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Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff are the 2017 winners of the PMI Research Achievement Award. They are given the award for founding the Making Projects Critical (MPC) network and workshops, as well as for the ongoing research that opens up project management and project-based organisations to critical examination. The award is shared with their MPC collaborators; Director Svetlana Cicmil at Bristol Business School, University of the West of England, and Professor Damian Hodgson at Alliance Manchester Business School, Manchester University.

PMI (Project Management Institute) is the leading international association for project managers, with operations in over 80 countries. The PMI Research Achievement Award is one of the premier research awards in the field, and has been awarded since 2003 to ”recognize and honor an individual or group of individuals whose work has significantly advanced the concepts, knowledge, and practices of project management through a published body of academic research”. It is the second time the award has gone to Swedish scholars. Read the list of past winners!.

The editor-in-chief of Project Management Journal writes about us in this editorial!

The award was handed over at a ceremony in Boston, 14th June 2017. M J

In this new article in Higher Education, Marianne Ekman, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff discuss how ‘managerialist’ and ‘leaderist’ discourses are drawn upon in the context of the deregulation of Swedish higher education. As of 2011, there has been new legislation that frames Swedish universities as ‘autonomous’ and transfers most of the regulative responsibilities from the government level to university vice-chancellors. The aim of this article is to inquire into how tensions within and between managerialist and leaderist discourse are handled in the promotion of New Public Management reforms and the conse- quences thereof in terms of how leadership in the higher education sector is constructed. We analyse how these discourses are employed in the core documents leading up to the 2010 Riksdag decision to enact most of the proposed deregulations, and the subsequent evaluation undertaken by the social democratic government that took over in 2014. Based in this analysis, we suggest that the texts indeed draw upon notions of leadership and leaders as necessary for Swedish universities to survive and thrive in the future, but that the envisaged practise of this ‘strong leadership’ can either be characterised as a discursive void or described in terms of de- personalised, instrumental managerial surveillance and control. Read the article open access at the journal homepage!

What does the promotion of ’entrepreneurship’ do to us? In a new article in acclaimed journal Organization, Karin Berglund, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff take an interest in what subjectivities are fostered among schoolchildren through the recent introduction of entrepreneurship initiatives in primary and secondary school. The educational terrain is but one example where entrepreneurship has been discursively transformed during recent decades from the notion of starting businesses into a general approach to life itself in the advancement of neoliberal societies. Entrepreneurship is presented as being equally available for all and something everyone should aspire to, yet the initiatives still sustain the suppression and marginalisation of women and femininities. The initiatives specifically promote a responsible and adaptive masculine subject position while notions of rebellious entrepreneurship and non-entrepreneurial domestic positions are mobilised out of the picture. Read more at the article home page

Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff participated in the 2016 AoM meeting, held in Anaheim, California, 4-9 August. They presented the paper ”Fragmented meritocratisation: On mobilisation and demobilisation of gender in higher education”, co-authored with Marianne Ekman Rising, in the Critical Management Studies stream.

In 13-14 April 2016, the first ever international Symposium on Projectification of the Public Sector were held at Malmö University, organized by Mats Fred and Dalia Mukhtar-Landgren. Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff were invited, and contributed with the presentation ”Projects as a mode of justification: On the discursive fabric of projectification”. Read more (in Swedish)

In an article in the special issue on the politics of projects in technology-intensive work in New Technology, Work and Employment, Svetlana Cicmil, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff examine how the discourses related to project-based work and management are drawn upon in the organising of contemporary work, and the implications they have for project workers. We are interested in how project workers and projectified organisations become vulnerable to decline, decay and exhaustion and why they continue to participate in, and so sustain, projectification processes. The critical perspective taken here, in combination with our empirical material from the ICT sector, surfaces an irreversible decline of the coping capacity of project workers and draws attention to the addictive perception of resilience imposed on and internalised by them as a condition of success and longevity. Under those circumstances, resilience is made sense of and internalised as coping with vulnerability by letting some elements of life being destroyed; thus re-emerging as existentially vulnerable rather than avoiding or resisting the structures and processes that perpetuate vulnerability. Read more on the journal homepage!

Damian Hodgson, Monica Lindgren, Johann Packendorff and Svetlana Cicmil has co-edited a a new special issue on ”The politics of projects in technology-intensive work”. Published in well-ranked New Technology, Work and Employment journal, the special issue contains four original articles on various aspects of project work. Read more in the editors’ introduction and in the journal table of contents!

Johann Packendorff has been appointed full professor of Industrial Economics and Management at KTH. He will hold the new position from the onset of March, 2016. Read more at the KTH website! 

In a recently published article in well-ranked Entrepreneurship and Regional Development journal, Karin Berglund, Johan Gaddefors and Monica Lindgren discuss entrepreneurship in a depleted community in transition. The purpose is to develop knowledge about how discourses are used in the positioning of identity in regional development. The concept positioning illustrates how identities are provoked, challenged, negotiated and moved into identity positions that break away from the idea of imitating successful and wealthy regions; instead, locality, place and history emerge as important resources from where local actors obtain agency and recognize new opportunities. Results show how rural change was conditioned by discourses and how entrepreneurship challenged and reframed dominating structures through interaction between entrepreneurship and community. Four discourses, expressed as dichotomies available to people in this depleted community, illustrate the interactive process of positioning: change vs. traditions, rational vs. irrational, spectacular vs. mundane and individual vs. collective. The results support research emphasizing perspectives that acknowledge interaction between entrepreneurship and context as well as discursive aspects of regional development. Read more!

The 8th Making Projects Critical workshop was arranged at Newcastle University Business School, UK, 21-22 January. Organized by Neil Alderman, Chris Ivory, Svetlana Cicmil, Damian Hodgson, Monica Lindgren and Johann Packendorff, it gathered scholars from three continents for presentations and discussions on cutting-edge critical project studies. Read more