PAPERS October 2012 ■ Project Management Journal ■ DOI: 10.1002/pmj 5 INTRODUCTION ■ O ver the past 20 years, the interest in project management, whether defined in its narrow sense (the management of a single or “lonely” project) or more broadly (“management of projects”), has increased considerably (Smyth, 2009; Smyth & Morris, 2007; Söderlund, 2004a, 2004b; Turner, 2010). In fact, coined as the profession of the 21st century (Stewart, 1995), the wave of the future in global business (Pinto & Kharbanda, 1996), a major management philosophy, or as the means for dealing with change (Cleland & Ireland, 2007), project management has become one of the hottest topics in management, with practitioners and researchers demonstrating keen interest in the field (Ika, 2009). Thus, proj- ect management is emerging as a true scientific discipline in its own right, with its own academic journals, conferences, language, associations, period- icals, and its claim to a particular scientific status (Packendorff, 1995; Shenhar & Dvir, 2007). Yet, in a paradoxical way, despite such scientific activity, an ever-increasing number of bodies of knowledge and their periodic updates, the tireless efforts of practitioners, delays, cost overruns, underperformance in terms of quality, user satisfaction, and achievement of strategic or business objec- tives, as well as disappointment on the parts of project stakeholders, all seem to have become the rule and not the exception in the contemporary reality of projects (Cicmil & Hodgson, 2006a; Ika, 2009; Shenhar & Dvir, 2007). Consequently, “from a research perspective, there is a great opportunity to close this gap (between practice and research),” and as such, the project man- agement field is promising and rich with challenges (Shenhar & Dvir, 2007, parentheses added, p. 93). Ironically, such promise closely matches the rising criticism of the research in the field (Söderlund, 2004a). In this respect, some authors have singled out certain scant or fragmented theoretical background and, not sur- prisingly, one of the responses to this criticism has been to investigate the the- oretical underpinnings of the project management field (Anagnostopoulos, 2004; Cicmil, 2006; Cicmil & Hodgson, 2006a, 2006b; Koskela & Howell, 2002; Packendorff, 1995; Sauer & Reich, 2007; Söderlund, 2004a; Turner, 2010; Winter, Smith, Morris, & Cicmil, 2006). Furthermore, most authors herald the development of a solid and explicit theoretical basis for project management as the crucial and single most important issue for the project manage- ment profession. Although there have been a few important attempts to rethink project man- agement (Winter et al., 2006) and to assess the epistemological, theoretical, and Foundations of Project Management Research: An Explicit and Six-Facet Ontological Framework Jacques-Bernard Gauthier, Département des sciences administratives, Université du Québec en Outaouais, Gatineau, Canada Lavagnon A. Ika, Telfer School of Management, University of Ottawa, Ottawa, Canada ABSTRACT ■ This article proposes a new, explicit, and inte- grated ontological framework to stimulate proj- ect management research. It suggests that the ontological question should be viewed as a six- facet diamond that represents a set of root assumptions about projects. The article con- veys the idea that whenever a project manage- ment researcher emphasizes a specific facet, he or she knowingly or unknowingly leaves the other five facets in the dark in his or her research. This article calls for attention on the ground ontological assumptions of project man- agement research in order to transcend the abstract epistemological and methodological debates and concentrate on what really divides the different theoretical positions. KEYWORDS: ontology; project manage- ment research; project management history; theory; epistemology Project Management Journal, Vol. 43, No. 5, 5–23 © 2012 by the Project Management Institute Published online in Wiley Online Library (wileyonlinelibrary.com). DOI: 10.1002/pmj.21288