Global Projects Research Paper

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According to Powell, a new “logic of organizing” has been spreading in market economies. This logic has translated into flattening of organizational hierarchies, weakening of firms’ boundaries in favor of networks of collaborations, and restructuring of competition between firms within and across industries. Especially project-based modes of organizing and controlling work have been on the rise. Developments in this context include the “projectified society” and, most recently, the global-project form of organization. What constitutes projectification? What constitutes the global project? How may these be universal solutions for the future, independent of context? We first review what generally constitutes a project. We then proceed to define what makes a project global. We then highlight the importance of bringing the organizational environment back into the analysis. All through our review, we refer to various kinds of industries.

What is a Project?

Generally, at least since the building of the Great Pyramids of Egypt, there have been public engineering projects: temporary organizational forms with an explicit target and given a resource budget and a time frame. What is new is that functions in more and more business organizations are embodied in a project team. Firms as hierarchically controlled systems of work organization combining legal personality, centralized authority, arm’s length and adversarial relations vis-à-vis other firms, investor ownership, and transferability of shares are less the standard organizational form than they were earlier. Firms are transforming into fluid, overlapping organizational arrangements in which both internal and external boundaries break down, and cooperation with other firms grows. The knowledge, capabilities, and resources of the firm are built up through the execution of major projects.

In considering what kind of drivers are behind the spread of the project form of organization from the public to the business domain, as well as the emergence and development thus of a fully projectified society, two underlying dimensions dealing with learning and the development of firm-specific knowledge seem especially important. The first of these dimensions concerns the extent to which global projects focus on developing unusual, sometimes “singular” or one-off products and services for varied—and often uncertain—markets. The second dimension concerns the extent to which the organization of expertise, tasks, and roles is “predictable”—stable or incurring only a minor adaptation—in comparison to projects that went before or after them. This review will consider each of these dimensions in turn.

Singularity and Agency Business as Differences in Degree Rather Than in Kind

In much feature film production in the United States, especially since the decline of the studio system, a considerable number of technically qualified experts are contracted to work together on producing one or small number of particular kinds of products, whose specification is often open to interpretation and change over the course of the project. The nexus coordinating such projects and employing these staff is often a firm but one that is just a legal vehicle, or an “administrative convenience,” for paying wages, acquiring other resources, and owning property rights over the final product. Once the film or building is completed, the project unfolds; sometimes the firm also ceases to exist, except perhaps as a paper entity with one or two principals controlling property rights. Traditionally, also principally noncultural industries such as the construction industry have in many instances functioned in the same singular-project ways as the film has.

In contrast to the film industry, London-based advertising agencies simultaneously undertake a series of similar projects. In this industry, the model is that a core group of employees work together over a period of time and develop collective routines for managing such activities across projects that are similar to projects occurring before and after them. Such agencies often rely on outsiders to complete individual tasks, but retain a core group of employees for initiating, organizing, and conducting separate projects. The core actors develop distinctive capabilities and reputations as a result of the collective learning in their projects and in those of freelancers. The business remains more stable than it would if all agency staff members were freelancers. On average, staff members in an advertising agency are often quite mobile, changing employers in London, for instance, every two or so years. Ultimately, the ability to develop firm-specific knowledge over a succession of projects is also limited in the “agency business” projects. Thus, the mechanisms of knowledge development in both singular and agency business projects are essentially the same: some of the work, identity, and skills will always remain with individuals, rather than with the organization. We are talking here about differences in degree of singularity versus agency, rather than about two distinct kinds of projects.

Distinguishing Work Roles, Identities, and Skills Common to All projects

Studies of consulting in its various guises—product design, engineering, and management, for example—show that on one hand, the individuals’ competences can migrate over time into parts of the stable routines and competences of the project-based firm, as well as into particular projects carried out by members of that firm. On the other hand, the firm can develop competences and stable routines that foster connectivity across individuals and their individual specific skills.

