Projectification of Work: Do Project Skills Question Professional Configurations and Boundaries?

Among models on management and organisation of work and labour relations, project work increasingly stands out, affecting the role, status and powers of professionals. One trend observed in project work contexts pertains to the rise of new skills related to project management and organisation, framed and pushed by a growing set of programmes for training and certification of project skills. With this paper we propose to discuss how changing, projectified, organisational conditions, and particularly the rise of project skills and how they may overlap with professional expertise, can affect professionals’ work and standing in different contexts.

This discussion stems from a research project ‘PROWORK – Projectifying work: network organisation models in contemporary capitalist societies’, devoted to the analysis of modes of projectification, understood as processes that raise the “project” in its own right as the central tenet of work organisation. The data for this discussion comes from case studies in four different sectors: Research & Development, Consulting & Management, Social Economy, and the Arts. The research methodology draws on ethnographic work, including direct observation, document analysis, and interviews.

Project work occurs within contexts where forms of expertise are shaped by mixed models of regulation, where claims to the public good may be in competition or combined with claims of market value, and multiple forms of legitimacy and authoritative knowledge claims can clash. Projects are thus a ground where notions of expertise can be challenged, prevailing dichotomies between formal education and on-the-job training overpassed, and prevailing modes of professional regulation undermined. As such, it is a model of work organisation that can introduce significant changes in professional boundaries, at its core, as project skills and management can encroach on professional expertise and autonomy, which calls for specific analysis on how those concepts still hold their explanatory power under conditions of projectification.