Managing Stability and Change in Interorganizational Projects: The Ambiguous Role of Digital Tools for Relational Dynamics

Abstract

Focusing on relational dynamics among collaborating organizations, we ask how inter-organizational projects respond to digitalization and ensure that the dynamics remain manageable. Digital tools, such as Building Information Modeling (BIM) in the construction industry, can help to manage relational dynamics but may also cause additional ones. Considering the theorizing of stability and change as a duality, the practice-based perspective adopted, and the empirical evidence from two comparable construction projects investigated, these dynamics are not only mitigated, but also maintained, or even mobilized. With its focus on relationally embedded interorganizational projects, and additional relational dynamics triggered and managed by BIM in face of the recursive interplay between stability and change, the study provides a nuanced manageability framework. With this it contributes not only to project management scholarship, but also to management research more broadly, which is increasingly interested in forms of temporary organizing.