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The purpose of this paper is to investigate tool lending library patrons’ perception of their tool borrowing, in order to explore the role of a public lending service in the context of their lives. It addresses the research question, why do patrons borrow tools from the library?

A case study was conducted, consisting of semi-structured interviews with patrons of a tool lending library. Led by a phenomenographic approach, the interviews focused on participants’ recounted experiences. Transcripts were structured into major categories and underlying themes. Findings were discussed from a perspective taking departure in Wiegand’s notion of “the library in the life of the user,” and summarized with regards to sustainable community development.

Participants are found to talk about their tool borrowing from two main viewpoints. First, reasons for making the decision. This involves weighing practical considerations, e.g., cost, storage, access, and frequency of use. It also includes ideological motivations, and sympathy with the concept. Second, effects of their borrowing, interpreted as how it enables them. This enablement includes inspiration, learning, support to self-employment, and strengthening of community. Patrons focus on local aspects of social and economic development, rather than global or environmental motivations.

A single and in part unique setting was studied. The findings provide foundation for a developed discussion on the societal role of public libraries providing “non-traditional” materials such as tools, with particular regards to community settings and sustainability.

Addresses knowledge gaps on borrowing and tool lending libraries.

The purpose of this paper is to provide an overview and analysis of the legacy of Christensen and Kreiner's (1991) literally classic Projektledning: att leda och lära i en ofullständig värld (Project Management: to manage and learn in an incomplete world).

The paper is based on a three‐step theoretical analysis deduced from the mentioned classic. The first step provides an overview of the content where the core ideas of the book are derived. This is followed by an analysis of the legacy and impact on theory, empirical approaches, and education. Finally, three main takeaways from the book are discussed.

In tracking the legacy, the paper analyses, discusses, and illustrates how the Scandinavian approach to projects has evolved. It pinpoints the two core insights of the book; the importance of understanding the impact of the institutional environment on operations, and embracing uncertainty as a natural part of everyday organizational reality. Based on these insights it is shown how the book has expanded the theoretical contributions towards a focus on temporary organisations and everyday practice, how it has helped to make situated empirical research matter, and how it has influenced education to deal with real‐life project challenges.

This paper investigates a book available only in the Scandinavian language and thus only available for a Scandinavian research community. As such the review is written from a Scandinavian perspective, with the limitations in terms of objectivity to the book that follow from that.

The main lessons discussed in relation to the heritage from the book are: an increased focus on the details of organizing, situated multi‐level case‐studies, and situation‐sensitive teaching methodologies. The paper argues that an increased understanding of projects should start with a detailed multi‐level analysis of temporary organizing to provide a sound foundation on which to base future research and teaching.

The paper provides an understanding of the origins and diffusion of underpinning ideas of the Scandinavian approach to project management.

The purpose of this paper is to argue for the need of continuously revisiting and reformulating the contributions of past research. In particular the focus is on project management writings. In addition, the purpose of the paper is to introduce the reader to the special issue on Classics in project management and give an overview of the different contributions.

The paper is based on literature in related fields and the approach is paradigmatic, illustrating the value of common literature and common language to develop a knowledge domain.

The authors provide an introductory framework and arguments for the need to revisit the contributions of the past. Since “the past” and readings of it will continuously change and develop, exploring it is not a “one‐off” job, but part of the dialogue within the academic community. From an evolutionary perspective, the authors make the point that an important role for scholars is to “store” knowledge from the past to tell the stories found in prior research, the influential ideas and their development within the knowledge domain/discipline. In a critical realm, the authors also see the role of critical engagement with the past to question what we take for granted to be able to improve our collective ability to think and from that end develop project management thinking and research. In that sense, revisiting the past might provide avenues to future research and adventurous explorations.

The authors introduce the idea of classics in project management as an ongoing and important debate among scholars within the field. This discussion has so far received only limited attention among scholars in the field of project management.

