Organizing Mega-projects: Understanding their Cultural Practices
Alfons van Marrewijk
Prof. Dr.ing. Alfons van Marrewijk
Professor in Business Anthropology
Department Organization Sciences
Faculty of Social Sciences
VU University Amsterdam
De Boelelaan 1081
1081 HV Amsterdam
The Netherlands
+31 (0)20 598 7640 (Secretariat)
fax +31 (0)20 598 6765
a.h.van.marrewijk@vu.nl
Paper to be presented at 1st workshop: Megaprojects: Theory meets Practice 12-13
September, London
1
Introduction
Complex and extensive civil engineering and construction mega-projects frequently attract
societal attention. Newspaper headlines, journalistic books, TV specials, and parliamentary
inquiries inform the public about nuisances, failures, budget overruns, time delays, citizen
resistance, and resigning politicians. Mega-projects rarely remain uncontested, particularly if
pursued within a democratic political context, as they are perceived not only as costly, but also as
significant threats to local quality of life. For example, the construction of a new Mexican airport
(Dewey and Davis, 2013) and the extension of the Stockholm rail (Corvellec, 2001) never came
to execution due to citizen resistance. In another example, the revalorization of the Stuttgart 21
railway station undermined important policy objectives such as historic preservation,
environmental protection and primarily benefited already affluent individuals and groups (Novy
and Peters, 2012). Therefore, Flyvbjerg et al. (2003) call mega infrastructure projects ‘political
and physical animals’.
Not withstanding their contested nature, there has been a sharp increase in the magnitude
and frequency of major infrastructure projects (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003). Mega-project
organizations have become popular by public politicians and local officials to create attractive,
sustainable and economically viable urban areas for citizens (Lehrer and Laidley, 2008;Diaz
Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). Such projects have become great symbols of modern engineering
and for politicians an important political legacy; highly visible, material results of public policy
and officials at the local and national level (Del Cerro Santamarıa, 2013a;Trapenberger Fick,
2008).
Although mega-projects have become important to politicians and civilians, for a long
time academic attention was reserved to the engineering discipline (Cicmil and Hodgson,
2006a;Morris, 2011). With its intellectual roots in engineering science, project management
research has traditionally been concerned with planning techniques, methods and tools for
optimizing project performance, and project efficiency (Söderlund, 2004). Studies on megaprojects primarily focused upon quantitative evaluations of the performance of mega-projects
(Merrow, McDonnell and Arguden, 1988) (Flyvbjerg et al., 2003), the public private
collaboration in mega-projects (Koppenjan, 2005), the management of mega projects (Hertogh,
Baker, Staal-Ong and Westerveld, 2008), and lessons learned on risk and management of mega-
2
projects (Greiman, 2013). By now we have learned that the phenomenon of mega-projects have
increasingly attracted attention, but what exactly is the nature of mega-projects?
Defining mega-projects
Although mega-projects have been constructed ever since the pyramids of Egypt, the Maya cities
in Mexico and the road networks of the Roman Empire, mega-project were first conceptualized
in the early 1970’s with the Canadian government and the American contractor Bechtel
simultaneously to describe large scale projects (Merrow et al., 1988). The word ‘mega’
originates from the Greek word ‘mega’ and is a prefix or root word that can be combined with
other words. In the Oxford Advanced Learners Dictionary (1990) ‘mega’ is connected to the
number of one million (e.g. megabyte, megacycle). Furthermore, it is synonym for very large or
great (e.g. megaphone) and used for things that are extra ordinary examples of their kind (e.g.
megastar). While ‘magna’ signifies large and great in spiritual sense, ‘mega’, ‘megal’, ‘megalia’
and ‘megalo’ are all referring to large, big, full-grown, vast, high in material sense (e.g.
megaliths). Connecting the word ‘mega’ to ‘project’ emphasizes the uniqueness as well as the
greatness and largeness in material sense of the project. Finally, in the International Systems of
Units ‘mega’ is opposed to ‘micro’. Therefore, a micro perspective of organizing practices in
mega-projects is a nice paradox to solve in this book.
A book on mega-projects should discuss the question to what extend mega-project are
different from other projects? This question is not easy to answer as mega-projects and other
projects both differ from any other form of organizing in their intended temporality and their
death (Söderlund, 2013). They share the general nature of a project, which is in traditional
literature on project management, perceived to be a temporary aggregation of stakeholders
working together to get something delivered within time, scope and budget (Söderlund, 2004).
Interestingly, developing countries did not do better or worse than developed countries in
executing mega-projects (Merrow et al., 1988).
Mega-project can be defined as simply as projects whose capital for the complete
construction exceeds a certain number of million US dollar (Merrow et al., 1988). Or can be
defined as complex as Del Cerro Santamaria (2013a: xxiv), who perceives megaprojects in an
urban context as large-scale development projects that sometimes have an iconic design
component, that usually aim at transforming or have the potential to transform a city’s or parts of
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a city’s image, and are often promoted and perceived by the urban elite as crucial catalysts for
growth and even as linkages to the larger world economy. According to Williams (2002)
complex mega-projects distinguishes themselves from other projects in their structural
complexity, which is the interaction and interdependency of elements in a project, and
uncertainty, resulting from a lack of clearness and agreement over project goals and the way
these goals have to be research.
An analysis of a rather limited set of literature on mega-projects (Hertogh et al.,
2008;Van Marrewijk, Clegg, Pitsis and Veenswijk, 2008;Flyvbjerg et al., 2003;Merrow et al.,
1988;Williams, 2002;Pryke and Smyth, 2006) results in a number of characteristics of megaprojects;

