Gernot Grabher traces project ecologies in London’s Soho; six-layer architecture, six limitations identified

Seeing Like an Ecology: Project Ecologies as Prism, Practice, and Provocation1

Seeing Like an Ecology: Project Ecologies as Prism, Practice, and Provocation1 Gernot Grabher1 Abstract This article traces the genealogy, architecture, and afterlife of the concept of project ecologies. Originating from an extended immersion into London’s Soho advertising industry, the concept proposed a six-layer architecture—team, ﬁrm, epistemic collective, personal network, locality, and institution—to capture how temporary projects are embed- ded in, and recursively reshape, more durable relational conﬁgurations. The article reconstructs the intellectual trib- utaries that fed the concept (heterarchy, temporary organizing, the knowledge economy, the new spirit of capitalism); maps its subsequent diffusion across creative industries, megaprojects, urban development, and infrastructure delivery; and tracks how recent scholarship has advanced—and complicated—its constitutive dimensions along what are here termed the 4 + 2 Ts: time, task, team, transition plus territory and things. In a concluding act of retrospective candor, six limitations—typological drift, empirical reach, boundary delineation, power asymmetries, normative undertone, and conceptual overlaps—are diagnosed and paired with concrete research directions that aspire to convert a capacious but underdetermined trading zone into a proper research program. Keywords project ecology, project management, temporary organizations, governance, heterarchy From Soho, With Bewilderment The idea arose neither from a conceptual epiphany nor from an exercise in methodical deduction: the notion of the project ecology, rather haltingly, began to take shape during an extended immersion into the world of advertis- ing in Soho (London). Part expedition (through largely uncharted terrain, back then) and part safari (with encoun- ters of exotic organizational creatures), this quest sought answers to one question: How had Soho transformed itself from a subordinate outpost of Madison Avenue’s utilitar- ian “ﬁrst wave” into a global creative hot spot pioneering the self-reﬂective “second wave” of advertising? (Grabher, 2001a, p. 351). Although most conspicuously celebrated and legiti- mized by a surge of Cannes-Lions decorated advertising campaigns, Soho’s creativity was by no means limited to the realm of its tangible output. Already a center of gravity of Swinging London’s creative industries2, this tiny dis- trict (of roughly a square mile) also catalyzed a radical transformation of the production process: breaking away from the ritualized antagonism between the hearts and the suits, between the creatives (embodying an artistic ethos) and the account managers (honoring a business ethos), Soho agencies pioneered the professionalization of account planning (introducing, in fact, a scientiﬁc ethos into creative production) (Grabher, 2001a, p. 352).3 The ad village, as it was colloquially referred to, moreover afforded a fertile breeding ground for bold experiments (that is the safari part) with corporate governance. The per- sistent inception of mavericks like the employee-owned Agency of the Year in 1997, St. Lukes, time and again, enriched the genetic pool for further organizational and governance mutations (see also Grabher & Stark, 1997, p. 536). By venturing ever deeper into the variegated life world of Soho advertising, the early fascination with this daz- zling empirical reality increasingly began to intermingle with a sense of conceptual unease, not to say bewilder- ment. At least viewed from a far-off university desk, the 1HafenCity University Hamburg, Hamburg, Germany Corresponding Author: Gernot Grabher, Urban and Regional Economics, HafenCity University Hamburg, Henning-Voscherau-Platz 1, 20457 Hamburg, Germany. Email: gernot.grabher@hcu-hamburg.de Thoughtlet Project Management Journal 1–19 © 2026 Project Management Institute, Inc. Article reuse guidelines: sagepub.com/journals-permissions DOI: 10.1177/87569728261452960 journals.sagepub.com/home/pmx

