The world according to the project

Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to address the communicative reality of projects, which has an organisational and interactional component. I argue that projects can either be seen as organisation‐bound projects which are differentiated subsystems that progress along the decision premises of the organisation or as operationally closed projects with boundary‐constituting decisions (autopoietic projects). These two types of projects operate with fundamentally different world constructs. The analysis of the case study accounts of four papers shows that with Luhmann's conceptual framework, we can make a significant contribution to the explanation of ‘contextuality’, the understanding of the role of interaction systems in the functioning of projects and organisations in general, as well as the modelling of the relational dynamic between organisations and their projects.