high degree of complexity;

large-scale, and geographical dispersed;

enormous budgets (over billions of euros);

have a major impact on the environment and society;

can be subject of citizen resistance;

the period of inception until realization often covers decades;

embedded in a national political context which can change over time;

new and unproven technologies and legislation;

involvement of many stakeholders;

often unique at national level;

high quality aesthetics;

incorporate many uncertainties;

mixture of joint organization and sub-contracting to legally separate partners;
Old versus new mega-projects
Leher and Laidley (2008) make a distinction between ‘old’ and ‘new’ mega-projects in the
development of urban economies. In the “great mega-project era” of the 1950s and 1960s
(Altshuler & Luberoff, 2003) mega-projects were the monolithic constructions with little
attention for draagvlak, citizen participation and environmental issues. Since then mega-projects
have evolved (Fainstein, 2008). The ‘new’ mega-projects take the form of vast complexes
characterized by a mix of uses, a variety of financing techniques, and a combination of public4
and private-sector initiators (Lehrer and Laidley, 2008). The construction of new transport
infrastructures, or the extension of existing ones, and complex building projects are examples of
these new mega-projects (Diaz Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). They involve a transformation of
urban space, its built form and its specific land use(s) and changes the social practices in these
urban landscapes (Van Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010;Lehrer and Laidley, 2008;Del Cerro
Santamarıa, 2013b).
Importantly, new mega-projects are often undertaken by state actors operating in
collaboration with private interests in the pursuit of gentrification of city-regions within a
competitive global system (Lehrer and Laidley, 2008;Del Cerro Santamarıa, 2013a: xxx). A
study of 13 large-scale urban development projects in 12 European Union countries urban
development projects showed that mega-projects are almost all state led and often state financed
(Moulaert, Rodriguez and Swyngedouw, 2003: 250). Contractually however, these megaprojects are often defined in terms of Public Private Partnerships (PPP), in which there is a
structural cooperation between public and private parties to deliver some agreed outcome (Van
Marrewijk et al., 2008;Koppenjan, 2005). While these contractual arrangements therefore seek to
address the many interests, which are at stake in complex mega-projects, they do not fully
capture the complexity of the multiple, fragmented subcultures at work (Van Marrewijk et al.,
2008).
Problematic organizing of mega-projects
The increasing complexity of new mega-projects attracted the attention of organization scholars
(Bresnen, Goussevskaia and Swan, 2005). By the 1990’s project management had begun to
attract serious attention of business and management researchers who became engaged in the
development of project management as an scientific knowledge domain (Cicmil and Hodgson,
2006a). These academics, coming from sociology, business administration, psychology, and
anthropology, brought in organization perspectives in which (mega)projects are perceived as
temporal, organizational and social arrangements that should be studied in their context, culture,
conceptions and relevance (Kreiner, 1995;Packendorff, 1995;Lundin and Söderlund, 1995). The
dominant perception of organizing megaprojects as technical defined matters in demarked spatial
settings with a particular kind of complex tasks that has to be solved is highly problematic
(Kreiner, 1995;Söderlund, 2013;Engwall, 2003).
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Mega-projects can’t be delivered with closed management systems as they are politicallysensitive and involving a large number of partners, interest groups, citizen opposition and other
stakeholders (Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006;Bresnen et al., 2005). Therefore, explicit attention is
needed to context as an interpretive framework for the environment(s) of organizational actors in
mega-projects. It concerns the specific aspects and circumstances such as history, ideology,
fields of action and technical infrastructures, within which cultural patterns are developed and
reproduced, which drive or legitimize an assignation of meaning (Van Marrewijk et al., 2008).
Context is important as humans manifest an immense flexibility in their response to the
environmental forces they encounter, enact and transform (Geertz, 1973).
In literature on mega-projects, power, politics and conflicting and opposing interests are
generally excluded (Clegg and Kreiner, 2013;Hodgson and Cicmil, 2006). An exception is
Flybjerg et al. (2003) who suggest that a main cause of overruns is a lack of realism in initial cost
estimates, motivated by vested interests of partners. However, according to Clegg and Kreiner
(2013) power in mega-projects has to be understood as relational effects, not as sources that can
be held by partners. Project design, including contractual arrangements, and project cultures play
a role in determining how managers and partners cooperate to achieve project objectives to a
greater or lesser extent (Van Marrewijk et al., 2008). Therefore, Cicmil and Hodgson (2006b),
