Hybrid Controls in Project Organisations

For the past decade, project organization has become increasingly central to management and organization studies, particularly as these seek to discern the contours of post-modern organizations. Yet, these contours frequently seem to be sighted without bearings on the current realities of project management. In this paper we take such bearings, using data derived from a detailed qualitative, ethnographic enquiry into the experience of project management. Project managers from France speak authentically about the experience of being a project manager. From this data we construct the contours more sharply. Rather than being a harbinger of an autonomous and more democratic future, free from extant bureaucratic organization controls, we find that project management has distinct modalities of control that we outline in the paper: behavioural, calculative, organizational, professional and corporate. Indeed, rather than foreshadowing a future transformational form, we find traces of a much older design: that of Tocqueville.