Projects, paths, and practices: sustaining and leveraging project-based relationships

By S. Manning. 2011

148 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this article, we examine how project entrepreneurs maintain and leverage long-term project-based relationships in highly uncertain and volatile project businesses with clients and key service providers across ever changing collaborative contexts. Based on a thorough analysis of TV project networks, using both quantitative and qualitative data, we find that project entrepreneurs form core teams with particular clients and service providers, and establish sequences of related projects thereby forming collaborative paths. These paths allow partners to exploit and stretch existing, and explore new capabilities and partner resources across time and contexts of collaboration. Paths are promoted by connecting practices partners apply to establish task and team linkages between past, present and potential future projects. Our findings promote a more processual understanding of project-based organizing and learning, and tie formation and maintenance in dynamic industry contexts.

Subfields: Management Science and Operations Research, Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management, Strategy and Management

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/1738c572d8cb1d1a89111a865d50cdb3a4de9ee2

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In Management Science and Operations Research

In Organizational Behavior and Human Resource Management

In Strategy and Management

Citations in the corpus

Explicating the dynamics of project capabilities (2016, background): “When collaboration is 27 repeated across projects, the trust established among the parties involved can form a repository of project capabilities that can be retrieved when participants work together on subsequent projects (Sydow et al, 2004; Manning and Sydow, 2011).”
Project Networks: Governance Choices and Paradoxical Tensions (2016, background): “This ambiguity of boundaries is well documented in a series of studies by Sydow and colleagues on German television production (Manning, 2008; Manning & Sydow, 2011; Sydow, 2009; Sydow & Windeler, 1999; Windeler & Sydow, 2001).”
Cultural Industries: Product–Market Characteristics, Management Challenges and Industry Dynamics (2015, unknown): “24 Repeated collaboration allows creatives to exploit and stretch existing capabilities (Manning and Sydow 2011), and mutual trust allows an industry to operate without formal organizations (Johnsen 2011).”