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The present article analyses extreme context studies published in leading project management journals with the aim of developing a time-based typology that could be of value for the project community at large.

In this study, the authors reviewed 62 articles on extreme contexts published in three main project management journals (IJMPB, PMJ and IJPM) and two specialized outlets Disaster Prevention and Management (DPM) and International Journal of Disaster Resilience in the Built Environment (IJDRBE).

The authors present a typology, in which emergency, risky and disrupted (RED) contexts are related to the manageability of time. It shows that when pressure rises, due to high levels of urgency, uncertainty and ambiguity, control over time decreases, causing the organizational response to shift from formalized into improvised.

Based on this review, the authors theorize the influence of extreme contexts on project management in general.

The study responds to the scholarly call to advance the academic debate on the relatedness of project and temporary organizations by perceiving temporality as a continuum.

A typical governance challenge that has emerged with the introduction of shared service centers and other forms of service-related centralization within organizations is how to balance horizontal integration with vertical accountability. From a transaction costs perspective, this study aims to analyze the relationship between intra-organizational demand and supply linkages, asset specificity and coordination costs.

For this purpose, a case study has been conducted within a European military organization that has undergone major budget cuts, forcing it to start following a strategy of functional concentration with captive buying and selling relationships between internal customers and suppliers.

The research findings clarify that organizational hybridity may be the result. In a supplier role, the organizational elements are primarily concerned with efficiency, while operational effectiveness predominates when they are in the customer position. Also, the results show that focusing on standardized service delivery may sometime carry too far. When services are treated as being standard, while in reality, they ask for a more tailored approach, productive internal demand and supply collaboration will be put at risk. Moreover, the organizational actions needed to restore the internal supply chain’s efficacy will seriously increase transaction costs.

Despite being mentioned as a key governance category, actual research on the practicalities of internal captive buying and selling, in relation to the functioning of SSCs, is still lacking. To advance on this topic, the present research introduces knowledge from supply chain management theory, where dedicated inter-organizational buyer–supplier interaction in the automotive industry has already received academic attention.

Crisis management entails among other things developing organizational systems that are capable of reacting to unpredictable and different types of crises. It also involves designing cohesive operational elements to deal with the local dynamics of an actual crisis situation. This challenge of responsiveness – where organizations simultaneously need to react to change demands of different task environments – has hardly been investigated in management theory. The purpose of this paper is to initiate to shed more light on this blind spot.

Modular organizing and organizational sensing are introduced as key drivers of organizational responsiveness. Based on a large-scale survey among 1,200 senior officers the study investigates how these two variables have influenced the responsiveness of the Netherlands armed forces for crisis response deployment.

The findings indicate that the level of modularization is an important facilitator of organizational responsiveness. Organizational systems that are made up of semi-autonomous work groups are in a better position to simultaneously live up to the change demands of different environmental levels than organizations that follow a fine-grained modularization approach.

It uses the military crisis response organization as an exemplary case for project-based organzations in general to take advantage of.

The low success rate of megaprojects stems from the opportunism triggered by uncertainty. Developing trust between participants is an effective means to reduce uncertainty, but this process is inevitably affected by contracts. The purpose of this paper is to examine the impact of uncertainty on participants’ opportunism in megaprojects and the effect of trust on reducing uncertainty. At the same time, the moderating effects of contractual control are tested.

This research classifies trust into competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust and categorizes uncertainty into environmental uncertainty and behavioral uncertainty. Partial least squares structural equation modeling is used to test the hypotheses based on data collected from 172 respondents.

The results show a positive correlation between the two types of uncertainty and opportunism. For the governance of uncertainty, competence-based trust can reduce environmental uncertainty, but it is ineffective for behavioral uncertainty, and goodwill-based trust has a significant effect on both types of uncertainty. The test of moderating effects shows that contractual control strengthens the effect of competence-based trust but weakens the effect of goodwill-based trust, which means that contractual control complements competence-based trust and substitutes for goodwill-based trust.

This research enriches the theory of megaproject management. First, it validates the role of competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust in reducing the different types of uncertainty in megaprojects. Second, this study clarifies the substitution or complementarity between contractual control and different dimensions of trust in the context of high uncertainty, which provides a comprehensive answer to prior research inconsistencies on contractual control and trust.

For practice, this research provides some implications for megaproject management. First, project managers should recognize that the match between trust and project uncertainty is key to the success of megaproject governance. For example, some megaprojects involve many organizations, and there are many difficulties in behavioral supervision and performance appraisal. Therefore, developing goodwill-based trust between participants through positive interactions is an effective means to reduce the behavioral uncertainty of all participants and to curb opportunistic behaviors.

This research validated the role of competence-based trust and goodwill-based trust in reducing the different types of uncertainty in megaprojects. Furthermore, it clarifies the substitution or complementarity between contractual control and different dimensions of trust in the context of high uncertainty, which provides a comprehensive answer to prior research inconsistencies on contractual control and trust.

The purpose of this research is to measure incompatibilities between the manufacturing approaches (MA) used by the manufacturing industries, and those used for the off-site construction (OSC) of buildings. The aim is to explore which of these approaches could be integrated into OSC in a precise manner as viewed by architects as well as how this might occur.

An empirical research and empirical cycle (EC) was adopted as a methodological framework to measure incompatibilities. A combination of quantitative and qualitative mixed methods was explored through a literature-based case study of prefabricated houses and cars, nine real-life projects built by the second author's research team and the first-named author's practical experiences of leading these projects, based on a logic framework derived from the authors’ reflections of their architectural practices.

The findings quantitatively present the incompatibilities between cars (automobile bodies) and prefabricated houses. Design-related aspects have the most potential for integration (42.3% increment). The key lessons were identified as specific design philosophies and related guidelines for architects.

The findings are limited to single types of products (cars) and buildings (prefabricated houses) in particular regions. The key lessons just present a preliminary evaluation of the application of the design philosophies and related guidelines in nine real-life projects to comply with word limit constraints.

This study could help architects and other practitioners to locate and target and alleviated incompatibilities between MA and OSC. It could also precisely identify integration shortcomings to optimize decision-making as well as technical pathways for possible and effective breakthroughs.

This study provides fundamental research as a starting point for further discussion and development. A series of additional in-depth investigations combined with case studies are planned for the future. These could provide alternative study approaches to develop more appropriate architectural design methodologies and more streamlined processes.

The research contributes an alternative architectural perspective when measuring incompatibilities between MA and OSC. The results highlight the implications of precise measurement and provide guidance for architects. These facilitate the effective and successful integration of MA into OSC of buildings and promote the uptake of lean construction (LC) in OSC.