Project Marketing: A Structurationist Perspective

In the last decades project marketing scholars have vigorously contributed to underline the social embeddedness of projects and the intense net of dynamic relationships that characterizes buying and selling projects. The introduction of the milieu as pertinent unit of analysis, has theoretically and empirically enriched the project marketing discipline, showing how a project selling company can acquire a competitive advantage through a favorable positioning in a social context and through a concrete mobilization of resources within it. Despite these notable advances, the theoretical discussion concerning the embeddedness of the project business in social contexts and how these social contexts influence and are influenced by project marketing strategies, is far from being complete and exhaustive. This paper contributes to reinforce the importance of the milieu in project marketing by drawing on structuration theory as a sensitizing device. Being focused on the recursive interplay between structure and action, structuration theory seems to be a suitable theoretical lens to explain both the suitability of different strategic postures and the process of meaning and norm construction in project marketing milieus.