Year: 2025
Type: article
Abstract: Purpose The “fat tail” of megaproject failures recorded by Flyvbjerg (Flyvbjerg and Gardener, 2023) is a sign of decadence in megaprojects because it is indicative of the normal being treated as futile and absurd. Rival explanations for this normal absurdity have been advanced, including those of optimism bias, the planning fallacy, the hiding hand and strategic ambiguity. Each one of these is criticized for their lack of explanatory potential. A megaproject, it is argued, is essentially future-oriented to an open system future that cannot be controlled in all its particulars. Design/methodology/approach The paper is a theoretical exercise in constructive criticism of taken-for-granted assumptions in project studies. It draws on anthropology and the philosophy of science to do so. Findings The project management body of knowledge applied to megaprojects resembles a series of rituals whose latent function is to produce legitimation, despite it being constantly eroded by failure in practice. These provide accounts that rival project management theories can dispute. Standard research approaches in the field replicate these accounts of material and sociomaterial events that unsettle control of the variables of time, scope and cost. Rather than reproducing ritual, project studies might better attend to the institutional work that such accounts achieve, using anthropological and ethnographic approaches to understanding the ways in which these accounts function and with what existential effects. Research limitations/implications Rituals that do not serve their manifest function of control invite anthropological inquiry into their latent functions, which inquiry has been sketched here. Perhaps anthropological inquiry, as well as remedial managerial practices, might well prove to be connected? Practical implications Decadence is a “technical label” for language games in theory that mirror those played in practice in increasingly recursive loops. These merely provide available accounts that rationalize a failure to correspond to initial projections. Social implications Project studies of megaprojects are played out in language games in theory that mirror those played in practice in increasingly recursive loops. The language games should be accounted for in terms of rituals that do not serve their manifest function of control; instead, they invite anthropological inquiry into their latent functions. The social implications of this proposition are that it is anthropological interventions into megaproject cultures that might help dissolve the language games being played and better control the variables that they are played with. Originality/value The paper offers a novel perspective on project studies that is provocative and can be expected to create controversy.
Author: Stewart Clegg
Institution: The University of Sydney
Language: English
Field: Decision Sciences
Domain: Social Sciences
Open Access status: hybrid
OpenAlex ID: W4411653964