In singular projects, specialists contract each other to work together as a team to achieve a specific objective, and neither party in such a contractual arrangement typically has any expectation of continued employment or cooperation after the successful completion of that goal. In the agency business projects, it is common to employ skilled staff on a semi-permanent basis to work in a number of teams on a succession of similar kinds of projects. Labor turnover may be considerable but teams and employers are able to learn across projects and to develop distinctive routines that could form the basis of firm-specific capabilities. Over the course of several projects, patterns of work coordination and control across agency business projects exhibit continuity more or less on the basis of these roles, identities, and skills. In sum, then, the more varied the project customers, goals, and problems are, the less projects are able to generate distinctive, organization-specific competences, and vice versa. In singular-projects, “freshness” or renewal is often developed more through changing team members than through developing new ways of working together and combining expertise in novel groupings. In projects that are characterized more by the agency business rather than by singularity, workers adopt different roles over the course of projects and in different project teams. Greater emphasis is placed on cumulative improvements in collective capabilities than on individual skill enhancement or “freshness.”

If one wished to differentiate between singular and agency business projects, the distinguishing feature is the degree of singularity, at one extreme, or role separation and stability, at the other extreme. Some projects combine tasks and skills in novel, fluid, and firm-specific ways, while others organize so that they rely more on preestablished competences, identities, and routines for working together to come up with competitive advantage. Studies of software and advertising in Germany and Britain, for example, have shown that projects with varying degrees of singularity can be accomplished with more than one kind of combination of role separation and stability. The feature film, Internet software, and multiple projects have also exhibited differences in degrees of key expertise and organizational structures, so that the precise project form is not fully deterministic of project outcomes, but is of a shape that is approximative.

What Is A Global Project?

Already, the title of this research-paper reveals that more and more companies are now becoming structured around distinctly global projects, in which people with different skills or tasks on one hand and different cultural and institutional backgrounds on the other are brought together. Thus far, this review has given a fair description of what constitutes a project. Global projects differ from the conventional project in that they represent multiple cultural and institutional legacies. Literature on the topic defines a global project as a temporary organizational form with members presenting multiple cultures and institutional systems, as well as a specified target and resource budget and time duration. Organizing highly skilled workers dealing with complex problems to create novel outputs by integrating varied forms of expertise—also across cultures and institutional systems— represents a significant new organizational form.

The Role Of The World War II In The Globalization Of Projects

Culture and institutional differences among members in any project were long considered “noise” and were omitted from analysis. Projects involved—or were assumed to involve—project members from only one culture and one institutional system. For the project goal or target to be reached, activities for a very large-scale and complex project were, at least for the most part, colocated. For example, when Christopher Columbus’ project was to embark from Spain to find India, and he found the American continent, this was not a problem of a distributed work over long distances because all project work was centralized on his three-ship fleet. He could simply report what he found once he got back to Spain.

World War II marked the end of the era of the colocated project as the only kind of a project that existed. Two global projects took place during World War II: the invasions of Normandy and Germany. These projects required coordination and integration of Allied Forces. Even while the United States was the dominant military force, the forces took off from Britain for Normandy, France. The ultimate target was Germany, with France being only the beachhead. The United States, Britain, and France were (and still are) cultures representing considerable differences in experiences, language, values, and basic assumptions, yet orchestration was the key. Successful completion of the invasion of Germany required the orchestration of the actions, skills, and competences of representatives from more than one of these countries and cultures. The fact that the Russian forces proceeded to invade Germany from the east while the rest of the allies proceeded from the west further complicated the project. The Normandy Project was a global project in that it many cultures (the American, British, French, and Russian ones), whose representatives were intended to interact productively.

After Germany surrendered in 1944, a number of Germans were flown in from Germany precisely for the purpose of participating in the final phases of the Manhattan Project, in which the atomic bomb was developed and produced in preparation for a possible war with Germany and was dropped in 1945 in the Japanese cities of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. By the time the Manhattan Project was finished, it had involved 125,000 laborers and had cost nearly $2 billion. The Manhattan Project has often been considered a culmination point of the colocated “big science” project, where the roles of preplanning and the project office in one site (in Los Alamos, in this case) are the keys to success. However, the Manhattan Project was, in fact, also a global project because of the participation of representatives of different cultural and institutional systems. From the beginning, it was carried out according to a proposal by the U.S. Office of Scientific Research and Development in 1941, when ways to facilitate across the cultural and institutional differences between the Americans and the Germans, for example, were hardly topics for explicit consideration. Moreover, the fact is that aside from the German input, much of the basic research work ended up being distributed to researchers in Britain and in Canada, as well as in 13 major research sites other than Los Alamos across the United States. Thus, in one more ways than one, cultural issues in project management had become the key by World War II.

