The linguistic turn in project conceptualization

Prior and conflicting stakeholder concerns can make projects complex. Listening to, and integrating, this concern into the project is easier said than done. However the pragmatic ethics of the Australian 'fair-go' argues long term success requires an attempt be made. This pragmatic philosophy provides a solution by explaining the relationship between community, conceptualization and agreed reasonable action. After introducing pragmatism, this paper uses an Australian based re-organization project to explain why linguistic concepts might be used to conceive projects made complex by conflicting stakeholders. The philosophy is made operational by using idea networking to reveal the concepts underpinning stakeholders' comments. This method clusters similar statements to enable exposure of these underlying concepts (themes, meta narrative), which are named. It was found that using this concept driven method provides an internally consistent means of conceptualizing projects with conflicting stakeholders' concerns. (C) 2012 Elsevier Ltd. APM and IPMA. All rights reserved.