Sustaining and Developing Disciplinary Expertise in Project-Based Organizations

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3

METHODOLOGY

Approaching the Field and Selecting the Companies

This study was initiated as a result of what we had experienced when conducting studies of knowledge integration in product development projects (e.g., Enberg, 2007) and the organization of HRM in project-based organizations (e.g., Bredin, 2008), respectively. This is to suggest that we knew before entering the field which type of organizations experience the problems raised in this study and therefore approached several project-based organizations involved in advanced product development requiring specialized engineers to integrate their knowledge in solving complex problems. Of the six companies first contacted, we finally chose three, based on the information about ...