By the postwar years, global projects emerged indisputably as a new template for organizing large and complex engineering work in nonmilitary fields. The United States’ Marshall Plan and the reconstruction of Japan in the late 1940s and the 1950s constituted U.S.-initiated but essentially global projects, similar to the invasion of Normandy and the Manhattan Project.

Drivers Of Global Projects

However, the birth of modern global projects can also be traced to further back than only 6 decades ago. The modern spread of project organization forms can be historically and causally linked to three instrumental drivers: (a) advances in transportation, (b) advances in communication, and (c) advances in information technologies.

The first and second Industrial Revolutions—at the beginning and end of the 19th century, respectively—involved major advances in transportation technologies. Primary among these revolutions was the railroad. The American railroad industry was a very turbulent industry in these early days. As reported in T. D. Judah’s “A Practical Plan for Building the Pacific Railroad” (1857 San Francisco: Henry Polkinghorn Printer), engineers and clerks at the project office prepared a formal report only after they received information from the field from managers in charge of surveys and operations. The project office functioned as an administrative office.

The railroad created conditions for mass production and economies of scale to emerge in many other industries as well. Serving the mass market, railroads created rapid growth opportunities for many firms. The large size of many of these new companies then turned coordination and control into key organizational challenges. The first solution that gradually emerged was the standardization of organizational routines, combined with a hierarchical and rigidly centralized form of control and reporting. This tightly coupled organizational solution, labeled since by Djelic and Ainamo (1999) as “the bureaucratic paradigm,” was gradually established throughout the first part of the 20th century as a “one best way” that could be equally suited to all companies and situations (p. 623).

When the British and the French constructed the Channel Tunnel in 1989 to 1991, steps were taken to organize the construction project as British-French joint project rather than as a bureaucracy. The English Channel Project was an international project that involved two government agencies (the British and French governments), several financial institutions, engineering construction companies, and other various organizations. The project goal, cost, schedule, and other factors needed to be adjusted to conduct the project.

Also, the language, use of standard metrics, and other communication differences needed to be addressed.

In the instance of the communication revolution, also the telephone was invented in the late 19th century. While the telephone was intended as a serious technological standard to support the bureaucratic form of organization, enabling and furthering advances in scale and scope of the operations of businesses, it was used in diverse ways, some of which had never been envisioned by the inventors such as Edison.

Within this context of transportation and communication revolutions, many industries that had earlier operated within a relatively stable environment and a “craft” model of organization, such as clothing fashion, experienced environmental turbulence. The fashion industry in France drew in participants into Paris from such places as Britain and Austria. The industry managed to be modeled as a peculiarly French phenomenon, despite an international pool of talent from which it drew. Yet the industry could not help but change in some way. Soon, it represented the first evidence to show that not all projects are quickly or effortlessly transformed strictly according to the bureaucratic paradigm. In the face of international turbulence in terms of class structures of societies, the French fashion industry in particular moved toward greater organizational flexibility in its haute couture of luxury segment. The French luxury fashion industry was imitated by rivals in Italy and the United States after World War II—that is, when what can be called a global consumer culture and demand for fashion began to emerge. The rivals took off in trajectories leading to organizational flexibility that differed significantly across the French model. However, at least in name, a global fashion industry was born, with a common identity and a shared rate of project-based change with four seasonal collections a year.

Film was long a cultural industry similar to fashion in that it pulled talent and institutional and cultural legacies from all over the world into one location—in this case, Hollywood. Like the fashion industry, the film industry took its model of organizing not from the military, but rather from the crafts. Also like the fashion industry, the film industry did not modernize until the late 20th century, and for much the same reasons. Global consumer culture and demand fueled this turbulence and helped in coping with it. The first large and complex projects were filmed in locations outside the studio and abroad in exotic locations, sometimes as far away as Africa.

Yet while global communication was a source of competitive advantage in film, global projects of communication have not always produced competitive advantage for the sponsors. Established in 1998, Motorola’s $5 billion Iridium Project aimed to provide global communication service virtually anywhere at any time on the basis of satellite-based mobile telephony. A program office, with full-time project control managers, software engineers, and analysts, was established. The project control managers utilized sophisticated project management software called Primavera Project Planner (P3) to handle complex and interrelated project scheduling management. In March of 2000, Iridium filed for bankruptcy, terminating its services. Once viewed as a technological breakthrough, the project ended quickly and mysteriously. The full-time project control managers, software engineers, and analysts were relocated.

