The Paradoxical Profession: Project Management and the Contradictory Nature of Sustainable Project Objectives

Sabini, Luca and Alderman, Neil (2021) The Paradoxical Profession: Project Management and the Contradictory Nature of Sustainable Project Objectives. Project Management Journal, 52 (4). 379 - 393. ISSN 8756-9728
Copy

Professions are undergoing a significant change in how they integrate environmental and social objectives into their core values. This article examines the situation in which those working in the project management profession are expected to work under contradictory sustainability constraints. In this article, we investigate the tensions project managers experience when addressing sustainable objectives. Results show that when tensions arise over sustainable objectives (temporality of objectives, organizational barriers, and lack of control), they are addressed only when anchored to an economic one in the form of a business case for sustainability. We also find that when matching traditional project objectives with sustainable ones is not possible, practitioners enact a set of reactions characterized as greenwashing, it can’t be one person, no space for sustainability in my job, other actors involved, or pushing back, depending on the specific project context. Adopting the paradox theory lens, we provide an alternative approach to the business case for sustainability. The practical contribution of this article lies in suggesting the need to find strategies to embrace paradoxical situations and we provide some suggestions to illustrate this.


picture_as_pdf
87569728211007660.pdf
subject
Published Version
Available under Creative Commons: BY 4.0

View Download
visibility_off picture_as_pdf

Submitted Version
lock copyright

Atom BibTeX OpenURL ContextObject in Span OpenURL ContextObject Dublin Core MPEG-21 DIDL Data Cite XML EndNote HTML Citation METS MODS RIOXX2 XML Reference Manager Refer ASCII Citation
Export

Downloads