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International Journal of Project Management 33 (2015) 251 – 253
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
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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 Litera-
ture 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
252 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 commu-
nities 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 philosoph-
ical 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 manage-
ment 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 Manage-
ment stream of research and provide a critical discussion of its
accomplishments. Six broad categories of research are identi-
fied: 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 inves-
tigations? 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 longi-
tudinal 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 phenom-
enon 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?
 Editorial
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Ralf Müller
Corresponding author at: 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