In fact, the previous example of the film industry may be a good example of how information technology, rather than globalization of communication, is a driver of globalization in projects. Consider that by the time film became a truly global industry in the 1990s, software rendering of filmed material across time zones for the Lord of the Rings trilogy, for example, enabled and supported new centers of expertise in New Zealand. These centers sprang up and remained in addition to traditional centers such as Hollywood, Pine-wood in Britain, or more recently, in Vancouver, Canada or in various locations in Ireland.

Since 1969, when the ARPANET was set up, the Internet has been as much a collection of technological communities as a collection of technologies and its success is largely attributable to satisfying basic community needs and utilizing the community in an effective way to push the infrastructure forward. According to Carayannis, Kwak, and Anbari (2005), between 1995 and 2000, the Internet started to change business practices in virtually every industry in the mid-1990s. Leading project managers around the world adopted Internet technology to become more efficient in controlling and managing various aspects of projects. In 1996, the first edition of the Project Management Book of Knowledge (PMBOK)—in its third edition at the time of this writing—was published (see Box 47.1).

The PMBOK is an internationally recognised standard (IEEE Std 1490-2003) that provides the fundamentals of project management that are applicable to projects in a wide range of industries, including those in construction, software, engineering, automotive, and so on. PMBOK recognizes five basic process groups typical of almost any project. The basic concepts are applicable to projects, programs and operations. The five basic process groups are: (1) initiating, (2) planning, (3) executing, (4) controlling and monitoring, and (5) closing. These five basic processes are seen to overlap and interact throughout a project or its phase. Besides the processes, the projects can be described in terms of (a) inputs such as documents, plans, designs, and so on, (b) tools and techniques or mechanisms applied to the inputs, and (c) outputs such as documents, products, presentations, service delivery events, and so on. The benefits of knowledge of these processes and ways of describing them is that integration is made easier, scope of project is kept from “creeping,” milestones are met with greater certainty, cost budget are not over-run, and quality is controlled. Moreover, the processes and their operationalization through such techniques such as work breakdown help to ensure that the manager is able to control the human resources, risk and procurement in the project.

Box 47.1 The PMBOK SOURCE: PMBOK, 3rd edition, 2004.

In addition to transportation, communication, and information revolutions, modularity of outputs, visibility of processes, involving of clients, and cumulativeness of technological development have also amplified and sped up the spread of global projects in various industries. Innovation is a driver of global competitive advantage. When global projects represent the key economic actor in the globally competitive Silicon Valley and similar innovative regions, global projects are established as an organizational form in other regions around the world as well. Global projects are organizational arrangements that enable the development of radical innovations in a number of industries—in particular, institutional regimes such as those in film, software, and biotechnology, for example. Global projects as a universal form include that global projects can also be radical projects that are part of larger corporations that, as a whole, do not follow a strategy of radical innovation.

From Local To Global Project Forms

Fashion and film are examples of industries that were long dominated by singular or “craft” form of organization, and such a form has never ceased to exist in these industries. Consider art movies and the fact that still today, in large part, haute couture clothes are part sewn by hand. Software and biotechnology are just some of the new industries in which the bureaucratic paradigm has never taken root. Project-based organizational forms thrive in all industries where cost competition is not significant and the customer values production exhibiting elements of quality craftsmanship.

By the end of the 20th century, transportation, communication, and information technology revolutions; globalization; and increasing customer sophistication radically redefined environmental conditions. The environmental challenges of this century clearly show the limits of traditional organizational recipes. The continuously reoccurring periods of severe environmental dislocation call for new organizational solutions that adapt to changing purposes.

Bringing the Environment Back In

There is much evidence that the bureaucratic paradigm has never been efficient in all situations beginning as early as the 1960s. This led to the idea of a contingent fit between organizations and their environments. The survival and effectiveness of organizations was found to hinge upon the right match between organizational capabilities and environmental peculiarities. While the idea of contingent fit has shaped organization theory to this day, the nature and direction of the fit and the mechanisms for change still very much remained a matter for debate until recently.

On one side, some have argued that environmental characteristics essentially determine and shape organization forms. Contingency theorists, population ecologists, and more recently, organizational neo-institutionalists all have proposed variants of this argument. On the other side, others have put forward an entirely different claim. Strategic choice and resource dependency theories, the cognitive, and the more recent postmodern argument have all in one way or another defended the idea that organizations choose and shape, at least in part, their own environments.

