction, 42, 101–103, 105, 133, 136, 138, 148, 150, 152, 155, 159, 214 Interfaces, 3, 12, 148–153, 156–159 Interpretive policy analysis, 98 Interventions, 46, 62, 75, 132–135, 138, 168, 206 J Jacobsson, B., 173 Jacobsson, M., 9, 96, 134, 169 Jałocha, B., xi, 7, 9, 40, 96, 169 Jensen, A. F., 7, 9, 17, 76, 94 Jensen, C., 63, 96, 100, 131, 135, 195 Jensen, Marie Stissing, xi

231

K Karo, E., 150, 159 Klijn, E.-H., 167, 168, 170, 172, 173 Krause, M., 62, 75, 85 Kuokkanen, K., 11, 93–104, 106, 211, 214, 215 L Latent functions, 41 LEADER, 189, 190, 193, 195, 196 Legitimacy, 82, 86, 88, 148, 151, 153, 155–158, 172, 178, 198, 212 Li, T. M., 59, 61–63, 66, 69 Lindgren, M., 3, 7, 41, 43, 52 Local government, x, 40–49, 51, 52, 190 Long-term, 48, 94, 97, 99, 100, 102, 104, 135, 142, 148, 157, 169, 173, 175–177, 179, 214 Lundin, A. R., 4, 7 Lundin, R. A., x, 4, 18, 20, 43, 133–135, 141, 142, 152, 180, 187, 205, 206, 213, 214 M Mahoney, J., 205 Management, viii–x, 3, 5–9, 11, 12, 18, 20, 22, 40–43, 50–52, 58, 62, 66, 69, 70, 87, 88, 95, 97, 99, 100, 102, 131, 132, 134, 142, 148, 150–152, 155, 170–177, 179, 193, 196, 205, 210, 212–214, 217 Manifest functions, 40 Marketization, 67 Mazeaud, A., 98, 104 Mc Glinn, M., 66, 69 Mechanisms, 13, 18, 49, 84, 150–152, 155, 159, 169, 170, 172, 173, 177, 179, 190, 192, 193, 203–205, 207–209, 211, 214 Merton, K. M., 40

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Metagovernance, 198, 204, 211–215, 217 Midler, C., x, xi, 2–4, 18, 170 Mouffe, C., 58, 69 Mukhtar-Landgren, D., xi, 7, 97, 104 Müller, R., 173 Munck af Rosenschöld, J., 13, 151, 157, 188, 189, 192–194, 197 N Networks, 3–5, 14, 32, 33, 45, 46, 49, 79, 96–98, 102, 150, 159, 168, 172, 178, 197, 198 New Public Management (NPM), 43, 170–173, 175 Nonaka, I., 150 Non-governmental organisation (NGO), 100, 102, 104, 105 Nonjon, M., 96, 98, 104 O Ong, A., 59–61, 64, 66 Open innovation systems, 147 Organisational boundaries, 133 Organisational change, 4, 42, 44, 51, 134 Ostrom, E., 208–210 Outcomes, 13, 47, 88, 135, 142, 168, 169, 173, 175–177, 179 Output, 140, 176, 207, 212 P Packendorff, J., 3, 7, 18, 20, 41, 43, 52 Participatory democracy, 95 Participatory governance, 11, 93–97 Participatory projects, 11, 93, 94, 97–106 Permanent organization, 135, 152, 158, 192–194, 197, 214 Policy-implementing, 133, 141 Policy instruments, 10, 41, 168

