Temporal structuring in project organizing: A narrative perspective

Time is at the heart of project organizing because it is fundamentally about drawing on the present and the past to articulate desired future states, yet it has received relatively little explicit attention in the literature. The dominant systems paradigm in project organizing advocates an objective view of time while the actuality counter-perspective advocates a subjective view. Our contribution to theory in project organizing is to propose moving beyond these binary perspectives by arguing that project organizing is both goal-orientated and emergent through temporal structuring. We then develop this insight with the concept of project narratives as a form of future-perfect-thinking by which end states are articulated and resources are mobilized to achieve those desired end states. Drawing on an illustrative vignette, we then identify three different kinds of temporal work in project organizing: convincing oneself; convincing the team; and convincing stakeholders.