In the late 20th century, a third modern framework emerged that for the most part bridged the controversy. Adopting a longitudinal perspective, coevolution theorists argue that environmental transformation and organizational change interplay and feed upon each other through time. In periods of relative environmental stability, existing and dominant organization forms define organizational populations and shape in part environmental landscapes. In turn, environmental transformations affect organizational populations and forms. In periods of relative stability, change takes place, but only in an incremental way, in a manner analogous to species variation.

Organization Forms for the Future

There is little doubt that the end of the 20th century was a period of significant environmental dislocation, at least as much as the end of the 19th century had been in its time. Many industries and companies faced increasingly turbulent, ambiguous, and hypercompetitive environmental conditions. In such conditions of environmental dislocation, to use the classic formulation of James G. March (as cited in Djelic & Ainamo, 1999, p. 624), the capacity to balance exploration and exploitation is necessary. It is necessary that the firm explore or search for entirely new kinds of solutions to ensure survival of the individual organization and the population to which such organizations belong. Exploration requires flexible and organic organization forms. The firm must find ways to promote cultural and political variety and still avoid inefficiencies, fragmentation, and political strife. It must move toward integrating—or preserving looser types of—mechanisms and more flexible organizational features, although it should not give up some of the clear advantages that come together with standardization and exploitation. Like all organizations and populations, the firm must also exploit existing resources, dominant solutions, and institutionalized search routines in order to be able to replenish their resources.

Design theory suggests a solution for handling this apparent contradiction: a redefinition of the organization as a “nearly decomposable system.” According to the Nobel Laureate Herbert A. Simon (as cited in Djelic & Ainamo, 1996, p. 624), “[T]he potential for rapid evolution exists in any complex system that consists of a set of stable subsystems, each operating nearly independently of the processes going on within other subsystems.” In such complex systems, each organizational part or module may be better adapted either for exploitation or for exploration. Pioneering global projects by leading firms appear to point toward

this kind of flexible combination of subsystems or modules, where a core competence corresponds to each module. Near decomposability—or “modularity,” as it is commonly labeled—thus seems to be key in managing complexity in tomorrow’s organizations. In fact, project-based forms of organization, allowing modularity, are emerging and thriving in many global industries.

However, while there is widespread agreement among organizational practitioners and theorists alike that competences and modularity can indeed make it possible for organizations to reconcile flexibility with cost efficiency, the global project is, as of now, more of a ragbag than a clear paradigm. Many different organizational experiments do fit under the label. It seems, in fact, that the road to the future is not straightforward, but rather, that it leads to multiple “migration paths” or trajectories of change. A coevolution perspective with a historical and comparative dimension has helped account for this—each trajectory only makes sense, in fact, within a particular institutional context and in connection with specific historical legacies.

In sum, evidence from such industries as the railroad, fashion, film, software, and biotechnology industries shows that multiple forms, solutions, and trajectories appear to be ultimately converging and differences staying beyond the foreseeable periods of transition and acute environmental dislocation.

Specifying How Global Projects Spread as Organizational Form

Through time, project managers have seen their job as a process of interaction between the way their work is organized, the project goal or target, and local constraints. Research on new organizational forms in the coevolution perspective suggests support for this view: environmental transformation and organizational change interplay through time in a path-dependent and historically constructed process, in which projects and their global and local environments feed upon each other. Research on many industries strongly suggests that the current period of acute environmental turbulence is, in fact, a period of transition, characterized by search, exploration, and multiple but temporary solutions.

A matter long open for discussion was whether, after the current and foreseeable periods of transition, the organizational landscape will end up converging upon a unique, widely legitimated, and institutionalized organizational paradigm. Now, it is quite clear that the global project is an organizational form showing clear signs of convergence. The global project is made a robust form by virtue that it takes in and builds on elements from earlier forms. The global project treats existing knowledge and skills as bases on which to build new ones. This building of new knowledge and skills builds on a recombination of different bodies of existing ones so that a multidisciplinary team forms around a specific project of innovation. Similarly to what project management practitioners call an “adhocratic” organizational form, the cultural diversity inherent in the global project suits it for recombining competencies in novel ways. Task coordination in the global project includes the requirement to have social and cultural skills to manage the cultural and institutional diversity of global projects. When high cultural diversity is managed, it produces novel competences of culture and product, service, or other artifact.