suggest a more critical approach to understand the management of projects by exploring how the
relationships between individuals and the project organization are produced and reproduced, how
power relations create and sustain social relations. In sum, project management is a way of
exercising power as projects are organizational entities constructed of relations of power (Clegg
and Kreiner, 2013).
To deal with relations of power, mega-project implementers have learned to expect and
respect citizen opposition, and increasingly adapt their interventions and their decision-making
processes to preempt or defuse claims against their proposals (Dewey and Davis, 2013: 17;Diaz
Orueta and Fainstein, 2008). Planners and politicians adopted “everyone gains” rhetoric of both
economic competitiveness and environmental sustainability and the paradigm of “do no harm”
which is the idea that mega-projects should only proceed if their negative side effects are
negligible, or significantly mitigated (Alsheudler and Luberooff, 2003;Lehrer and Laidley,
2008). These experiences have forced project implementers that planning legitimacy,
implementation and sustainability of decisions depends also on the careful execution of a
6
collaborative process that is deemed fair and open to affected citizens (Innes and Booher, 2010).
In line with this, Merrow et.al. (1988) come to the conclusion that cultural, linguistic, legal and
political factors should be included in the organizing of mega-projects. Therefore, they advise
the training of project managers to become aware of both institutional environment and internal
project organization.
The soft side of mega-projects
Increasingly, academic attention is pushed towards issues of social interaction, power issues,
reproduction, sense-making, and organizational culture (Van Marrewijk et al., 2008). Söderlund
(2004) names this the ‘soft’ side of project management. He claims the need to combine the
‘hard’ and ‘soft’ side of project management to address the complexities of real projects
(Söderlund, 2013). In line with this claim, a special issue of IJPM on managing construction
mega-projects stresses to include, besides the technical and managerial aspects, also the social
aspects of complexity in mega-projects (Li and Guo, 2011). The importance of ‘people issues’ is
also acknowledged in the incorporation of so called ‘best practices’ in well established cultural
practices in projects (Winter, Smith, Morris and Cicmil, 2006). From my own personal
experience, Dutch managers of building and civil infrastructure mega-projects recognize the
importance of a ‘people’ or ‘soft’ perspective on project management. And although I’m very
sympathetic to the appeal for more attention to soft aspects in mega-projects, the separation of
the ‘social’ and ‘natural’ world itself is an act of social construction (Latour, 2005).
Latour (2005) argues that humans and objects have been established as two irrevocably
sundered realms of knowledge and experience. From his perspective, this separation imposes a
binary division on the world of human experience that is not itself in the world (Latour, 1993). In
the same line, Orlikowski (2007: 1438) remarks to give up on treating the social and the
technical as distinct and largely independent spheres of organisational life. As a trained engineer
and academic anthropologist, I’m very sympathetic to this view when studying mega-projects. A
way of making the world of people and the world of material phenomena equally problematic, as
well as their intersections and entanglements in social-material hybrids Latour (1993) introduced
the concept of symmetric anthropology. In this view mega-project are proliferating entities that
are made and remade as mixes of the social and the material (Van Marrewijk and Yanow, 2010).
7
Mega-projects as a cultural phenomenon
Ultimately, the theoretical debate above leads us to position mega-projects to be as much the
object and outcome of social interactions as any other form of organizing within a multiple
context of socially interdependent networks. Mega-projects bring together, under various
contractual arrangements, differing and competing partners, interests, values and modes of
rationality (ways of doing and thinking). The flux of everyday experience in projects is what
provides the initial source of material for our speculative conjecturing (Chia, 2013: 35). Such an
approach of mega-projects takes humans central and perceives mega-projects as social networks
of people in the process of organizing (Van Marrewijk, 2007;Van Marrewijk and Veenswijk,
2006).
Within the field of project management studies, attention for a cultural perspective on
project management has increased significantly (Henrie and Sousa-Poza, 2005). However, the
integrative perspective (Martin, 2002) used in many project management studies (Kendra and
Taplin, 2004;Winch, Millar and Clifton, 1997) is too limited to fully understand culture practices
in mega-projects. This definition states that culture is the totality of socially transmitted
behaviour patterns, arts, beliefs, institutions, and all other products of human work and thought
(PMI, 2000). In this definition there is no recognition of ambiguity, subcultures, power, and the
decision-making practices of project managers and partners, who work within limited boundaries
