Resumen de Path dependence and path shaping: unearthing institutional dynamics in large-scale
In the last decades, inter-organizational projects and other forms of temporary organizing have gained prominence. An organizing form variously defined as the megaproject, global project, or service-led project has proliferated and gained renown influence in recent years. These definitions apply to large-scale projects that typically deliver a substantial physical infrastructure or a complex product with a lifecycle that can extend for decades. Large-scale projects’ grown popularity corresponds with the so-called ‘infrastructure-gap’ and the new pressing needs for infrastructure investment worldwide. Large-scale projects are an essential vehicle for developing sustainability-oriented infrastructure that helps to overcome many of today’s societal issues, such as climate change, for achieving economic growth, managing welfare, health, and safety concerns. Accordingly, over the last two decades, large-scale project endeavors that involve massive capital infrastructure investments have become the norm for many utility sectors, such as transport, energy, water, or food. These projects may evolve, arising as inherently societal concerns, and then shift to technical problems and vice-versa. However, such projects are complex endeavors embedded in highly institutionalized social structures and technologies, including public and private actors with various rationalities, modes of collaboration, and project management competencies. Thus, large-scale projects pose enormous coordination challenges, creating wicked problems for their management. They entail technical and social elements that are deeply entwined and co-evolved over a long time, introducing inertia, organizational path-dependency, and lock-in. Besides, a significant policy perspective and the trend points to the new generation of large-scale projects, which in contrast to the Fordist era in the US and Europe, compels efforts that require management to minimize affecting the surrounding societal environment, hence achieving project legitimacy. Therefore, although most of the economic and engineering problems have been tackled, the (inter-) organizational context, the social misalignments of large-scale projects, and the widely diverse actors in them remain under-studied. Hence, the questions of how these large-scale projects as inter-organizational collaboration unfold, and how they can be successfully managed and organized despite these challenges have become crucial in academia and practice alike.
Scholars from different disciplines have picked up these questions of organizational, technological, and environmental issues in large-scale infrastructure project organizing and have put forth valuable insights into such endeavors. Nevertheless, hitherto the dominant perspective of studies in large-scale infrastructure projects continues emphasizing the economic aspects and, for that purpose, applies the behavioral psychology lens. Indeed, focusing on intra-organizational aspects explaining the overall performance of large-scale infrastructure projects by maintaining the logic of individualism, while considering the constitutive features in the setting as given, and deriving behavioral conclusions from them. Such a frame of reference holds to large-scale project performance – their relative efficiency and the importance of accountability – and points to different actors' vested interests and the value of cost-benefit analysis. It seems the dominant perspective has analyzed large-scale infrastructure projects from a normative ideal. It has, for long, embraced an objectivist, static and ahistorical view. This thesis challenges these underlying assumptions.
The thesis is explorative, engaging with the empirical context as the point of departure. In line with the overall research aim and conceptual framework, the research design has a qualitative nature and relies on a multi-level process approach. In adopting a process approach, it builds in extensive case studies, and case elaboration method. The first study represents an in-depth “insider” case study of project-based processes in the division of Adif - the Spanish Administrator of Rail Infrastructure. Besides, the second and third case studies investigate both public and private infrastructure organizational actors, which were heavily involved in sustainable-oriented large-scale projects that required technology adoption. The thesis employs a combination of data collection methods, including semi-structured interviews, (participant) observations, database search, documents, and other secondary data following the intensive media discussions.
This thesis contributes to the debate on large-scale project organizing by advancing an institutional perspective. Further, it puts a socio-technical approach that accounts for the co-evolution of organizational and technology issues in large-scale infrastructure projects. It provides a rich empirical examination; it shows that to understand large-scale infrastructure project processes, there is a need to change the ontological priorities that underpin the dominant research on the behavioral studies in project management. The thesis develops nascent theorizing on how the temporary and (inter-) organizational nature of large-scale projects in the presence of institutions narrates the emergence of processes, e.g., path-dependence, and lock-in. A conceptualization of path-shaping and project actors’ agency that bridges the gap between the intra-organizational and institutional level efforts is promoted.
The managerial implications of this thesis are two-fold. First, the appended papers put forth among other frameworks and process models that are indeed useful to be utilized. They outline ideas relevant because they lay the groundwork for project managers to extend their efforts beyond the micro-managing of tasks. In particular, Paper I develops the lock-in process model that can be useful for project managers. Secondly, the thesis gives countless advice and managerial implications. The most important being the consideration of heterogeneity in large-scale project contexts in the multi-organizational setting and their interdependencies in broad project networks. They represent the sources of variation in the desired outcomes. Accordingly, Paper III suggests attention needs to be directed to the understanding of the institutional logics and (inter-) organizational elements in the context as an essential feature of project management practice. In other words, this thesis suggests that embeddedness in large-scale infrastructure projects is of crucial importance. To this end, Paper II proposes means for an active project owner organization, that are essential for effectively interacting with other actors, and for selecting and managing both contractual and trust-based mechanisms effectively. Conclusively, the thesis suggests that project managers’ institutional knowledge in large-scale project setting is equally important, if not more, than the economic or engineering expertise.
