Who Needs Traditional Organizations?


Those of us who have been studying projects and temporary organizations tend to set our mind accordingly. We open our eyes more widely towards those kinds of phenomena leaving very little and very limited room for traditional thinking about organizations as permanent entities. In our view, most of the important economic activities can be regarded as projects. Wherever we look, we see projects, projects, and projects. This is not to say that we do not see other organized activities as well. On the contrary, we see a lot of organization, but the organization we see is designed to get things done in a project-like manner. As already indicated, projects appear to be of main importance for profit generation, but they are far from being organized as traditional organizations.

This leaves us with projects as a matter of utmost interest and a notion of traditional organizations with a decided stress on "traditional." Together with the example of "making money fast" entrepreneurial activities mentioned under the first heading, this places a special emphasis to the question in the headline: "Who needs traditional organizations?" Part of the answer that is of interest in the present context is that these organizations often function as "mothers" to projects and that they are needed as hosts for projects. (The mother organization is where a project is conceived and the host organization is where a project is carried through. In the majority of real-world cases the mother and the host are the same organization, but there are of course exceptions.) Out of the twenty-five major projects used as illustrations by Ekstedt et al. (1999), twenty-one were hosted by one and only one organization. (This proportion does not at all reflect proportions in the project populations. The reason is that most projects hosted by a single organization are close to invisible to the outside world. At least there are very few statistics available to the general public concerning such projects.) These twenty-one cases covered projects of a wide variety: building construction, theater and opera, product development, and organizational renewal to mention a few. The remaining four projects were inter-organizational, meaning that they could be described as joint ventures with several important stakeholders involved. One feature of projects hosted by a single organization is that they are more or less totally under the control of that organization. Conversely, this means that the organization is responsible for how the project is handled.

Leaving the fairly trivial questions about hosts and mothers aside, there are two other types of answers to the previous question, why traditional organizations are needed after all. The discussion to ensue in the following sections is based on empirical work presented in Ekstedt et al. (1999) and by Pettigrew and his associates (Whittington et al. 1999), respectively. Essentially the arguments are of two types. The arguments based on the work presented in Ekstedt et al. center on learning in project work and how learning aspects relate to the organization of a traditional kind serving as hosts for the project in question. The Pettigrew material concerns how traditional and typically permanent organizations are changing character to become atypical and how new organizational forms for ventures also might alter the character of the host organizations. I will commence my discussion with the latter example.




The Frontiers of Project Management Research
The Frontiers of Project Management Research
ISBN: 1880410745
EAN: 2147483647
Year: 2002
Pages: 207

flylib.com © 2008-2017.
If you may any questions please contact us: flylib@qtcs.net