Abstract :
Project management is a rapidly expanding subfield of management and organization
studies. This paper seeks to make sense of this development and the current state of
project management research. It reviews the literature published over the last five
decades in 30 leading management and organization journals. In total, 305 articles
were included in the data set. The paper proposes a categorization of the published
articles into seven ‘schools of thought’: Optimization School, Factor School, Contingency
School, Behaviour School, Governance School, Relationship School and Decision
School. The schools vary in terms of their main focus and use of the project concept,
major research questions, methodological approaches and type of theorizing. It is
suggested that a better awareness on how to make use of the schools and the identified
perspectives would stimulate cross-fertilization, unification and thus enhance a pluralistic
understanding of projects and project management at the same time as it would
prepare research to frame more accurately the problems of contemporary projects. In
that respect, the paper offers ideas on how to navigate at the crossroads between
specialization and fragmentation, between the search for novel topics and improvements
of existing knowledge.
