Projectifying Research and Development Work: Academy- and Industry- Driven Projects

This paper addresses the impacts of projectification on ST&I work, based on the results of two case studies analysing Research and Development (R&D) projects carried out in partnership between companies and research institutions. These case studies are part of a research project - ‘PROWORK – Projectifying work: network organisation models in contemporary capitalist societies’ - analyzing modes and processes of projectification in different contexts, where the “project” is becoming the central tenet of work organisation, with specific impacts on work relationships, performance, goals and rationales.

While R&D has long been configured as a largely project-based endeavour, the impacts of the projectification of R&D work are not uniform and unchanging, making it important to analyse how that projectification is empirically enacted, in different contexts, by different social actors, and what specific impacts it bears. For that purpose, we will analyze both academy- and industry-driven R&D projects: one about preventing groundwater contamination, publicly funded and anchored in academic institutions that partner with local water companies in various geographies; the other focused on the development of a new product based on composite materials, privately funded by the company that produces them, and developed in partnership with academia.

These R&D projects will thus be analyzed as socio-technical networks, focusing not only on the individual and organizational levels, but the interorganizational level. The fact that these projects have different institutional anchors, are based on different funding sources, and compose diverse networks with distinct actors, is what makes them interesting to analyse various dynamics and dimensions of projectification, the role played by different stakeholders in them, and its outcomes.

Serving that in-depth and layered look, the case studies methodology draws on ethnographic work, to capture the subtler phenomenological dynamics of the projectification of R&D work, including data from direct observation, document analysis, and interviews.