Hybrid Controls in Project Organisations

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.