'2nd International Workshop `Making Projects Critical': From project ontologies to communities of virtue

Projects, as an organizing principle, can provide exciting contexts for innovative work. Thus far,
project management discourse has tended to privilege the vital need to deliver projects ‘on time, on
budget, and to specification’. In common with the call for papers for this workshop we suggest that
perhaps the “instrumental rationality” underpinning this language of characterising project activity
may create more problems than it solves. In this paper we suggest that such questions (and
language) frame project contexts in a partial way. We argue that such concerns stem from a
particular worldview or ontology, which we identify as a ‘being’ ontology. Here we contrast being
and becoming project ontologies, to explore the questions, methods and interventions that each
foregrounds. In an attempt to move this dialogue further than simply another contrast of modern
and postmodernist accounts of project organising, we go on to consider some possible ethical
concomitants of valuing being and becoming ontologies in project contexts.