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The purpose of this paper is to review the formation and evolution of the “Making Projects Critical” movement in project management research.

Retrospective and discursive paper.

Reflections on tensions and challenges faced by the MPC movement.

The paper establishes the historical trajectory of this movement and clarifies the tensions and challenges faced by MPC.

The purpose of this research note is to articulate the limitations that project management (PM) currently faces by outlining the PM literature's frequent neglect of political, social and ethical dimensions of PM work in order to raise a number of important themes that can be usefully integrated into mainstream PM literature.

Extensive research note which updates us on where PM research is heading.

PM is a highly complex, political and social process. The paper challenges readers, PM academics and practitioners to view PM more critically and to expand their appreciation of PM work as being more complex in its social context that merely delivering instrumentalist and mechanistic functional management processes.

This paper triggers a debate using critical PM research to engage with all levels of the project hierarchy with the aim of initiating some transformation in how actors perceive themselves, their voice, their broad responsibility and their influence in shaping their own social place.

This paper aims to empirically explore the nature of tensions that emerge within the process of becoming a manager in the post‐bureaucratic organisation, by focusing on the emergence of project management as a key carrier of post‐bureaucracy. The paper seeks to address two aspects of individual transformation into project manager; first, it aims to understand the specific factors, which drive the transformation of technical specialists into project managers and, second, to illuminate the tensions and challenges experienced in this new position.

The empirical base for the study is a series of structured group discussions with project managers from a range of distinct industrial sectors and organisations.

The paper illustrates the tensions implicit in the process of becoming a project manager. It identifies a number of conflicts that arise between the overarching philosophy of project management and the process of enacting the role of project manager around the themes of status, organisational value, power, influence and ambiguity.

The research approach is empirically rich yet exploratory, providing directions and inspiration for more extensive research in specific contexts.

The research points to an understanding of how new managerial roles are created and embedded in organisational contexts, and the pressures, which are brought to bear on the incumbents of these new roles through this process.

The purpose of this paper is to explore the extent of the continuing influence on project management (PM) research directions of rethinking project management over the last ten years.

The authors chose a qualitative research approach that involved reading all papers published in the International Journal of Managing Project in Business since its commencement in 2008. Content analysis was performed on these papers to allow axial coding of key article content influence themes.

The research identified the strength, over time, of the three research interest clusters on the PM research agenda and resultant changes in the PM paradigm. The five directions put forward by the rethinking PM agenda and other researchers ten years ago have continued to influence the PM research agenda.

Findings provide a better understanding the changes in PM research directions since rethinking PM, the increased breadth and sophistication of PM research in general, and future research directions.

This paper aims to illustrate the important role marketing technologies play in contemporary neo‐liberal policies which aim to effect social control over a populace through the shaping of the desire and freedom of individuals. This argument will be developed through an analysis of the expanded role of marketing technologies in the UK financial services industry in the light of studies of governmentality. Drawing on Foucauldian work, it will be argued that to understand governmentality, power relations must be reconceptualised beyond notions of institutional power and repressive mechanisms of control towards an understanding of their productive and seductive operation. From this perspective, deregulation should be seen not as a liberation of market forces or an empowerment of the “new consumer”, but rather as “government at a distance”. The danger of such neo‐liberalist solutions lies in their rhetoric of liberalisation and empowerment which does much to obscure the governmental operation of power in modern societies.

The purpose of this paper is to outline the philosophy of the journal and present a summary of its content and how the various papers link to the journal's philosophy.

The paper is a limited literature review to establish the journal's philosophy and linked description of the issue's content.

This helps readers to understand the scope scale and expectations of reviewers with respect to papers to be submitted and also helps readers understand what kind of papers to expect in this and future issues.

As the first issue, this editorial establishes the themes to be expected and it outlines several innovations in the journal's format.