---
title: "Gernot Grabher traces project ecologies in London’s Soho; six-layer architecture, six limitations identified"
sdDatePublished: "2026-09-10T16:19:00Z"
source: "https://www.hcu-hamburg.de/fileadmin/documents/Professoren_und_Mitarbeiter/Gernot_Grabher/Grabher_Seeing_Ecology_2026.pdf"
topics:
  - name: "business strategy and marketing"
    identifier: "medtop:20000192"
  - name: "research and development"
    identifier: "medtop:20000208"
  - name: "infrastructure projects"
    identifier: "medtop:20001245"
locations:
  - "Prato"
  - "Affile"
  - "Emilia-Romagna"
  - "North Holland"
  - "Munich"
  - "Hamburg"
  - "England"
  - "Canada"
---


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