Project Management in North America, Stability of the Concepts

The field of project management has undergone very important developments during the last 10 years, if one considers the very large amount of activities that it has generated and continues to generate (papers in journals, dedicated journals, books, meetings, applications, etc.). Even if project management has reached some maturity—due to the construction of a common referential, a common body of knowledge called A Guide to the Project Management Body of Knowledge (PMBOK® Guide)—its future is subject to questions and debate among its researchers. What is the evolution of the field? What is its structure? Is it integrating new topics that correspond to management by project? In order to answer such questions at least partially, we have studied project management literature by the method of associated words (scientometric analysis) and the software, “Leximappe.” All the papers that are relative to project management and included in the bibliographic ABI-INFORM database from 1987 to 1996 have been analyzed. In this paper, we present the main results of this study.