Like other projects, the global project is by definition dissolved upon successful completion of project goals, a feature that is spreading from the feature film and other entertainment industries to software, biotechnology, and other similarly highly dynamic new media sectors. Relatively small entrepreneurial firms still remain important actors in biotechnology because this is an industry that is not yet mature to a degree that established pharmaceutical companies would acquire and swallow up precarious start-up firms. There are at least two kinds of industries in terms of global projects: (a) those where global projects are already a reality and (b) those where global projects are not yet a reality. Individual and organizational learning are here the keys to the development of innovations and effective dynamic capabilities. Global projects create their distinctive signature by coordinating the internal division of labor and by recombining the knowledge and skills of the individual project participants, sometimes also taking in collective capability when it exists. In this sense, both singular and agency business projects are viable organizational solutions. In the first instance, capability is more of a coproduction of individuals, while in the second instance, core actors carry also collective capability from earlier projects. The common characteristic in both kinds of global projects is that a major part of the collective capability becomes a reality when participant commitment is a reality.

Global Projects As Organizations Of The Future

This research-paper has defined what differentiates global projects from conventional projects and from traditional organizational solutions, what drives the existence of global projects, and how they spread. The research-paper has also identified how the global project is more than likely to become significant in various circumstances.

The global project is a distinctive kind of organizational solution that is significant in an increasingly broad array of industrial sectors and societies, each with small variations. We can distinguish between singular and agency business global projects. We can distinguish between individuals with distinct powers or responsibilities and project tasks that are independent of a precise individual for any given project task. The global project as an organizational form is robust in that it can treat both instances as extremes of various combinations of individual roles, identities, and skills and the projects tasks at hand. Global projects can be clustered into more than one variant, but it is difficult to find a mutually exclusive categorization. In one cluster, it is easier to develop firm-specific capabilities and knowledge through the management of a succession of projects and employment of skilled staff than it is in another, but these are but various shades of gray.

The many commonalties and the few differences are important for understanding industries and locations such as Silicon Valley, Silicon Alley, the Italian industrial districts, and Denmark. The contingencies we have identified suggest a number of reasons why different types of global projects appear to be more or less popular in these contexts. Global projects vary only in degrees of singularity in how they elicit commitment from investors and workers, and how activities are managed. Given this rise of singularity in how to organize industrial activity, it appears beyond doubt that global projects are becoming more noticeable in a range of global industries and markets. As technologies and markets develop to become increasingly global, global projects will play increasingly significant roles rather than be replaced by nontemporary or fully routine operations. The extent to which the competitive advantages of global projects are manifested in particular time and space in one way or another depends on the precise degree of singularity and stability of work roles. Where firms are established to create a single or very small number of discrete, separate kinds of products and services, and employment contracts are highly project specific, the global project manifests itself as a singular project in one site. Such a project is too temporary an organization to develop central actorhood or business agency in terms of explicit firm-specific organizational or technical competences. Knowledge created is appropriated by individuals and by small teams. Here, witness the publics-sector project of internationalization in the case of Soviet Union, a collective that since declined and ceased to exist, while many Russian robber baron—individuals to the extreme—of the 1990s and the new millennium became very rich. Witness industries such as feature film and luxury fashion that have been from the start project-based. In all three of these examples of Russia, feature film, and fashion, learning has remained primarily individual- or team-based. Skilled workers directly and spontaneously coordinate their activities without relying on managerial routines or organizational procedures. Employees in such as system may even improve technical and team working skills during each project, but such incremental growth in problem-solving capacities remains the property of the individuals involved and is not codified into organizational procedures and practices.

The managers of many global firms in industries such as information and communication technologies now invest in knowledge management systems and related procedures for codifying, combining, and disseminating project-based knowledge that enable the organization as a whole to develop distinctive organizational competences. By focusing on the singularity of global projects goals and outputs and on the separation and stability of skills as critical features of global projects, this review has suggested a way to distinguish global projects as a distinct and increasingly universal organizational form that helps to explain the spread of global projects in an increasingly broad array of sectors, industries, and societies. In the current global economy, success in developing particular technologies and markets is associated with success in global projects and with effectively dealing with the commitment and coordination problems of exchange and work across cultural and institutional differences.

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