Complex partnership for the delivery of Urban Rail Infrastructure Project: how culture matters for the treatment of risk and uncertainty

This research proposes an original framework to account for the governance of large scale infrastructure projects. The framework offers a cultural perspective by breaking away from Transaction Cost Economics to put an emphasis on context, culture, action and sensemaking. It considers the current context for large scale infrastructure projects that is the emergence of Public-Private Partnership, market coordination and complex contracts that lead to multi- organizational arrangement with multiple stakeholders. It demonstrates that governance is dynamic due to the diversity of cultures and subcultures. Governance arrangements are changing over the project life cycle to respond to project imperatives. It shows that governance must remain flexible and open to change by telling the story of the first metro line of Istanbul: Taksim 4.Levent, the Jubilee Line Extension (JLE) in London and Meteor in Paris. The originality of the research relies on the use of the Grid-Group Model introduced by the British anthropologist Mary Douglas (Douglas, 1999). It is the first time that the model is applied in the project management context. Used in combination with Action Net (Czarniawska, 2004; 2008), the Grid-Group model depicts a process, the making of Urban Rail Infrastructure Projects. It gives a perspective on complexity and the treatment of risk and uncertainty. This perspective gives relevance to the early work of Scandinavian scholars on the temporary organization (Lundin and Söderholm, 1995, Packendorff 1995) and literature that tends to see change as the norm rather than the exception (Tsoukas and Chia, 2002). The most surprising finding of the research is to enable to name the project process in Grid- Group terms, particularly Hierarchies as an ideal structural and cultural form of governance that emerge ex-post through the project process.