Project work strategies in fusion research

Abstract

In this article, we examine and discuss observations on projectification from organizational and management studies and contextualize them with recent insights from the discourse around social acceleration. Against the backdrop of these debates, we ethnographically inquire into project work strategies in fusion research. First, we briefly survey existing scholarship that interrogates acceleration and projectification of research. Second, we explain why we focus on projects in fusion research and introduce the site of our investigation. In the third section, we identify three project work strategies in fusion research: content adjusting, temporal stretching, and (de)consolidation. In the final part, we argue that the highlighted project work strategies emerge as a product of the dialectical interplay of projectification and stabilization contexts that yields new spaces and opportunities for crafting agency and negotiating time in research that go beyond the reductive fast/slow dichotomy that nowadays tends to characterize contemporary accounts of temporality in and of research.