Project management scholarship: Relevance, impact and five integrative challenges for business and management schools Jonas Söderlund a, ⁎ , Harvey Maylor b a BI, Norway b Cranfield School of Management, UK Abstract This paper discusses the standing of project management in the academy. It does so from the viewpoint of business and management schools. The paper identifies five critical integrative challenges concerning research, how they might be better addressed and perhaps turned into opportunities. The paper builds on recent debates within the area of engaged scholarship and knowledge co-production, which call for greater focus on multi-disciplinarity and research–practice collaborations. The paper offers suggestions as to what project management scholars could do to tackle the identified challenges and thereby improve the standing of project management as a subject area within the academy and its contribution to the curriculum and research agenda of business and management schools. The paper ends with some thoughts about future debates on the role of project management research and teaching, especially how project management scholarship could help respond to some of the current criticism of business school research and how research could better inform management practice. © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. Keywords: Project management research; Impact; Relevance; Integrative challenges 1. Introduction Business and management schools worldwide face consid- erable challenges in the years to come. Recent debates have highlighted a series of issues, including globalization, lack of relevance of the research, lack of diversity, and modest impact on organizational and management practice (see for instance Denisi, 2010; Pettigrew, 2011). This paper examines the issues of relevance and impact for business and management schools and in what ways PM scholarship can help resolve them. It is a conceptual paper, based on relevant literatures and our own experiences of working in business and management schools. We refer to ‘integrative challenges’—requiring bridging of areas, domains, practices, perspectives, and problem defini- tions. These challenges not only present opportunities for business and management schools, but some changes in PM scholarship itself. One example of an integrative challenge is the dualism of strategy and execution; business schools historically have viewed these as distinct and separate activities. An integrative view considers them as a duality, nested and mutually dependent and, contrary to current thinking, one being just as important as the other. In this paper we will discuss this and four other integrative challenges (business and technology, hard and soft skills, linking research with practice, and exploration and exploitation of research). We go further and suggest that teaching and research in PM could potentially make business and management schools better equipped to respond to the issues of relevance and impact, and perhaps even turn the challenges into new opportunities. 1 The subject of PM has evolved into an increasingly important field both for driving research within business schools and for executive education, and not just for our employers but globally. The main reasons are the strategic ⁎ Corresponding author at: BI Norwegian Business School, 0442 Oslo, Norway. E-mail address: jonas.soderlund@bi.no (J. Söderlund). 1 We have deliberately focused on business and management schools. We recognize that considerable PM scholarship also takes place within engineering schools. The challenges in that context are different and we recognize this as a limitation to our discussion. 0263-7863/$36.00 © 2012 Published by Elsevier Ltd. doi:10.1016/j.ijproman.2012.03.007 Please cite this article as: Söderlund, J., Maylor, H., Project management scholarship: Relevance, impact and five integrative challenges for business and management schools, International Journal of Project Management (2012), doi:10.1016/j.ijproman.2012.03.007 Available online at www.sciencedirect.com International Journal of Project Management xx (2012) xxx – xxx JPMA-01401; No of Pages 11 www.elsevier.com/locate/ijproman