Professionalization and Dissemination of Project Management in Italy. Structuring an Organizational Field

The prevailing view looks at Project Management (PM) as a neutral and objective corpus of managerial knowledge. This perspective explains its growing popularity as an adaptive response by the organizations related to some significant environmental changes and the consequential changes in the strategies and organizational structures. This paper aims to propose an alternative vision - called Situationist - of the processes of professionalization and dissemination of PM. Through this different lens new elements emerge – institutional processes and power dynamics – suggesting different considerations. With respect to them, the work shows the preliminary results of an ongoing larger qualitative research program about the structuration of an organizational field in Italy.