Innovative approaches in project management research

JPMA-01695; No of Pages 3 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com ScienceDirect International Journal of Project Management xx (2014) xxx – xxx www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman Editorial Innovative approaches in project management research The 2013 IRNOP (International Research Network for Organizing by Projects) conference was held at BI Norwegian Business School in Oslo, Norway with the theme of “Innovative Approaches in Project Management Research”. This special issue presents selected papers which were suggested by the track chairs and subsequently reviewed by the Journal reviewers. IRNOP 2013 attracted more than 150 submissions, an all time high for IRNOP, of which 84 were chosen for presentation at the conference. The innovative approaches shown in the submitted papers were mainly in new types of perspectives towards research in projects, programs, portfolios and their management. These papers follow the trend of recent years, which has addressed perspectives such a “Making Projects Critical” (Winter et al., 2006) or the “Practice Turn in Project Management” (Blomquist et al., 2010) to name a few. Along this line, a number of researchers continue to support the community of researchers with new and inspiring research perspectives (e.g. Bakker, 2010; Packendorff, 2014; Söderlund, 2011). This is a favorable development, which contributes to the needed pluralism in project management research as suggested, for example, by Söderlund (2013). This positive development is, however, not matched by a related variety in empirical research designs and research methods to execute the suggested studies and their new perspectives. Indeed, despite the call for papers emphasizing papers on methods and design, very few submissions to IRNOP 2013 addressed design or methodological issues. Even that does not come as a surprise, as studies have shown that project-related research is very traditional in its design and its researchers rarely dare to leave established avenues of interviews, questionnaires, and regressions/Structural Equation Modeling for trying new and unpaved ways in order to find new or contradictory insights (Biedenbach and Müller, 2011; Sankaran et al., 2013; Smyth and Morris, 2007). Technically speaking this can be seen as a Type 1 and Type 2 error problem: how many new insights do we miss by erroneously applying a traditional methodology when a contemporary approach would be more appropriate? Conversely, how many new insights will we miss by erroneously applying a contemporary methodology when a traditional one would be needed for a new insight? The high popularity of traditional methodologies shifts the balance clearly towards the former: we miss the opportunity for new insights by using established methods for almost all types of empirical investigations. When taking Popper's (1959, p. 8) view that a methodology is the “rational reconstruction” of the researcher's thought process, then the community of researchers in project management seems to be strongly aligned, thus narrowly oriented, in their methodological thinking. Therefore we would like to use this editorial to give some hints on recently developed methodological enhancements from neighborhood disciplines which could be of use for the community of project researchers. For that we focus on the research design and data collection phases of research. We do not claim that these approaches were not yet used in project-related research, but we see too little use of it and we see too little debate about methodological approaches and design issues in general in published work in the domain of project management. On the one hand Aaron Shenhar's (2001) famous phrase “One size does not fit all projects” aspires to become the mantra of the research community, as exemplified in the countless articles with a country or industry in its title (e.g. “Critical Success Factors for IT projects in ….”). On the other hand it is surprising that methods especially designed to support the context specificity of phenomena are not more often used by the research community. Examples include Systematic Literature Reviews (Harden and Thomas, 2010; Harden et al., 2004; Tranfield et al., 2003), which are designed to develop evidence-based context dependent taxonomies of phenomena (Pawson, 2006). Originally developed to show which medical treatment works in which circumstance, a similar context specificity can be applied to project-related phenomena. To use the former example: “which success criteria work in which context (country/industry)”, this would not only reduce the number of individual articles, all with the same method and overlapping findings, but also provide one reference for practitioners and academics instead of dozens of repetitive articles. Another contradictory is the frequently claimed need for a practice turn in project research, while, at the same time, large communities of practitioners are available through social media but not used in or for studies. This includes the numerous project management groups in, for example, LinkedIn or http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/j.ijproman.2014.10.001 0263-7863/00/© 2014 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved. Please cite this article as: R. Müller, J. Söderlund, 2014. Innovative approaches in project management research, Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.ijproman.2014.10.001 2 Editorial Facebook, which are rarely contacted to do more than just answering questionnaires, as can be seen in the very few papers published by teams consisting of academics and practitioners (see Berggren et al., 2008, for an exception). These communities present opportunities for researchers to make the claimed practice move a reality by teaming up with practitioners and use, for example, Action Research to study practice-relevant topics (Er et al., 2013), or to investigate the role of social media in project management by investigating the traces project managers leave in the Internet (Thelwall, 2011). Other opportunities present themselves through more studies using mixed-method designs. These approaches are rarely used, but allow for various forms of triangulation, such as methodological (Cameron and Sankaran, 2013) or philosophical triangulation (Bechara and Van de Ven, 