This chapter addresses the challenges associated with temporary organising under conditions of institutional complexity. The authors draw on findings from an in-depth case study of a megaproject initiated to reshape healthcare in Sweden. At the centre of this transformation was the construction of a new, ‘world-class’ hospital to replace the former (historical and renowned) university hospital. The authors posit that organising such projects is largely a matter of creating, responding to, and re-creating temporal institutional complexity. Thus, their study identifies four distinct response strategies – innovating, partial decoupling, avoiding, and surfing – on which project actors relied when dealing with the multiplicity of temporal institutional requirements. The authors propose a model for explaining how these strategies affected the temporal institutional complexity faced by the project. Their chapter adds to the literature on temporary organisations by highlighting the nature and dynamics of temporal institutional complexity and by revealing how inter-institutional temporary organisations cope with such complexity.

The aim of this paper is to conceptualize time as an important dimension of institutions and, more specifically, to develop the analysis of institutions, time, and temporal misfits. The paper explores these matters in the context of an inter‐institutional project where actors, who represent different organizational fields and respond to different institutional requirements with regards to time and timing, need to collaborate.

The paper centers on three critical incidents taken from a study of a large‐scale telecom project in Norway. The paper is based on an analysis of public documents and 35 interviews with key stakeholders and managers in the focal project.

This research shows that temporal misfits are a critical, yet understudied, element of project organizing. The paper suggests and discusses three primary measures – detecting, correcting, and escaping – that project management makes use of to resolve temporal misfits among the actors involved. To advance the analysis of problems facing projects in institutionally‐bounded settings, the paper proposes a typology of temporal misfits (phase and tempo) and different types of complexity (analyzable and systemic).

Although purposeful in many instances, especially in collaborations across institutional boundaries, timing norms may cause profound organizational problems due to temporal misfits among the actors involved. The paper argues that project managers need to identify and be prepared for such organizational problem by being equipped with a repertoire of resolution strategies to handle them. New concepts and approaches are needed to identify and deal with temporal misfits among important stakeholders in projects.

A number of previous studies on project organizing have emphasized the critical aspects of studying institutions and time; but to date, no comprehensive efforts have been made to combine these ideas in empirical investigations. This study emphasizes the criticality of timing norms and temporal misfits to enhance our understanding of the linkages between projects, institutions, and time.

Temporary organisations are time-limited organisations that are created with a deliberate termination point. Temporary organisations can increase flexibility, allow for innovative and transformative activities with less resource commitment, and reflect a ‘Zeitgeist’ of acceleration and time limitation in society. They also give rise to tensions and paradoxes that require new adaptive and coordinative practices. Research on temporary organisations has moved from primarily exploring the distinction between temporary and permanent organisations to using temporary organisations to study a range of phenomena such as temporality, acceleration, identity, and attachment–detachment dilemmas. This volume reflects this new orientation. We map empirical phenomena along the lines of events, projects and networks, and explore three conceptual themes that run through the nine chapters that comprise this volume: (1) temporality in temporary organisations; (2) the interaction between temporary and permanent organisations; and (3) the strategies and practices that temporary organisation develop in response to tensions and paradoxes.

In 2006, the “Rethinking Project Management” network called for a paradigm shift in project research, and proposed five research directions. The directions inspired research and marked a milestone in the development of the field. The purpose of this paper is to reflect on the past decade and to rejuvenate these research directions.

The authors propose the umbrella term: “project studies” to denote the research related to projects and temporary organizing. Project studies is conceived not only as a body of research, but also as a social process embedded in research communities, and contemporary Zeitgeist. Based on Sandberg’s interpretative approach to the fit between work and works (in this case research-researcher) and Habermas’ three types of human interests: technical, practical, and emancipatory, the authors develop a conceptual framework circumscribing three types of research in project studies.

The conceptual framework is used to craft future research directions, in the lines proposed by Winter et al. (2006b).

