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The purpose of this paper is to discuss and critically examine how formal project management (PM) tools and techniques affect the organization of university research.

The paper is empirically grounded and explores how university researchers respond to an increasing emphasis on formalized PM methods to manage research work conducted within the university. The empirical material consists of 20 interviews with research staff working with engineering, natural and medical sciences at Uppsala University, Sweden. Describing how PM techniques are increasingly imposed upon the researchers, the paper analyses different modes of relating to the formalized toolsets, and discusses their accommodation and resistance within academia.

One key finding is how the PM formalization is resisted by partial accommodation and containment. This can be described in terms of an enactment of a front- and a backstage of the research organization. At the front-stage, formal PM technology and terminology is used by specially appointed research managers as means of presenting to funding agencies and other external parties. At the backstage, researchers carry out work in more traditional forms.

The findings indicate a challenge for research to comply with increased PM formalization and secure on-going open-ended research. Second, the paper points toward a risk of young researchers being nudged out into “front-stage” administration with little chance of returning to “backstage” research.

This paper builds upon a growing area of the critical analysis of PM practice, offering insights into the tension between the values and norms of university research and an on-going formalization of PM in some organizational contexts.

Traditional perspectives of manufacturing strategy tend to focus internal transforming activities, including how transformed resources are handled and the relations with other value‐creating operations inside and outside the firm. Manufacturing management evolved as a discipline with little clear alignments with business strategy and firm positioning. Even manufacturing strategy is often delimited to the boundaries of the firm and its dyad relations to collaborating actors such as suppliers and distributors. This paper aims at exploring and demonstrating what a network perspective can add to the understanding of manufacturing management and strategy.

The research design is built on principal reasoning of future manufacturing strategy. Articles and conference papers together with over 25 years of field studies constitute the empirical base. An industry was chosen to demonstrate the application of the research framework of horizontal and vertical technologies.

The analysis indicates that manufacturing occurs within open‐production systems here called extraprises as an extension to enterprises with their inside the firm focus. Taking a network perspective, it is suggested that a conceptual framework of horizontal and vertical technologies offers a fruitful conceptualization to identify the content and meaning of future manufacturing strategy.

The network theory conceptualization takes the view of manufacturing systems a further step beyond systems theory and contributes a richer framework for manufacturing strategy research.

It is argued that future directions of manufacturing strategy will gain from taking a network perspective using network theory with its foundations in actors, resources, and activities.

Since the reforms started in the Romanian child protection, and in spite of adopting children’s rights, and investing in the professionalization of the child protection staff, research has indicated that children continue to suffer violence in care settings.

This chapter contributes to the literature that documents children’s rights violations in Romanian residential care, before and after the political shift in 1989, including the period after the accession to the EU, by presenting and discussing interview data of 48 adults who spent parts of their childhoods in child protection settings.

The conceptual framework of this analysis is based on the human rights perspective and the transitional justice. The main body of the article presents the testimonials of adults who grew up in institutional care in Romania, as collected in the framework of the SASCA project, funded by the European Union. ¹

The purpose of this paper is to identify areas and issues for management to consider in balancing specialization and commonalization in large manufacturing corporations with multiple brands from a strategic R&D and manufacturing point of view.

Three global manufacturing corporations from the automotive sector are used as a strategic sample composing three sequential clinical research projects. The data come from complementary data-gathering methods combining documents and interviews and workshops with top executives, project leaders, platform managers and product brand managers, thus enabling triangulation.

The study shows that managing manufacturing corporations with multiple brands is not just on a scale between full specialization and full commonalization but instead has its own logic of categorizations and portfolio formations. In order to develop the value of the brand portfolio, management must simultaneously embrace and address a number of highly integrated corporate values and highly differentiated brand company values.

This study contributes primarily by relating economy of scale in relation to the need for differentiation of products and brands that have different values, customers and market positions. A model for balancing commonalization and specialization provides several opportunities for further research and development; however, generalizations are issue and context specific.

The critical issues in balancing how to deal with specialization and commonalization in a company with multiple brands are explored and summarized in a framework for the practitioner to use in analyzing a real situation.

Previous literature focuses on the maximization of synergies within one brand, missing the specific dynamics of large manufacturing corporations with many entities, such as individual products and brands. This paper adds knowledge regarding how to balance synergies from commonalization with important objectives to preserve the specialization and distinctiveness of each product brand.

Marit Kristine Ådland is a Ph.D. student at Oslo and Akershus University College of Applied Science. Her research interests and activity is within knowledge organization, information behavior, information retrieval, and information architecture. Her current research explores users’ tags and tagging behavior in the field of cancer information. She teaches classification and indexing to students training in librarianship.