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What Peter Morris's books meant to me: An Amarcord

2022; Elsevier BV; Volume: 40; Issue: 2 Linguagem: Inglês

10.1016/j.ijproman.2022.01.001

1873-4634

Giorgio Locatelli,

Management and Organizational Studies

Infrastructure megaprojects are temporal, complex undertakings that require close coordination between a variety of stakeholders to keep these projects on track. Very often, coordination bottlenecks emerge, particularly on vanguard projects, as parties are unable to agree on how processes and operations should proceed leading to slippages in duration and budget. In this paper we conceptualize these impasses as arising due to contradictions in institutionalized logics relating to work practices used by various organizations on such projects. Using empirical data from two metro rail megaprojects in India, we show that contradictory logics in carrying out work can lead to 'horizontal' or process-based institutional voids, and 'vertical' or role/hierarchy based institutional voids that must be successfully navigated to ensure project progress. We show how freelance expatriates working as consultants on these projects often functioned as institutional entrepreneurs in such settings, using three specific strategies - re-architecting transaction spaces, reinforcing hierarchy, and mediation, to create more and less stable routines that bridged these voids and created a framework for executing work on the project. This paper contributes to our understanding of the dynamics of institutional entrepreneurship and institutional complexity in vanguard infrastructure megaprojects and offers a preliminary process model of how coordination bottlenecks are resolved in such projects.