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68 MADSEN AND KAUTZ

Table 5.4

Social Context
Multimedia case Web case
Similarities Long-term social relations between the Long-term social relations between
three influential actors (the overall project company management and academic
manager, the local project manager, and supervisor
the principal designer)
Social infrastructure characterized by Social infrastructure characterized
involved and easily accessible overall and by involved and easily accessible
local project manager management and academic supervisor
Differences Close relations, but also a certain rivalry Influential actors’ long-term trust-based
between the two project managers relation and collaboration within TCS
program, academic supervisor as
boundary spanner
The three influential actors had different Shared understanding of company,
backgrounds and emphasized different project vision, and established work
aspects during development (i.e., EU practices passed on from management
reporting requirements, formalized method and academic supervisor to newly
development, multimedia development) employed developer

The strong relations and shared assumptions cemented the distribution of power in favor of com-
pany management and the academic supervisor and meant that the shared understanding was passed
on from these actors to the newly employed developer. The academic supervisor’s background and
his preference for data modeling, technology, and prototyping were especially influential (Madsen,
2004; Madsen, Kautz, and Vidgen, 2006), as was his role as a “boundary spanner” (Curtis, Krasner,
and Iscoe, 1988), linking the steering committee and project team as well as the past, present, and
future. Together, management’s and the academic supervisor’s history and long-term trust-based
collaboration help to explain that even though the content of change was continuously reconceived,
the development process was driven by a set of shared underlying assumptions, stable power rela-
tions, and an agreed-upon product orientation manifested in a focus on working code.
In both the Multimedia and Web cases, the social context was characterized by long-term social
relations between, and a high degree of involvement of, the influential actors. However, the analysis
of social context shows that the two cases are distinctively different in that the emergent method
in the Multimedia project to a large extent can be explained by conflict, while the unfolding of the
method in the Web case is best understood in terms of consensus (see Table 5.4).

THE EMERGENT METHODS’ FORMS AND DRIVERS

In the Multimedia case, the project was initially planned to follow a phased and sequential in-house-
developed method. However, the emergent method took the form of a dialectical process (Van de
Ven and Poole, 1995), where the two subgroups in the project team engaged in a power struggle
leading to a sequence of events that roughly followed a thesis–antithesis–synthesis pattern. In this
dialectical process, conflict regarding how to perform the development process was the major driver
of change, and the outcome was an altered power balance, reallocation of tasks, and standardization
of documentation templates. In the Web case, the project was initially outlined in a detailed plan for