Stewart Clegg

The University of Sydney

Purpose The paper discusses sustainability, in terms of creating purposive social value, which is increasingly an inherent characteristic of project leading and doing. Consequently, project scholars are currently grappling with what purposive social value creation means to initiation and execution of projects. Design/methodology/approach In line w...

The second edition of this comprehensive textbook has been fully revised and updated, streamlining chapters and ensuring accessibility. Sustainability is now at the core of this textbook, showing students how projects can achieve success and create value for all stakeholders, ensuring projects for people, planet and prosperity. Key features of th...

Collaborations addressing grand challenges seek social impact; whether such social innovations will endure beyond initial enthusiasm is a major issue. Over the last decade, Social Impact Bonds (SIBs) emerged to diffuse globally as a new form of cross sector collaboration to finance solutions for social problems. Crucially, SIBs rely on intermediary...

We reflect on AI's implications for management and organization research. Advanced language models like ChatGPT can analyze large datasets and generate human-like text, potentially disrupting academic research and knowledge production. While potentially helpful, the technology evokes concerns about, for example, inaccuracies and accountability, ina...

Little attention has been given to questions of blocked access in public administration research. We draw on past scholarship on access: qualitative research accounts in public administration that address access processes, problems, and possibilities; and our own experience with access challenges in a public school setting involving public sector e...

This article analyses the case of Dubai’s smart city from a public policy perspective and demonstrates how critical it is to rely on the use of the public-private partnership (PPP) model. Effective use of this model can guarantee the building of a smart city that could potentially fulfill the vision of the political leadership in Dubai and serve as...

As Saudi Arabia embarks upon a transformative economic journey under the umbrella of its Vision 2030 and National Transformation Plan, the Saudi government plans to implement various initiatives to engage the private sector in meeting new national development goals, including the provision of 1600 schools through the public-private partnership (PPP...

In processual approaches to the sociology of organizations, there are prevalent assumptions differentiating ‘strong’ and ‘weak’ process research. In this paper, we challenge this assumption and suggest a novel, non-dualistic hybrid approach that is methodologically strong-weak. This approach integrates both flux (becoming) and its temporary materia...

The discourse of social organizing in projects centres on temporary-permanent relationships across projects and between projects and embedded organizations. Less explored are temporary-temporary relationships within project ecologies. We investigate the practice of collaborative consumption in project ecologies as a form of such relationships. Spec...

Legitimation is a core topic of Management and Organization Studies. Actually, it is a very judgemental one, and in that sense it is human-centered. In this chapter, we try to explore posthuman and prehuman views of legitimation and alegitimation. We explore a decentered, material process in which, paradoxically, mainly de-legitimation makes sense....

This process article reports on the use of Gioia data structures as a visual boundary object in project management research. Gioia data structures work as effective boundary objects that span a research team’s geographical distance in a virtual setting as an artifact for promoting visual collaboration in project management research. We demonstrate...

This policy insights paper explores the development of public-private partnerships (PPPs) in the Gulf Cooperation Council (GCC) region over the past three decades and argues that although GCC states did not embark on a full-fledged experience with PPPs, unstable oil and gas prices are changing this approach. PPPs are increasingly gaining strong pol...

Public-private partnerships (PPPs) have been promoted as achieving value for money in government projects through innovation. Private investment, contract bundling, and transferring risk to the private sector are regarded as incentives creating innovation. Data collected on PPPs through in-depth interviews with 36 senior practitioners are analyzed...

The relationship between gender equality and diversity practices and their impact on gender diversity in project based organizations has delivered mixed research results. Policies abound but the implementation of diversity practices has received limited research focus. The quality of the processes implementing equality and diversity practices is th...

In this paper, we present an analysis of how activity‐based costing (ABC) was included among austerity policy prescriptions within the healthcare sector. Relying on the proposition that an increasing quality of outcomes is achievable simultaneously with a reduction in costs, ABC straddled tensions between the logics of care and business for clinici...