2011) to increase the credibility of the research results. We could go on for a while here, but we think that the 2013 published first book on research methods for organizational project management (Drouin et al., 2013) provides further inspiration in this respect. It addresses translational research designs (i.e. designs that allow for quick practice use) and transformational designs (i.e. designs that shift existing paradigms and perspectives). While doing a contemporary study is one thing, getting it published is another. That puts a burden on the community of reviewers to get familiar with these new approaches in order to give qualified feedback. However, for reviewers it is not a question of yes or no, but more a question of when they have to get familiar with contemporary approaches in order to avoid imposing their own worldview or preferred methodologies on authors instead of returning “to the initial model of reviewing papers so they reflect the authors' voices, as opposed to that of the reviewers or editors” (Zaid, 2014, citing Andrew van de Ven). The scarcity of new methodological approaches in the papers submitted to IRNOP (or the reviewers' rejection of “out of the box” papers?) is reflected in the three selected works. Two of the papers are conceptual in nature and address project management practice in terms of the professionalism of the project manager and the role of improvisation in achieving this success. One paper uses a systematic literature review to identify categories of research contributions to the Rethinking Project Management stream. The first paper is by Bredillet, Tywoniak and Dwivedula. It addresses the question of “What is a good project manager?” by taking the perspective of the types of project manager competences as well as their assessment. This is the more difficult as there are substantial differences within each of these two perspectives. By taking a philosophical approach the authors identify that the expectations of different project management standards, such as attribute-based standards and performance-based standards, can be reconciled at the individual level by moving from the prevailing deontological (i.e. achieving “good” outcomes through “good” actions) and consequentialist (i.e. focusing on “good” outcomes) ethics perspectives to the more holistic Aristotelian ethics (i.e. having a “good” character) in order to “do the right things right” for the benefit of stakeholders. This approach combines ethical and intellectual dimensions for the judgment on a “good” practice and/or practitioner by moving the project manager's virtue in the center of the judgment, thereby overcoming the duty and outcome divide as established by the more deontological and consequentialist schools and manifested in the two different types of project management standards. The second paper is by Klein, Biesenthal and Dehlin and addresses the role of improvisation in project management. The paper is the conceptual part of a larger effort to develop a praxeological meta-theory that spans existing project management knowledge and applies it in a contextual way. By way of that the authors aim for the development of a framework for the project managers' theoretical knowledge, based on multiple schools and standards of project management, and its application in different situations. The application of the framework's context-specific knowledge is proposed to help project managers to improvise successfully when the need arises. Thus the paper aims for preparing practitioners for resilient project management practices, a contribution to the practice turn discussions in project research. The third paper is by Svejvig and Andersen. Through a two-stage (unstructured/structured) literature review the authors address the development of the Rethinking Project Management stream of research and provide a critical discussion of its accomplishments. Six broad categories of research are identified: contextualization, social and political aspects, rethinking practice, complexity and uncertainty, actuality of projects, and broader conceptualization. The analysis of the papers indicates a) a general emphasis on theorizing and lesser interest on a well-grounded, empirical understanding of projects, and b) that only a small number of the identified papers are related to the practice turn in project research, despite its importance for the Rethinking Project Management movement. In summary, the third paper underscores the imbalance between theoretical papers and empirical investigations that we outlined in the beginning of this editorial. How much knowledge do we miss to discover by not following up on these well-grounded theoretical findings with empirical investigations? For example, Paper 1 would benefit from a follow-up study on a deeper empirical understanding of the role of Aristotelian ethics in practice, possibly through a longitudinal ethnographic study. Paper 2 could possibly be followed-up by developing evidence-based taxonomies of the phenomenon in its context and then test it in practice, thereby providing guidelines to practitioners as to what these phenomenon can possibly mean in their particular context. There are many other ways of driving these studies further. In conclusion of the above we would like to encourage the community of project scholars to a) build on existing studies to develop strong and lasting theories, instead of “reinventing the wheel” again and again (Söderlund and Geraldi, 2012), and b) move from theorizing to empirical evidence, which implies the use of new and yet unfamiliar methods. This may be more cumbersome to do than using the old and proven ways of doing things, but it bears the potential for real breakthrough results. Isn't that what we as researchers are aiming for? Please cite this article as: R. Müller, J. Söderlund, 2014. Innovative approaches in project management research, Int. J. Proj. 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Ralf Müller * Corresponding author: BI Norwegian Business School, Department of Leadership and Organizational Behaviour, Nydalsveien 37, 0484 Oslo, Norway. E-mail address: ralf.muller@bi.no Jonas Söderlund BI Norwegian Business School, Norway Please cite this article as: R. Müller, J. Söderlund, 2014. Innovative approaches in project management research, Int. J. Proj. Manag. http://dx.doi.org/10.1016/ j.ijproman.2014.10.001