Abstract
The genesis of this Special Issue was a conference on “Delivering Social Good: Managing Projects in the Non-Profit Sector” held at the University of Limerick in October 2014. The diversity that exists within the broad non-profit sector became apparent at this event, as did its increasing projectification and the variety of organizational forms and models resulting from this trend. Tools, techniques, processes and practices inherited from the business world were described, as were methodologies adopted, adapted and specifically designed for work in areas like international development, humanitarian work and community settings. Insights into the lived experiences of project managers in the non-profit sector were also shared, as were a number of diverse conceptualisations of temporary organisations.
Highlights
The genesis of this Special Issue was the conference Delivering Social Good: Managing Projects in the Non-Profit Sector held at the University of Limerick, Ireland, in October 2014
Much work has been done on the transfer of organizational and managerial concepts from business to the nonprofit world (Beck et al 2008; Tucker & Parker 2013), and there is evidence that many nonprofit organizations (NPOs) are becoming more “businesslike” (Maier et al 2016)
As Peter Drucker said in his book Managing the non-profit organization: practices and principles, the NPO exists to bring about a change in individuals or society, and the task of an NPO manager is to convert this into specifics (Drucker 2004)
Summary
Reinvigorating project management research and practice: perspectives from the nonprofit sector. While providing efficient processes and methodologies to complete complex tasks, the structural properties provided by both have the ability to constrain individual actions and agency It is possible for the project management discipline to develop ever more precise and complex methodologies for more turbulent environments, or more adaptations for diverse economic sectors. After reviewing the organization studies literature, she further argues that the resultant insights are, to a large extent, limiting due to the discipline overlooking “the ways in which organizing is bound up with the material forms and spaces through which humans act and interact.” She calls for sociomateriality as a way of providing an alternative conceptualization, which challenges the assumption in the extant organizational literature that organizations, work, and technology should be conceptualized separately (Orlikowski & Scott 2008). Exploration of this theoretical stream has the potential to reinvigorate the research agenda, and to provide new insights that can only be to the benefit of project management research and practice
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