Public Sector Projectification – A Systematic Review of the Literature

Abstract

“Projectification” is an emerging subdomain of project management research which argues that proliferation of projects is one of the most important current trends in the public sector. As an emerging sub-field within projectification research, “public sector projectification” has been given increasing attention in the past few years. This article presents a structured literature review (SLR) on “public sector projectification”, with the aim of systematising the existing empirical knowledge guided by the research question: “What are the empirical implications of public sector projectification at the personal, organisational and societal levels in journal articles?” The SLR search detects 53 articles published between 2009 and 2021. Articles were detected by a literature search in three selected scholarly research databases and by reviewing cited references in the articles detected. By analysing researched empirical implications from the projectification literature at the three levels of personal, organisational, and societal, the SLR demonstrates that public sector projectification is a multilevel phenomenon with contradictory implications and interesting dynamics between the levels, which should gain increased attention in both research and practice to release the potential for organising projects in the public sector context.

Keywords: systematic literature review, projectification, projectisiation, projectified, project society, public sector, public administration