Policy learning, 150, 159 Political constructions, 57–59, 61–63, 69, 70 Politics, 3, 8, 14, 58, 69, 78, 98, 101, 142, 210, 211 Post-political, 11, 93, 94, 96, 98, 104, 105 Power, 5, 8, 11, 14, 58, 59, 69, 77, 83, 132, 152, 167, 172, 173, 189, 216 Processes, vii–ix, 12, 14, 40–42, 45, 46, 49–51, 60, 63, 65, 66, 69, 77, 81, 89, 133, 139, 148, 153, 156–159, 168, 169, 172, 173, 175, 191, 192, 203, 214, 218 Project-based organisation, 2 Project bureaucracy, 63, 64, 70 Projectified governance, 13, 148, 188, 189, 192–194, 193n1, 196–198 Project logic, 7, 9, 40–48, 50–52, 96, 206, 207, 215 Project organization, 203, 205–207, 209–212, 214, 215, 217 Project Society, 4, 9, 17–19, 21, 22, 24, 28, 30–35 Project time, 68, 138 Proximity, 50, 148, 151, 153–158, 177, 192 Public administration, vii–x, 6, 7, 13, 22, 43, 93–98, 104, 105, 133, 153, 170, 205, 206, 211, 212, 214, 215, 217 Public health, 11, 12, 49, 131–139, 141, 142 Public participation professionals, 96, 98, 100, 104 Public service, 168, 174 R Realism, 20, 207 Regional Conservation Partnership Program (RCPP), 189, 191, 193–195

 INDEX 

Repertoires, 66 Richterich, A., 148 S Sabel, C. F., 150, 159 Sassen, S., 59, 60, 75 Sayer, A., 204, 207 School, viii, x, 2, 5, 8, 8n2, 28, 137–140 Schumpeter, J. A., viii, 21 Scott, D., 10, 45, 57, 79, 83 Scott, W. R., 42 Simon, W. H., 150, 159 Single life, 29 Sjöblom, S., 6, 94, 96, 133, 151, 167, 168, 170, 174, 187, 192, 195, 206, 215 Social context, 135, 141 Social investment, 45–50, 52 Söderberg, E., 12, 131, 139, 140, 142 Söderholm, A., 3, 4, 20, 41, 43, 133–135, 141, 142, 152, 169, 180, 187, 205, 206 Sørensen, E., 96, 168, 198, 211–214 Specialized knowledge, 151 Speed, 13, 31, 32, 68, 169 Sports, 19 Stakeholder, 94, 96, 97, 100, 174, 178 Standing, G., 28, 81 Structural funds, 173 Sustainability, 147, 148, 150, 153, 154, 158, 171 Swyngedouw, E., 94, 96, 105 Sydow, J., 133, 134 T Task, 5, 12, 20, 21, 26, 29, 78, 89, 101, 105, 131, 133–135, 137–142, 193, 206, 207

233

Team, xii, 12, 21, 32, 131, 133–137, 139–142, 150, 154, 155, 157, 158, 206, 207, 211 Temporariness, 12, 135, 192, 205–207 Temporary, vii, x, 2–8, 12–14, 20, 21, 25, 28–31, 34, 35, 40, 43, 48, 49, 60, 133, 134, 138, 141, 149, 152, 153, 158, 168–171, 173–175, 177, 179, 180, 188, 197, 205, 214 Thick description, 99, 106 Thornton, P. H., 40 Time, ix, xi, xvi, 2, 8, 10, 12, 14, 20, 22–28, 32, 34, 35, 41, 44–48, 50, 51, 57, 60, 62, 65, 68, 69, 76, 78, 80, 81, 83–85, 88, 96, 102, 131, 133–135, 137–142, 151, 152, 155, 157, 159, 174, 179, 180, 190, 192, 197, 206, 209, 213, 214 Torfing, J., 152, 156, 168, 198, 213, 214 Traits, 12, 27, 194 Transformation, viii, 2, 12, 19, 22, 29, 33–35, 40, 42, 46, 49, 50, 85–87, 135, 140, 141 Transformational change, 197 Transformative capacity, 187, 188 Transition, 83, 84, 131, 133–135, 140–142, 147, 150, 158, 214 Trojan horse, 9, 39 U Up-scaling, 194 V Values, viii, 31, 81, 84, 104, 148, 149, 154, 167–169, 171, 173, 174, 176, 179, 207, 210–212, 214, 217

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INDEX

Vento, I., 14, 98, 195, 203, 213–216 Vihma, P., 12, 147, 148, 150, 151, 153, 157, 159, 188, 192, 213 Von Danwitz, S., 132, 135

W Warfare, 9, 19, 31–33, 35 Wicked problems, 150, 168 Wilson, J., 94, 96, 105