Towards a project theory: Theoretical contents of project management in 9 industry sectors

Abstract

This paper reports upon articles on project management and their contents from the literatures of 9 industry sectors that recognize project management as a theoretical or practical field. The paper answers to: What are the theoretical and theme contents of project management in existing research in various sectors?, and; What are the commonalities and differences across sectors? We use bibliometric and qualitative analysis to identify sector-specific theoretical and theme contents, using data from the ISI Web of Science journal databases for 1986-2009, basing our analysis on 2,354 project management articles in altogether 564 journals. This work contributes to existing research by recognizing common orientations in 9 different sectors, as well as differences across sectors. The results are useful for understanding the cross-disciplinary nature of project management, and how the contents of project management are fragmented into several sector-specific paradigms, and how project management paradigm is systemically adopted across certain sectors