Project management research has evolved over the past five decades and is now a mature disciplinary field investigating phenomena of interest to academics, practitioners and policymakers. Studies of projects and project management practices are theoretically rich and scientifically rigorous. They are practically relevant and impactful when addressi...

This chapter presents a holistic investigation into construction culture from an organisation studies as well as project management perspective, mobilising the concept of toxic project cultures as a novel conceptual lens to explore new ways to transform the construction industry into a more dynamic, innovative, and socially responsible sector. All...

This chapter explores the alignment of construction projects with strategy through several case studies and offers insights for the development of project portfolio management (PPM) capabilities in construction. Most PPM research occurs in industries associated with innovation and new product development, including manufactured products, service pr...

This research investigates the impact of project finance on the ability of Special Purpose Vehicles (SPVs) to deliver infrastructure Public Private Partnership (PPP) projects. The research reports on data that was collected through 46 in-depth interviews with senior executive practitioners involved in PPPs in Australia. Analysis of this data confir...

Management Learning is a centre of scholarship, and thoughtful scholars strive to achieve exemplary publications – those that make a difference to both theory and practice as well as being frequently cited. Adopting the poststructuralist idea that scientific texts are literary constructions, applying this focus to translation and diffusion effects...

To the surprise of many in the West, the fall of the USSR in 1991 did not lead to the adoption of liberal democratic government around the world and the much anticipated “end of history.” In fact, authoritarianism has made a comeback, and liberal democracy has been on the retreat for at least the last 15 years culminating in the unthinkable: the in...

The organization is traditionally assumed as the principal context of work. This assumption no longer holds in post-industrial and post-bureaucratic settings. Conducting meetings from home while juggling household responsibilities can be characterized as a form of organizing, but such contexts are not well accommodated by organizational perspective...

Purpose The purpose of this paper is to investigate and discuss stakeholder issues faced by renewable energy megaprojects and in particular solar and wind power projects and their relevance to socioeconomic evaluation of megaprojects. Design/methodology/approach The paper uses secondary data collected from the recent literature published on stakeh...

Project leadership increasingly occurs in the context of ecological risks, whether from a viral pandemic or an anthropogenically changing climate. It requires adaptability to change, especially as projects grow in complexity, becoming seen as interventions into wider systems. In this paper, we take a socialized perspective, synthesising recent work...

The introduction of a neo-normative discourse in a (post)bureaucratic organization can result in tensions between the neo-normative injunction to be authentic and exhortations to fit with the ideal (post)bureaucratic organizational subject. Focusing on how shopfloor workers subjectively experience the tensions between neo-normative and (post)bureau...

Paradoxical inertia is an organization condition that has received far less attention than organizational change. We investigate, ethnographically, an Australian Intellectual Property service firm, whose Board members proved to be unable to respond strategically to a rapidly changing environment that threatened their organization’s survival. In the...

Please see our Call for Papers for a Special issue of Business History on 'Organizations in Time: Paradox and History'. Deadline for Submission: 1st September 2022 Guest Editors: Stewart Clegg University of Stavanger Business School s.clegg@uts.edu.au Miguel Pina e Cunha Nova School of Business and Economics miguel.cunha@novasbe.pt Charles H...

To achieve effective stakeholder governance in the context of international social accountability certification (SA8000) requires constructing a network of agreement. In a case study of a small-to-medium-sized enterprise (SME), we examine managers’ attempts at enrolling participants in the supply chain to investigate how they strive to engage these...

Drawing on Actor-Network Theory and the cartography of controversies, we present a method for ANTi-History research to investigate the implementation of a contract between a labour services company and a public university hospital in Brazil. The research question focuses on how the past is enacted in the present. The method is a general guideline b...

