The Tyranny of Projects: Teamworking, Knowledge Production and Management in Consulting Engineering

Consulting engineering is a business service industry, which relies heavily on project teamwork in producing knowledge for its professional service products. Engineering practices and knowledge areas encompass mainly civil, mechanical and electrical engineering, buildings physics, project and construction management, which are typically pictured as knowledge-intensive activities. Such practices are here understood as local cultures, communities of practices, with a continuous and inherent sociopolitical element of negotiations of knowledge claims. Drawing on a five-month participant observation and interview study, the article illustrates how teamworking occurs under continuous pressures from structural, organizational, professional and individual sources. The organization attempts in its knowledge production to combine practical experience, formalized information, external alliances and customer demands. Corporate management and project teamwork are in a state of latent conflict. A series of management initiatives, including IT, address the production of knowledge. This can be seen as a combination of responses to external contingencies and at the same time development of internal resources within the conditions of possibility. Due to a continuous regime of 'getting things done' on the ongoing projects – what the author terms the tyranny of projects – cross-project learning and knowledge transfer are hindered.