exploration of Soho initially held the prospect of adding yet another richly textured contribution to the economic geography of territorial innovation models (Moulaert & Sekia, 2003). Although still perceived as the morally low- est of all industries (before the creativity hype-cycle con- secrated advertising as the avant-garde of the creative economy), an examination of the Soho advertising busi- ness promised a service industry-based contribution to the economic geographic inventory of territorial innova- tion models centered around manufacturing. Varyingly discussed as industrial districts, innovative milieux, regional innovation systems, learning regions or, in terms of the long prevailing notion, as clusters, the con- ception of territorial innovation models was derived from an increasingly motley collection of euphoric tales of regional economic success (or at least survival) that should corroborate above all this: any spatial concentration of industries, in principle at least, could galvanize territorial innovation—even in the most startling corners of the world. Despite conceptual nuances and different empirical foci, the blueprint of the various territorial innovation models was built around a rather straightforward architec- ture: the ﬁrm as the atomic unit of economic endeavor, the region as a spatially concentrated set of interorganizational relations. And despite the intentions to institute yet another analytical vocabulary, the various models invariably con- verged toward a single theoretical axiom: embeddedness. While Polanyi (1944) was occasionally mentioned in pass- ing, paying tribute to Granovetter’s (1985) reinterpretation of Polanyi’s paradigmatic notion became de rigueur in economic geography. By scaling down Polanyi’s under- standing of embeddedness from the macro-level of institu- tionally conditioned economies, Granovetter (1985, p. 490) had presented an analytical access to embeddedness that stressed the role of concrete relations and networks in gener- ating trust (Hess, 2004, p. 171). For economic geography, this relational reading of embeddedness appeared as a perfect analytical match: it lent the framing of regional economies as tightly knit bun- dles of interorganizational relations the scientiﬁc authority of economic sociology. Yet the entanglement with the embeddedness heuristic also steered the discipline into tricky terrain: it foregrounded the social situatedness of economic action but encouraged “tautological explana- tions and overly consensual accounts of local economies” (Peck, 2005, p. 132). Accounts of industrial districts increasingly read like rediscoveries of a preindustrial Arcadia in which trustful interﬁrm collaboration had coa- lesced into socially cohesive economies driven by the self- reinforcing logics of mutual learning and collaborative innovation (for a ﬁrst scorching critique of industrial- district romanticism, see Amin & Thrift, 1992). Diving ever deeper into the entrails of the London advertising business made increasingly clear: rather than a simple mutation of an established territorial innovation model, this local economy seemed an entirely different organizational creature. Foregrounding the efﬁciency of trustful collaboration across robust local ties glossed over what actually made Soho’s economy tick: rather than trustful collaboration, ﬁerce rivalry; rather than a robust interorganizational architecture, an ever-changing rewiring of nested hierarchies and crisscrossing networks; and rather than institutional coherence, productive friction (Grabher, 2001a, 2002a, 2004a, 2004b). Moreover, the ever-shifting relational fabric deﬁed any clear-cut geo- graphic delineation within a neatly demarcated patch of the city, perforating any district boundaries with task- speciﬁc ties spanning national and continental boundaries. London, deﬁnitely, was not the Emilia-Romagna; and Soho, likewise, did not match Prato. Since the advertising business, obviously, deﬁed the systemness and long-term stability that had long lent industrial districts their conceptual appeal, a ﬁrst attempt at a conceptualization settled on the notion of the heterar- chy (Grabher, 2001a). This notion afforded a conceptual vocabulary to capture constellations that appeared ﬂeeting (but not arbitrary), collaborative (but far from harmonious) and exhibited structure (but without a commanding cen- ter). This conceptual afﬁnity was hardly incidental: emerg- ing from early neurology and cybernetics, heterarchy had been contrived precisely to describe systems in which ordering principles coexist without collapsing into a single vertical axis—as paradigmatically evinced in McCulloch’s (1945) model of neural networks or Bateson’s (1972) anal- yses of distributed cognitive processes. In organization studies, the term later gained traction in analyses of post- bureaucratic and innovation-driven environments that operate through overlapping logics, competing evaluative principles, and recurrent role reconﬁgurations (Hedlund, 1986; Grabher & Stark, 1997; Stark, 2009; Williams & Lee, 2011; Schumacher et al., 2022).4 Beyond Heterarchy, Toward Ecology Heterarchy provided a powerful conceptual leverage to push beyond the Elysian portrayals of territorial innova- tion models and, hence, to understand what Soho was not. The concept, however, proved less conducive to spe- cify the organizational, relational, and institutional fea- tures of which this constellation actually was. Heterarchy, in other words, owed its conceptual appeal more to unsettling the orthodox perspective than to provid- ing a granular architectural template. Since heterarchy, most conspicuously, broke with notions of long-term sta- bility, “temporary organizing” turned into the primary key- word in the search for conceptual inspiration to frame an economy that pulsated in the fast-paced rhythm of pro- jects—the second viewﬁnder for this very quest. As a ﬁrst consequential discovery, the search revealed the centrality of Lundin and Söderholm’s (1995) seminal 2 Project Management Journal 0(0)

theorization of temporary organizations, famously built around the Four Ts of time, task, team, and transition that offered precisely the analytical grammar that heterar- chy lacked. Lundin and Söderholm’s (1995) account was truly groundbreaking for its time: it inverted the ontologi- cal order of organization studies by treating temporariness not as a deviation from permanence but as a legitimate mode of organizing sui generis.5 The Soho ﬁeldwork mapped almost uncannily onto this framework: sharply delimited time horizons (i.e., the campaign deadline), tightly bounded tasks (i.e., the 15-second TV commercial), teams assembled according to the local mantra (i.e., always change a winning team), and project-induced tran- sitions (i.e., advancing procedural and creative capabili- ties). What appeared deﬁcient through the Marshallian optic of an industrial district suddenly made sense as a sequence of nested temporary organizations orchestrated within a wider ecology. Debates sparked by Midler’s (1995) notion of the pro- jectiﬁcation of the ﬁrm added a second, decisive insight: rather than merely unfolding within organizations, projects actively reshape them. While his French automotive case illustrated how repeated project work reconﬁgures author- ity and knowledge inside established ﬁrms, Soho pre- sented an even more radical variant: rather than being transformed by projects, ﬁrms existed because of projects. Engwall’s (2003) insistence that no project is an island prompted a complementary impulse that resonated strongly with the temporary organizing in Soho in which projects were time bounded, yet densely entangled: client relations crystallized around robust personal ties, project teams reconﬁgured around reputational networks, and freelancers navigated overlapping personal networks stretching across agencies, production houses, a