Heeding recent calls for more studies on the relationship between projects and institutions, this paper reports on a collaborative case study to shed light on the recursive relations of large-scale projects and their institutional fields. Given the industry as the field-level institution, this study explores how two project organizations experienced the industry changes, its influence on the arrangement of large-scale projects, and the management response used to legitimize these arrangements. The qualitative secondary data analysis of two High-Speed rail projects in Spain and The Netherlands is based on semi-structured interviews, observations, and document analysis. This paper provides the institutional fields’ contextual detail and deepens our understanding of temporal institutional complexity that bound large-scale project arrangements. The findings suggest that in both cases the management responses altered across time and evolved depending on the salience of the institutional pressure, through the interplay with 1) regulative, 2) normative, and 3) dynamic cultural-cognitive forces, resulting in cycles of project legitimacy.

鉴于最近呼吁对项目与机构之间的关系进行更多研究，本文报道了一个合作案例研究，以阐明大型项目及其机构领域的递归关系。以行业为实地机构，本研究探讨了两个项目组织如何经历行业变化，其对大型项目安排的影响以及用于使这些安排合法化的管理层的回应。西班牙和荷兰的两个高铁项目的定性二次数据分析基于半结构化采访，观察和文档分析。本文提供了机构领域的上下文细节，并加深了我们对限制大型项目安排的时间机构复杂性的理解。