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The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management. Edited by Bent Flyvbjerg. Abstract. This handbook is currently in development, with individual articles.
Table of contents

The Case of Albert O. Hirschman Bent Flyvbjerg 9. Baade and Victor A. Gann Megaproject Stakeholder Management Graham Winch Graeme Hodge and Carsten Greve Wider Impacts of Megaprojects: Curse or Cure? Roger Vickerman Related Papers. By Bent Flyvbjerg. Megaproject Planning and Management: Essential Readings, vols. Ecological economics and opening up of megaproject appraisal: lessons from megaproject scholarship and topics for a research programme. By Markku Lehtonen. Do Classics Exist in Megaproject Management? Megaprojects and Risk: An Anatomy of Ambition.

The Academy of Management organizes workshops specifically targeting the management and organization of megaprojects, and a number of universities, business schools, and engineering schools around the world are setting up centers of excellence in research and training within the area of megaproject management.

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This rapid development clearly calls for a definition of the field; an overview of what is currently taking place; along with a discussion about the central areas of megaprojects, the core topics, and the core contributors. This Handbook does a wonderful job in doing just that—all under the auspices of Professor Bent Flyvbjerg at the University of Oxford.

Professor Flyvbjerg is one of the central players in this emerging field of research and he has teamed up with world-leading contributors from a diverse set of scholarly disciplines and backgrounds to offer a contemporary view of megaproject management. It adds considerable depth to mainstream project studies and previous handbooks of project management Morris et al. Without spending too much time on the definition—whether it is about the number of people involved, the money invested, or the time spent—we all know that megaprojects are the large-scale projects that shape and change society.

Most of them are found in infrastructure such as city development, transportation systems, communication systems , but they could also target the development of completely new technologies, such as the Manhattan Project, the Large Hadron Collider project in CERN, and many other large-scale scientific and research-oriented projects that develop future science and technologies. The new and primary idea of the megaproject concept is the focus on infrastructure and the connections to economic geography, architecture, and regional and urban planning.

Less on product and systems development in that sense, which are certainly large, but that might not meet the same kinds of challenges associated with politics, stakeholder complexity, and environmental concerns.

The book undoubtedly unveils many of the challenges associated with these projects, about their decision-making challenges, political intricacies, institutional requirements, and technological difficulties. Following a short introductory chapter, which addresses the prevalence and problems of megaprojects by the editor Bent Flyvbjerg, there are 24 chapters divided into four parts: challenges, causes, cures, and cases.

The division makes a lot of sense, although it is sometimes difficult to follow whether or not each of the chapters actually adheres to the theme into which it has been categorized, and what each theme actually is targeting. In Chapter 2, the first chapter in Part I of the book, Lenfle and Loch discuss why megaprojects so often fail. The authors underscore the essential role of poor management in explaining the poor performance of megaprojects, specifically that management fails to address uncertainty and stakeholder complexity.

According to the authors, the combinations of these challenges were known already in the s but management has lost the capability to address them. Going back to the root of the problem seems to be a good idea, with a stronger emphasis on acknowledging inherent uncertainties, stakeholder management, and flexible contract management. The chapter contributes to an insightful and intriguing treatise on the history of megaproject management. In Chapter 3, Siemiatycki offers an interesting historical and macro-perspective on the development of megaprojects.

The author introduces the idea of waves of megaproject development. Siemiatycki demonstrates his idea with a number of cases, which took place between and He demonstrates that these cycles of megaproject development range from brief punctuated fads to long-term trends. The cycles are driven by a complex blend of technological innovation, economics, social networks, ideologies, and interest groups that spur the diffusion of certain new megaproject approaches. Megaprojects are thus triggered by the political lure of achieving major tangible benefits, as well as the potential to convey a powerful set of intangible symbolic messages that are often associated with particular megaprojects.

The chapter provides a broadened view on megaprojects, and the notion of waves of megaprojects seems promising as a valid explanation for the existence of megaprojects. But, why do megaprojects have to be that big? Why do they have to be megaprojects? Why not smaller-scale projects? The authors discuss why bigger always seems to be worse by centering the analysis on investment fragility.

The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management (Hardcover)

The authors point out that big capital investments break easily and that they may deliver negative net present value to a great extent because of various sources of uncertainty that impact a megaproject during its extended time of development to fruition. The authors show, based on the empirical research on mega-dams, that nearly half of the projects suffered a cost overrun so large for the project to be considered broken before it even began operations. The authors point out that developing countries ought to stay away from projects that are big relative to the national economy.

In that respect, the authors clearly demonstrate that bigger is far from always better and provides a healthy critical analysis of the existence of megaprojects. Addressing the institutional challenges, particularly for global megaprojects, is the focus of Levitt and Scott's Chapter 5.


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The authors discuss a key reason why megaprojects tend to dissolve—traditional legal-contractual governance mechanisms almost always break in projects crossing institutional and national divides. The authors point out the difficulties associated with mixing and matching governance mechanisms in large-scale global projects. In particular, Levitt and Scott zero in on the difficulties so common in these projects and associated with cooperation and coordination across institutional divides. This is a chapter that makes an important linkage between projects and institutional theory, which adds to our understanding of the current challenges facing megaprojects and a theoretically interesting explanation as to why they so often seem to fail.

Moving even further into the realms of the ethical and political issues associated with megaprojects is the aim of Chapter 6 by Van Wee and Priemus.


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The authors particularly address the ethical aspects of the impacts of megaprojects on society, the quality of the estimates of the cost-benefit-analysis of megaprojects, and the democratic quality of the decision-making process preceding megaprojects. The authors offer evidence indicating that estimates are often biased: costs are more frequently underestimated than overestimated and benefits are typically more often overestimated than they are underestimated. In a condensed summary of normative frameworks of how to deal with these problems, the authors offer a set of core principles on how to improve the quality of cost estimates.