The authors conclude by proposing for a sixth theme on the practice of theorizing, and call for engaged, ambidextrous scholars, who’s “job” goes beyond the writing of articles and research applications, and includes shaping discourses of project research, nurturing new project scholars, contributing to project practice and carefully considering the legacy of projects and project studies in society.

This paper positions research as a social process, and the role of researchers as actors shaping research in project studies.

Knowledge creation is increasingly singled out as an important activity in a wide range of sectors. At the same time, projects are considered to be the loci where much of knowledge creation takes place. The aim of this paper is to give an overview of the current issues within this area and point out a few directions for future research.

This paper is based on a literature review and a summary of the papers included in the special issue. The aim of the literature review consists in pointing out the key themes in the continuing debate on knowledge creation in projects.

The paper argues that research needs to be developed along the following lines: the preconditions of effective knowledge creation mechanisms; the organizational practices able to support knowledge creation mechanisms; the contribution of communities of practice to knowledge creation in projects; the role of time and timing in projects knowledge creation; and the challenges associated with inter‐organizational projects and knowledge creation.

This paper (and the special issue) provides an understanding of the context of knowledge creation, of the requirements that different contexts place on knowledge creation, and of the suitability of such mechanisms in peculiar contexts. These issues have received only limited attention to date in the project management literature.

With the purpose of enhancing the understanding of multi‐project management, this paper is based on the findings of a doctoral thesis that focuses on the management and organisation of project‐based companies.

The research presented here is based on an inductive and qualitative case study approach, characterised by an exploratory purpose and based on an in depth analysis of two individual cases.

The study sheds light on several important aspects for managing and organising the special dynamics that characterise project‐based organisations. The thesis discusses how the balance between structuring mechanisms and the ability to handle the ever‐present uncertainty in project‐based organisations (PBOs) can be understood. This balance is necessary in order to handle the amount of changing requirements – both operational and contextual – during a certain period of time, thereby, being given the opportunity to encourage the organisation's dynamic capability.

This research proposes that the traditional theoretical focus of “How to … ” in project portfolio management is neither adequately efficient, nor sufficient. This view must be complemented with active individual and situated management actions, and the findings encapsulate the importance of the multi‐project management to focus on the balance between creativity, flexibility, and structure.

The profound theoretical ambition with this work is to complement the literature on project‐based organisations with an empirically‐based understanding inspired by organising theory, for both the research and practical execution of multi‐project management from a project‐as‐practice perspective. This research expands the conceptual view on the balance between structuring mechanisms and the ability to handle the ever‐present uncertainty in PBOs.

The general purpose of this paper is to give Sapolsky's classical study of the Polaris Project, written in 1972, the credits it actually earns. In addition, there are two more specific aims: to discuss the role and usage of project management techniques, such as PERT (programme evaluation and review technique), in the practices of project execution; and to display the power of thorough empirical case studies in order to deepen our understanding of the realities of project execution.

The paper constitutes a detailed review of the content and contributions of the book The Polaris Systems Development written by Harvey M. Sapolsky in 1972. The paper presents the main ideas of the book and discusses its implications for contemporary project management research.

Sapolsky's work, The Polaris Systems Development, is an important account of some of the most significant courses of events in the birth and formation of project management, especially the creation of PERT as a technique for project coordination. However, by going beyond the rhetorical surface of the project management, Sapolsky shows that PERT never played the role in Polaris that it is generally claimed to have had. The paper puts these findings in context and discusses why this has been ignored in project management research so far.

Scholars focusing on project management research need to distance themselves from its historical tight bounds to project management textbooks and administrative project management techniques. There is a strong need for a broader empirical basis and pluralism in theoretical perspectives in the study of the realities of project execution.

The paper recapitulates a classic account of the formative period of project management, which so far has generally been ignored in project management research. In addition, it discusses three functions of project planning techniques: boundary objects for coordination, political features for legitimacy and trust building, and cognitive means for the social construction of a predicable future.