Project-Based Organizations, Embeddedness and Repositories of Knowledge: Editorial

Abstract

Project-based organizations refer to a variety of organizational forms that involve the creation of temporary systems for the performance of project tasks (Lundin and Soderholm 1995; DeFillippi 2002). Project-based organizations have received increasing attention in recent years as an emerging organizational form to integrate diverse and specialized intellectual resources and expertise (DeFillippi and Arthur 1998; Hobday 2000; Gann and Salter 2000; Keegan and Turner 2002; Lindkvist 2004). Recent interest in the emerging knowledge economy has reinforced the view that project organizations in their many varieties are a fast and flexible mode of organizing knowledge resources. Project-based organizations can circumvent traditional barriers to organizational change and innovation, since each project is presented as a temporary, relatively short-lived, phenomenon. As such, it does not pose the same threat to vested interests as would the creation of a permanent new department or division. Moreover, project-based organizations allow for low-cost experiments. Because of their limited duration, project-based organizations do not constitute irreversible resource commitments of fixed costs. Hence, companies and other types of organization may launch a variety of ventures through project-based organizations and may terminate unsuccessful ventures at low cost and little disturbance to the organizational sponsor (DeFillippi 2002). Project-based organizations are found in a wide range of industries. These include consulting and professional services (e.g. accounting, advertising, architectural design, law, management consulting, public relations), cultural industries (e.g. fashion, film-making, video games, publishing), high technology (e.g. software, computer hardware, multimedia), and complex products and systems (e.g. construction, transportation, telecommunications, infrastructure). For many of these industries, project-based organizations are employed to meet the highly differentiated and customized nature of demand, where clients frequently negotiate and interact with project organizers over the ofteninnovative design of products and services (Hobday 1998). However, firms in all types of industries are undertaking projects as a growing part of their operations even while their primary ‘productive’ activity might be volume-based or operations-oriented (e.g. Midler 1995; Keegan and Turner 2002). Hobday (2000) refers to these as project-led organizations and Organization Studies 25(9): 1475–1489 ISSN 0170–8406 Copyright © 2004 SAGE Publications (London, Thousand Oaks, CA & New Delhi) 1475 Authors name