Project, program and portfolio management as modes of organizing: Theorising at the intersection between mergers and acquisitions and project studies
Why this work is in the frame
A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.
Bibliographic record
Abstract
Although the management of mergers and acquisitions (M&As) and of projects are connected in practice, they remain disjoined in academia. In this paper, we conceptually bridge the literature on projects and M&As to discuss the transitory nature of organisations by mobilising the concepts of project, programme, and portfolio as alternative modes of organising M&As. As a project, the managerial effort in M&A focuses on completion on time and budget. As a programme, M&As are managed as complex processes of convergence between organisations. As a portfolio, M&A management is part of the ongoing integration efforts within organisations that have grown via M&As. Our contribution to project studies is to position projects, programmes, and portfolios as modes of organising, hence, not as phenomena but as managerial choices used to shape strategic change initiatives, such as M&As. We conclude with implications beyond project studies, thereby drafting a project-based theory of the firm.
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Full frame distilled prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.
Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.003 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.002 |
| Research integrity | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
Machine scores (provisional)
The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.
Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it