Abstract:
For the past decade, project organization has become increasingly central to management and
organization studies, particularly as these seek to discern the contours of post-modern organizations.
Yet, these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project
management. In this paper we take such bearings, using data derived from a detailed qualitative,
ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management. Project managers from France
speak authentically about the experience of being a project manager. From this data we construct the
contours more sharply. Rather than being a harbinger of an autonomous and more democratic future,
free from extant bureaucratic organization controls, we find that project management has distinct
modalities of control that we outline in the paper: behavioural, calculative, organizational, professional
and corporate. Indeed, rather than foreshadowing a future transformational form, we find traces of a
much older design: that of Tocqueville.
