Organization Studies - Clash of the Titans: Temporal Organizing and Collaborative Dynamics in the Panama Canal Megaproject

Introduction

• Large-scale global projects necessitate inter-organizational collaboration across various boundaries.

• These projects are temporary endeavors aimed at optimizing outcomes by integrating resources from multiple sources.

• Global projects are inherently unstable and complex, often leading to conflict-ridden collaboration environments.

• Project-specific assemblies of experts from diverse permanent organizations are common, with limited prior collaboration history. Roles are often ambiguous and not rigidly defined.

• Despite the appearance of stability due to long timelines and sophisticated arrangements, these projects are fleeting constellations of interrelated subprojects and stakeholders.

• Potential for conflict arises from geographically dispersed stakeholders with conflicting interests and differing institutional contexts.

• Differences in national, organizational, professional, and project cultures can impact project success.

• Performance and collaboration between project partners can be problematic.

• Contractual arrangements and governance regimes may not fully capture the complexity of organizational collaboration.

• Large budgets, high public profiles, and lasting impacts on environment and society put collaborative relationships under constant pressure.

• Project partners are motivated to overcome differences, define roles, and establish firm relationships across institutional divides.

• Orr and Scott (2008) suggest project partners resolve differences through phases of ignorance, sensemaking, and response.

• Clegg, Pitsis, Rura-Polley, and Marosszeky (2002) describe efforts to develop an ‘alliance culture’ through socialization.

• Freelance expatriates mitigate differences through role reallocation, education, and translation.

• Principals often hire agents to manage and guard project execution and objectives.

• Temporary organizations maintain continuity through structured role systems and social mechanisms.

• Existing studies highlight practices that establish stability in temporary organizations.

• Organizational actors are primarily seen as seeking order and consensus.

• Complexity, ambiguity, and uncertainty can drive collaboration but also lead to disagreement and power struggles.

• A conflict view, alongside the order view, is essential for analyzing political struggles in large-scale global projects.

• Research question: How do project members negotiate their roles, responsibilities, and hierarchical relations in the collaboration between principal and agent in a large-scale global project?

• Data from a one-year ethnographic study of the Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP) is used to answer this question.

• The ACP initiated the PCEP in 2006 with an estimated budget of $$5.25 billion.

• CH2M Hill (CH) was hired as the program manager.

• Instead of the usual hierarchical positioning, CH was assigned the role of coach and mentor.

• The diffuse hierarchy led to constant renegotiation of roles and responsibilities.

• Three different faces of the collaborative process were identified:

  • Attempts to establish collaborative order through harmony-seeking practices.
  • CH consultants contesting emerging roles and hierarchic relations.
  • ACP managers contesting CH’s dominant position.

Key Insights & Contributions

• The paper demonstrates how project leaders constantly renegotiate emergent order rather than maintaining consensus.
• It addresses the gap in existing research by examining how conflicts and negotiations over role structures are interpreted and fought out between project partners.
• The study reveals that consensus-seeking discourse does not fully resolve institutional differences or create clarity in formal roles and relations.
• A temporary organization may constitute a context where order and permanence are not self-evident, leading to tensions and potential project delays or overruns.

Conflict vs. Order in Temporary Organizations

• Temporary organizations are formed to achieve specific tasks within a defined timeframe and then dissolve.
• They provide opportunities to study how organizational actors constitute practices, transfer expertise, and maintain stable collaborations.
• Also study how they innovate or challenge existing roles and routines (a conflict view).
• The literature on temporary organizations often views organizing as a process of establishing and maintaining collaborative relations.
• Researchers are motivated to understand how organizational actors produce collaborative roles across time and space.
• This research often privileges order and permanence over ongoing negotiations and transient relations.
• A conflict perspective views organizing as a process infused with power struggles, where collaborative arrangements are contested.
• Trading an order view for a conflict view would be unwise, as analysis may be constrained to a single perspective.
• Temporary organizing can be viewed as a process through which actors establish, maintain, challenge, or change collaborative roles and relations.
• The permanent and temporary may well coexist in projects.
• Analysis focuses on how project members establish order while contesting emerging practices.

Large-Scale Global Projects in Infrastructure

• Combining conflict and order lenses is vital for studying complex social dynamics of collaboration.

• There is considerable pressure to establish consensus and potential for politicking.

• These projects are complex, uncertain, and ambiguous due to:

  • A culture of temporariness.
  • A large number of partners and stakeholders.
  • Establishing relations between permanent and temporary organizations.

• Collaboration is critical but difficult, often resulting in underperformance or failure.

• Studies often focus on successful projects, prioritizing order and harmony over negotiation and contestation.

• Collaboration can be conflict-ridden and politicized, with power relations influencing project outcomes.

• Projects can be perceived as temporary entities constructed from relations of power.

• Members of a temporary organization engage in both conflict- and consensus-seeking practices, focusing on the interplay between permanent and temporary organizations.

• A discrepancy between expected and actual roles triggers formal and informal negotiation.

• Ambiguity in hierarchic relations is grounded in national, cultural, contractual, and organizational contexts.

Methodology

• Ethnographic research of the Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP) was conducted for in-depth knowledge and theory building.

• Single cases provide excellent contextual understanding of organizations as temporary phenomena.

• Daily practices and lived experiences were explored over one year.

• Ethnographic fieldwork offers unique contributions to organization studies, including:

  • Comparing different groups’ perspectives.
  • Acknowledging ambiguities.
  • Focusing on explanation and sensemaking.
  • Offering insight into tacit aspects of cultural negotiation.
  • Appreciating the uniqueness of specific situations.