The abrupt outbreak of the COVID-19 pandemic sent unprecedented shockwaves across the globe, creating an unparalleled crisis in terms of our health, severely impacting the way we live and work. Measures such as social distancing and travel restrictions, have disrupted production and supply chains, reinforcing a demand shock. In the midst of this pa...

MAD statement This leading article aims at Making a Difference (MAD) by inspiring to engage in new conventions for leadership and organizational change at a time when there is an opening for new practices to emerge. The COVID-19 pandemic upended much of what we take for granted, making us more aware of the ambiguity and multiplicity of reality, of...

We examine the historical phenomenon of truces, as these occurred during a period of intense warfare during World War I, around Christmas 1914. These were processes of resistance that could not have been planned (otherwise they would obviously have been thwarted by authority) and that occurred in a setting with continuously changing conditions. Our...

The paper contributes to literatures on settlements and institutional maintenance work. It does so by unpacking post-settlement legitimation efforts required to maintain contentious institutions between previously conflicting actors. Settlements often necessitate the maintenance of institutions from the past whose legitimacy is dubious for the new...

MAD statement This leading article is setting out to Make a Difference (MAD) through catalysing the further exploration and development of leadership theory and practice by facilitating the reimagining and reframing of challenges and solutions ahead. It does so by integrating the academic concerns of the current literature with the issues raised by...

Nosso objetivo é construir uma proposta de método para os ANTi-historiadores, tomando a análise da controvérsia como ponto de partida. Apesar do desenvolvimento teórico e metodológico da abordagem ANTi-história para o estudo do conhecimento do passado e a criação de sua história, há espaço para o desenvolvimento de um método com base na análise de...

The literature on how a start-up ecosystem impacts a start-up’s performance has significantly grown and contributed to the management field. Nevertheless, these theoretical developments have been scattered, inconsistent, lacking in theoretical depth. Therefore, in this review, we use three perspectives to organise the knowledge field, refine concep...

Despite increasing studies on IT monitoring, our understanding of how the relationships between the watcher and watched are affected by IT-mediation has remained limited in two areas. First, contradictory views exist on the relationships between the watchers and the watched. Studies either adapt traditional actor-centric frameworks assuming pre-def...

Purpose – The purpose of this paper is to understand how historical materialities might play a contemporary role in legitimation processes through the memorialization of history and its reproduction in the here-and-now of organizations and organizing. Design/methodology/approach – The authors briefly review the existing Management and Organization...

We are now entering a new phase in the establishment of historical organization studies as a distinctive methodological paradigm within the broad field of organization studies. This book serves both as a landmark in the development of the field and as a key reference tool for researchers and students. It evaluates the current state of play, advanc...

Project management is an essential life and workplace skill that everyone must develop. Following the popular style and format of other textbooks by Stewart Clegg, this brand new co-authored textbook on project management provides a much needed European perspective to the subject. Drawing on the latest research and practice, the authors guide stude...

In this essay, four leading scholars provide critical commentary on an article entitled ‘Protective or Connective Professionalism? How Connected Professionals Can (Still) Act as Autonomous and Authoritative Experts’ (Noordegraaf, 2020, Journal of Professions and Organization, 7/2). Of central concern to all four commentators is Noordegraaf’s use of...

Purpose Existing public–private partnership (PPP) literature that explicitly adopts neo-institutional theory, tends to elucidate the impact of isomorphic pressures and organizational fields and structuration on PPP projects. This paper advances this literature by presenting the institutional work and micro-level dynamics through which actors initia...

Research on organizational creativity tends to emphasize fairly static notions of coercive power as positional authority and control over scarce resources. The field remains largely silent about power as a positive and generative phenomenon that can produce creativity. We seek to break that silence by amplifying and integrating the work of Mary Par...

The increasing ubiquity of interactive technologies such as crowdsourcing is one of the major forces underpinning the emerging concept of open strategy. The large-scale interactive functionality afforded by such technologies offers unparalleled possibilities for including actors across the entire organization in co-creative efforts to respond to st...