Don G. Schley, Dennis Lewis

Abstract: This paper constitutes a response to the oft-repeated claim that project management is a field without a theoretical foundation, an amalgam of ad hoc practices, and not a discrete academic discipline. Relying on scholarship from the 1920s to the present, the authors argue that project management has indeed a distinctive theoretical foundation, but one that is eclectic, and not unitary, which they identify as the real lack in project management theory. Essentially, Schley and Lewis argue that the essential elements of project management theory originate with Mary Parker Follet’s lectures in the 1920s (delivered mostly before the London School of Economics) which identified such departures from classical management theory as lateral processes in organizations, and the authority of expertise in technical organizations. They then turn to the human relations school of management in the post-WWII era and the theoretical writings of scholars such as Elton Mayo, Kurt Lewin, Abraham Maslow, Chris Argyris, Douglas McGregor, the men of the socio-technical systems school of thought, Bertalanffy and his school of systems thinking, and point out that these radical theoretical departures from the classical, mechanistic model of organizational management forced the emergence of new approaches to management based on these theoretical breakthroughs, and that the most important of these was project management. Finally, the transformation of the American workforce by the GI Bill of Rights (1945) forced the development of new theoretical approaches to personnel and human resource management based on the new demographic realities of a workforce much more highly trained than in the earlier stages of industrialization.

Key words: project management; matrix; lateral processes; knowledge management; quality management; emerging management thought; conflict management; dynamic systems