The recursive interaction of institutional fields and managerial legitimation in large-scale projects

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