A pragmatist perspective on front-end project organizing: the case of refurbishment of the Palace of Westminster

This study examines how actors organized collective efforts to initiate the project and navigated their way forward, even though the ultimate outcome was not clearly defined. To address this question, we explore the potential of the philosophical tradition of pragmatism. This approach foregrounds duality, recursiveness and temporality of collective activities and offers a new and compelling way to understand and address the challenges actors face in organizing and managing the front-end. By accounting for both the situatedness of actions in the wider social and relational contexts, and by connecting the flow of present experience to the interpretations of the past and future, pragmatism holds the potential for integrating theory the actuality of lived experience in its continuous unfolding while accounting for actors’ transformative agency. By drawing on a real-time longitudinal study of conception of the program of the Restoration and Renewal (R&R) of the Palace of Westminster, we show how participants face the challenge of understanding and managing complex tensions that continually arise due to a duality of mobilization (between seeking consensus and expanding divergent possibilities) and a duality of transformation (between forming a bold vision of the future and translating abstract goals into concrete actions). To tackle the challenges, participants create strategic accounts that are stable enough to be practically feasible in current circumstances, but also sufficiently adaptable to pursue future possibilities in ways that challenge prevailing approaches. By showing how participants cope with these challenges by creating spaces of experimentation and constructing flexible boundaries this study contributes to the literature on management of project's front-end.