of rational behaviour (Alvesson, 1993;Alvesson, 2002).
While different perspectives on organisational culture are well-documented in the
literature (Smircich, 1983) the interpretative approach recognises that ambiguities, subcultures,
conflicts and power and where applicable, various national, professional and project cultures,
coexist and operate within mega-projects. In this approach, project culture is defined as the result
of socially construction by project actors ascribing meaning to their situation, which together
makes up a cultural framework, and through processes of interaction, meanings are created and
reproduced. (Van Marrewijk and Veenswijk, 2006). It takes mega-projects not having a culture
but as a culture. It is acknowledged that “to our despair mega-projects often develop lives of
their own and their lives sometimes defy control by us mere mortals” (Engesson 1982 quoted in
Merrow et al., 1988: 1).
Such an interpretative perspective focuses at processes of meaning, sense making and
social construction of culture by actors and come to a ‘verstehen’ of the constructed social reality
8
(Czarniawska, 1992). This learns us that (mega)project cultures consist of multiple fragmented
subcultures (Kendra and Taplin, 2004), which can be used strategically for internal and external
power struggles (Van Marrewijk, 2010). By examining these multiple rationalities and
subcultures, rather than seeing them as having a singular, shared rationality per se or a single
integrative culture, an alternative view is offered to Flyvbjerg et al.’s who claim that megaprojects are motivated by vested interests (Van Marrewijk et al., 2008).
Based upon a rich personal experience in the field of mega-projects and a, rather limited,
analysis of organization cultural literature (Van Marrewijk and Veenswijk, 2006;Martin,
2002;Alvesson, 2002;Czarniawska, 1992) the following cultural themes for the understanding of
mega-projects are extracted (see table 1).
Mega-project as culture
Cultural themes
Topics
Cultural differences
National cultures
Organizational cultures
Professional cultures
Heterogeneity
Large diversity of partners
Local representations
Transition rituals
Collaboration
Hybrid practices
Power relations
Project team dynamics
Management style
Knowledge sharing strategies
Narratives and discourse
Political discourses
Project narratives
Stories and myths
Spatial settings
Lay out project offices
Distribution of project offices
Material tools
Tabel 1. Mega-projects as cultural phenomena
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Understanding the mega-project as cultural phenomena through a practice based lens
This introduction results in the claim for an in-depth understanding of cultural processes in
mega-projects through the observation of everyday practices. Practices are the cultural
manifestations and representations of the project as cultural phenomenon (Geertz 1973). Cultural
practices are viewed a dynamic, on going, everyday actions that represent the ontological
primacy of practice as fundamental to produce social reality (Feldman and Orlikowski, 2011).
Such an understanding of cultural practices in mega-projects connects, what Söderlund (2013),
calls the ‘micro’ and ‘macro’ project management. Micro project management is directed to the
investigation of practices, rituals, and everyday routines while macro project management is
related to societal aspects of projects, antecedents and consequences of projectification and firmlevel issues.
The project-as-practice approach evolved as a critique on research that treats projects
normatively, with no regard to their context or social setting, (Hällgren and Söderholm,
2011;Blomquist, Hällgren, Nilsson and Söderholm, 2010). This approach focuses at project
activities and how actors make sense of these in project organizations (Blomquist et al., 2010).
With a special attention to power, politics and the micro-activities and their meaning in the
specific social setting the approach gives us insight in the everyday life of how different project
actors, public and private, and citizen are involved in the process of co-creation mega-projects
(Smits and Van Marrewijk, 2012).
Following Nicolini et al. (2003) practices are perceived as dynamic and provisional, as
activities that require some form of participation. In line with this, Geiger (2009) recognizes that
practicing is not an individual cognitive resource, but rather something that people do together.
Moreover, he verifies that practicing is a process of continuous enactment, refinement,
reproduction and change based on tacitly shared understandings within the practicing
community. For example, the ‘ritualization’ of project phase transitions and milestones facilitate
and mediate the mega-projects process by providing a temporal and spatial platforms in which
constructors, project actors, and interest groups are closely intertwined with power relations and
political and economic interests (Ende and Marrewijk, 2013). As practices are a bricolage of
material, mental, social and cultural resources (Nicolini et al., 2003), resistance is something
10
which is not grounded within the individual, but as distributed across actors and artifacts (Harty
and Whyte, 2010).
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