Are complexity and uncertainty distinct concepts in project management? A taxonomical examination from literature

Highlights

• Weak theories of project management imply limited generalizability.

• Non-deterministic approaches could yield stronger theoretic explanations.

• Complexity and uncertainty are terminologically confounded.

• Ontological and epistemological intermingling is a possible cause of confounding.

Abstract

Project management research is characterized by dominance of determinism, decision-theoretic approaches, and weak theories. The growth of research interest in non-deterministic paradigms through the lenses of complexity and uncertainty is recent, and could provide stronger theoretic explanations. However, analysis of select project management literature reveals that the constructs of complexity and uncertainty are yet to be grounded in terms of definitions and constituent variables. We argue that definitional clarity is necessary for the non-deterministic research to move forward. In this paper, we propose taxonomy of constituent terms of complexity and uncertainty based on semantic analysis of select literature and show that the two constructs are broadly confounded in their constituent terms. While our finding may appear to align with complexity theoretic concept of strong interrelationship between complexity and uncertainty, we argue that such confounding represents intermingling of varying ontological and epistemological preferences within the community of project management scholars rather than a broad adherence to the complexity theory. The paper contributes to project management literature by facilitating further research toward stronger construct definitions and theory-building efforts. The paper also contributes to research methods by offering a novel methodology to elicit taxonomy of terms and to illuminate the confounding and separating terms across multiple constructs.

Introduction

The field of project management research is characterized by the dominance of deterministic paradigm and decision-theoretic approaches. A review of literature reveals two themes anchored in determinism. Much of the early project management research lasting until late 1980s employs conceptual or analytical methods, and focuses on scheduling optimization, resting on the premise that project activities and their interrelationships are fixed and measurable (Kolisch, 1996, Herroelen et al., 1998, Kolisch and Padman, 2001, Herroelen and Leus, 2004, Herroelen and Leus, 2005, Hartmann and Briskorn, 2010). Subsequently, empirical studies seeking success or failure factors have gained prominence in 1990s (Kloppenborg and Opfer, 2002, Tesch et al., 2003, Turner and Müller, 2005, Jugdev and Müller, 2005, Rozenes et al., 2006, Huemann et al., 2007, Ika, 2009, Müller and Jugdev, 2012). The search for success or failure factors has also led to expansion of the research domain to broader organizational contexts, behavioral and interdisciplinary themes, organizational and external actors, strategic benefits, risk, etc. (Belout and Gauvreau, 2004, Turner and Müller, 2005, Huemann et al., 2007, Aloini et al., 2007, Littau et al., 2010, Padalkar and Gopinath, 2015). On the backdrop of determinism, a small non-deterministic stream is evident from 1960s. This includes critique of PERT and of beta distribution (Grubbs, 1962, MacCrimmon and Ryavec, 1964, Schonberger, 1981); modeling of uncertainty in project phenomena by relaxing the assumptions about fixed attributes (Martin, 1965; Burt, 1977, Cook and Jennings, 1979, Williams, 1992, Bowman, 1995, Cho and Yum, 1997, Elmaghraby et al., 1999, Chapman and Ward, 2000); use of system dynamics to model the nonlinear effects of feedback loops in projects (Williams et al., 1995, Rodrigues and Williams, 1998, Williams, 1999, Eden et al., 2000); and modeling the project phenomena under fuzzy or probabilistic assumptions (Chanas and Zieliński, 2001, Browning and Eppinger, 2002, Van de Vonder et al., 2005, Jensen et al., 2006, Chen, 2007). The dominant research orientation has continued to be instrumentalist, while seeking decision-theoretic models/methods, or success/failure factors as prescriptions for project performance.

The non-deterministic stream holds significance in view of the weak theoretic nature of project management (Shenhar and Dvir, 1996, Shenhar, 2001, Söderlund, 2004, Cicmil et al., 2006, Smyth and Morris, 2007, Whitty and Maylor, 2009, Morris, 2010, Jacobsson and Söderholm, 2011). It represents a paradigmatic change and has the potential to supply alternate narratives and explanations through different methodological approaches. The widening of research agenda and contexts in late 1990s appears to have aided the growth of non-deterministic research in the post-2000 period. From a brief scan of literature, we observe attempts to model project phenomena under complexity-related assumptions (Austin et al., 2002, Howick and Eden, 2001, Xia and Lee, 2004, Xia and Lee, 2005, Cho and Eppinger, 2005, Danilovic and Browning, 2007) and theoretic discussions, definitions, or constituent terms of complexity (Baccarini, 1996, Williams, 1999, Shenhar, 2001, Pich et al., 2002, Sommer and Loch, 2004, Benbya and McKelvey, 2006, Cooke-Davies et al., 2007, Geraldi and Adlbrecht, 2007, Maylor et al., 2008, Vidal and Marle, 2008, Brady and Davies, 2010, Lenfle, 2011, Geraldi et al., 2011, Ramasesh and Browning, 2014), or of uncertainty (Tatikonda and Rosenthal, 2000, Turner and Müller, 2003, Ward and Chapman, 2003, Cho and Eppinger, 2005, Atkinson et al., 2006, Perminova et al., 2008). Thus, it appears that researchers employ complexity and uncertainty as the principal lenses for non-deterministic enquiry. The importance of non-deterministic stream calls for a deeper study of how project management literature treats the two lenses of complexity and uncertainty.

This paper is organized as follows. Section 2 reviews relevant project management literature dealing with complexity and uncertainty. Section 3 presents the research methodology and data selection for building taxonomy for the two constructs from project management literature. Section 4 discusses the results of the taxonomical analysis.