This chapter is important to anyone interested in what needs to be done to fix the fragile foundation of many megaprojects.

The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management by Bent Flyvbjerg

Ending the section on the challenges is Chapter 7 by Xuefei Ren. The author offers an in-depth description of the current situation in China based upon which the author asks whether the current megaproject wave is the biggest infrastructure bubble ever seen in world history. The chapter centers on the conditions that underlie the planning and implementation of megaprojects, most specifically the regulatory reforms in the land, housing, and financial sectors.

The author locates many of the underlying reasons driving the megaproject boom to be found in regulatory changes in these sectors. In many ways, the author offers a refreshing analysis of the contested nature of megaproject development, and a sobering conclusion that tightened regulations will probably put a stop to China's megaproject era. Again, this is a chapter that connects the existence of megaprojects with regulatory changes. It is an important contribution based upon research on one of the most fascinating domains of megaproject development.

Part II of the Handbook centers on the causes of megaprojects or, perhaps more accurately, on the causes of the challenges facing megaproject management. In Chapter 8, Flyvbjerg leads the way for this part with a contribution on Albert Hirschman's work on the principle of the hiding hand—basically indicating that poor initial estimates in the project are accompanied by an underestimation of the ability to deal with the problems faced during the project.

This has considerable creative effects, argued Hirschman. Flyvbjerg criticizes the fundamental and general claim that Hirschman presented in his book more than 50 years ago. He demonstrates that Hirschman's data collection was biased, that the dataset was far too limited, that Hirschman misrepresented his findings, and that it is difficult to replicate Hirschman's findings through statistical tests. These are important matters for the future that very well could lead the way for an integrated and balanced scholarly debate about the rationality and different rationalities underlying the decision to implement a megaproject.

Helga Drummond continues the analysis of decision-making problems in megaprojects in Chapter 9 by addressing megaproject escalation of commitment.

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The topic is highly relevant for a book on megaprojects as this topic is probably one of the most influential areas of research linking megaprojects with decision making ever since the publication of the seminal work by Staw and Ross in the s e. Drummond elegantly summarizes the core ideas of this stream of research, addressing questions such as: Why does escalation start, how does it start, and what drives decision makers to hold on to an economically weak megaproject?

The chapter is important as it provides a coherent summary and analysis of extant research, yet simultaneously points out several important avenues for research and practice on how to encourage commitment to megaprojects and the dreams of megaprojects, yet avoid the dangerous effects typically seen in cases escalating commitment. This is another important chapter, especially the framework and discussion of project shaping, the process of project shaping, value creation in project shaping, and the management of project complexity, and less focus on the games of innovation.

In many ways, this chapter demonstrates the importance of building a solid foundation for megaprojects, of shaping the project in an accurate manner, of ensuring that the environment is sufficiently stable to allow for the implementation of the project. These are important tasks that involve multiple stakeholders, including project owners, sponsors, politicians, top managers, and project managers. In Chapter 11, Clegg, Sankaran, Biesenthal, and Pollack address the issue of power and sensemaking in megaprojects. The authors examine current practices underlying the management of megaprojects and show how the evolution of these practices created a management discipline that became ill equipped to deal with the current challenges facing contemporary megaprojects.

In particular, the authors emphasize the need to incorporate power relations into the analysis.

The Oxford Handbook Of Megaproject Management Oxford Handbooks

The authors present different ways in which project management produces cues for common sensemaking—creating, adapting, and using common frames of meaning that could characterize the megaproject organization and its members. Clegg et al. This is probably particularly true for projects spanning institutional fields.

The chapter nicely captures the integral features of power relations and sensemaking, that power is a central concern for megaprojects, and that sensemaking is particularly difficult in a fragmented megaproject context. Indeed, it demonstrates that politics is an integral part of megaprojects and the analysis of these organizations and that researchers should engage more closely in the emergence of the narrative around and within a megaproject; how meaning is created in the context of megaprojects to better understand what actually goes on in these kinds of projects.

Based on an indepth, comparative study of four major infrastructure projects in the United Kingdom, the authors show that to sustain a highly fragile consensus-oriented development, management needs to know when to resolve the make-or-break issues by relaxing rules, building slack and flexibility, or conceding problem-solving capacities to arbitrators. In many ways, the chapter builds further on the politics argument presented by Clegg et al.

It focuses specifically on what kinds of flexibilities are important in megaprojects and what managers can do to maintain and make use of them.

The Oxford Handbook of Megaproject Management

It also addresses how a particular kind of safeguarding mechanism should work in these kinds of complex and multi-organizational undertakings. In Chapter 13, on the drivers of mega-events in emerging economies, Baade and Matheson demonstrate why the economic outcomes for mega-events in sports have fallen short of expectations.

The authors point out that unreasonable expectations, poor management, and corruption are critical in explaining the failure to achieve satisfying economic outcomes in the domain of mega-events. These observations are also valid for the analysis of megaproject performance on a more general level.

The chapter furthers the analysis of the political issues of megaprojects and makes a strong point about the combination of unreasonable expectations and poor management being at the core of the underperformance of many megaprojects. It nicely identifies several common concerns among megaprojects in general and the specific case of mega-events and thereby identifies several important linkages among these knowledge areas.

Part III of the book centers on the cures for failed megaproject performance.

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This part begins with Chapter 14 by Davies, Dodgson, and Gann on innovation and flexibility in megaprojects. The authors present a new delivery model, which relies to a much greater extent on innovation and flexibility. Central to succeeding with developing such a model are, according to the authors, five strategic processes: search capabilities, adaptive problem-solving capabilities, test and trial capabilities, strategic innovation capabilities, and balancing capabilities.