The local government project: A matchmaker or a troublemaker?

Abstract

Several studies have focused on local government as project-supported organisations (PSOs) initiating projects aiming to solve non-routine activities, but we know less about the widespread practice of initiating projects to solve recurrent problems in daily operations. This paper reports findings from a qualitative, longitudinal study of how a project team in a Norwegian local authority navigated tensions in their efforts to solve a daily operations challenge. Our findings contribute to the recent debate about consequences of projects in PSOs. First, we argue that tensions in PSOs can be theorised as competition between co-existing institutional logics and understood in light of strategic owner capabilities. Further, we suggest that the perceived strength of tensions influences whether the project is interpreted as a matchmaker between different logics, or, at other times, as a troublemaker where the project team's interpretation of contextual complexity limits its ability to combine co-existing institutional logics.