• Data collection involved observation, participation, and in-depth interviews.

• Observations were made of daily work routines, workshops, and informal gatherings.

• Participant observation provided data on how practices come about and are negotiated.

• 47 in-depth interviews were conducted with ACP and CH employees.

• Interviews focused on roles, relations, practices of collaboration, coordination, and socialization.

• A documentary study collected historical, economical, and political information on the PCEP.

Data Analysis

• Adopted interpretive sensemaking, where data are understood within the context of the case.

• Analysis comprised five steps:

  • Familiarization with specialized terms.
  • Uploading interview data into Atlas.ti.
  • Assigning labels to text sequences.
  • Discussing preliminary findings with key respondents.
  • Building theory through multiple readings and iterations.

• Adopted a practice-based perspective.

• Analyzed the ambiguity of the CH-ACP collaboration by distinguishing three different facets or faces:

  • Harmonious and egalitarian relations.
  • Contested roles and hierarchical relations from CH consultants’ view.
  • Contested roles and hierarchical relations from ACP staff members’ view.

• Analyzed social and discursive practices to determine relational or self-other talk and temporal talk.

Context

• The relationship between Panamanian ACP and US-based CH formed and unfolded over time.

• Assumptions about roles, responsibilities, and relations became increasingly vexatious.

• Hierarchic relations were grounded in wider institutional contexts, including:

  • Discontinuities in national histories.
  • Established organizational practices in large-scale construction projects.
  • Ambiguous power relations between ACP and CH, contributing to divergent interests.

Historical Context: USA–Panama Power Relations

• The history of USA–Panama relations cast a shadow on the PCEP project.
• The PCEP reintroduced ACP’s dependency on foreign expertise after almost a century of US sovereignty.
• The PCEP was initiated to maintain competitiveness, increase turnover, and improve safety and efficiency.
• Key components included the design and construction of the Atlantic and Pacific locks.
• ACP created a temporary project organization in which ACP staff and a newly hired team of experts would collaborate.
• The project organization resided under ACP as a separate Department of Engineering and Programme Management.

(Inter)organizational Context: Principal–Agent Power Asymmetry

• The project management team usually acts in a chief executive role in large construction projects.
• Principals provide financial resources, monitor the project, and accept forecasts, while day-to-day management is delegated to the agent.
• In the principal–agent relation, the agent acts as a broker or steward.

Contractual Context: Diffuse Distribution of Power

• Program management services were put out to tender in June 2007.

• ACP described the expectations and tasks for the Programme Manager (PM) in the Invitation to Bid.

• The relationship between ACP and PM differed from standard principal–agent arrangements.

• Varying relations of power were envisaged, ranging from dominance of each party at different times to encompassing egalitarian relations.

• Three different ways of characterizing the relationship between the two parties:

  • Egalitarianism.
  • ACP’s formal authority over CH.
  • CH experts train and support ACP.

Egalitarianism: Titans Working Together in a Team

• The Invitation to Bid characterized the relation between the two parties as partners in a unified team.
• The PM was expected to integrate its program management services with those of ACP’s personnel.
• The envisaged relation was framed in non-hierarchical, consensual terms.

ACP’s Formal Authority over CH

• The collaboration was framed in hierarchical terms, placing ACP in a formal position of power and the PM in a supportive role.
• ACP managers would make decisions, and PM consultants would give advice.
• The PM would not run PCEP autonomously but would seek approval of the ACP before acting.
• The authority of the PM was bounded and subordinate to ACP’s plans and policies.
• ACP retained responsibility and accountability for the project operation.

CH Experts Train and Support ACP

• Implicit in the second framing is ACP’s acknowledgement of its need for external knowledge, expertise, and guidance.
• The PM was positioned in the role of ACP’s chaperone.
• Training would be aimed at strengthening ACP’s skills.
• The PM implicitly occupied the more authoritative position by teaching ACP employees.
• The bid anticipated the gradual departure of externally hired experts upon ACP’s decision.
• ACP sought support and guidance from a more experienced partner.

The Tender Process & Project Setup

• CH won the tender process in competition with two other US consultancy firms.
• An international consortium (GUPC) was formed to execute the project.
• CH sent 33 consultants to Panama to support the managing of the Third Set of Locks construction.
• ACP selected 250 staff for the project organization.

Findings – Titanic Struggles

• ACP and CH engaged in collaborative practices aimed at harmonizing relations and contesting each other’s positions.

• The reciprocal harmonization or contestation of roles and relations had three different faces:

  • The Titans’ optimistic and harmony-seeking talk on trust and marriage.
  • CH disputing ACP’s control over the project.
  • ACP disputing CH’s control over PCEP.

Harmony-Seeking: The Titans’ Marriage

• Participants sought collaboration, willing to build non-hierarchical cross-boundary relationships.
• Project members organized social events and joint activities.
• The relational discourse that dominated this early stage sought to establish harmonious relations.
• Project members spoke of a marriage between ACP and CH.
• The marriage metaphor suggested that each partner invested time, money, and effort reciprocally.
• Collaboration involved establishing an enduring bond to create synergy.
• Optimistic talk of new collaboration abounded, with no reference to the past.
• ACP management started to promote an image of harmony, revitalizing the slogan ‘One Team, One Mission’.
• Project participants reproduced the harmony-seeking language also used in the Invitation to Bid.
  *Roles and Relations