School of Communication and Culture

In this paper, we propose that posthumanist and constructivist insights and methods from the field of Science, Technology and Society studies (STS) can contribute to Project Management (PM) research. We argue that a focus on performativity, materiality, power and empirical studies of practice – all central to STS – provides novel approaches to PM. In the analysis and understanding of PM, we should pay attention to how tools, methods and discourses are adapted in the actual PM practices. We argue that we should be equally critical of both the instrumentalist and functionalist ideas of rationalist and managerial approaches to PM, but also of the critiques of those approaches, since they may tend to overemphasize the strengths of rationalist approaches in actual practices. Based on this discussion, we argue that the role of STS in PM research and suggest that maybe we should develop a discourse that is more ‘problem’- than ‘solution’-oriented.