Interpreting projects: bureaucratical mechanisms to enforce control or lever for change ?

There is a huge amount of research focused on the theme of project organization, stemming from the idea that project can be considered a tool to increase the degree of flexibility within bureaucratic and functional organizations, whereas in other few researches project management is supposed to stress the level of bureaucracy (Robertson and Swan, 1998; Clegg, 2004; Hodgson, 2004). The goal of this paper is studying the functioning of the project management within an Italian public organization, traditionally considered highly bureaucratised, in terms of effects produced on control mechanisms.