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Introduction
All major inter-firm projects require the alignment and coordination of several participating firms (Artto and Kujala, 2008, p. 478; Ruuska et al., 2009, p. 143; Grün, 2004, p. 116). The key challenge is managing the set of firms participating in a given project (Artto and Kujala, 2008, p. 481). Since no actor has total control and authority over all other participants (Eccles, 1981; Hellgren and Stjernberg, 1995, p. 379), firms are suggested to balance authority and responsibility in inter-firm projects among stakeholders (Artto and Kujala, 2008, p. 481; Grün, 2004, p. 129).
In research and practice, this activity is usually subsumed under the term project governance. Broadly speaking, inter-firm project governance may refer to the management of interrelationships between participating firms in a focal project (Artto and Kujala, 2008, p. 480; Winch, 2006, p. 325). As for any business transaction, the involved partners need to find ways to safeguard, monitor and adapt their resource exchanges (Ahola et al., 2014, p. 1321; Williamson, 1975). In that respect, a feasible project governance framework will provide a basis for decision making by clearly defining roles, responsibilities and accountabilities for a project. When reviewing existing contributions on project governance, most scholars seem to agree that contracts are the most important instruments to manage, control and steer a project. Winch (2006, p. 331) argues that external transactions of project organizations need to be governed by a “nexus of treaties” to be effective. Söderlund (2004) found that most of the research on inter-firm projects deals with contracts, transaction costs and inter-firm relationships. Although contracts are a key foundation of governance by providing a joint base of formal regulations and stipulating the roles and responsibilities of each party contributing to an inter-firm project (Hellgren and Stjernberg, 1995, p. 380), they are inherently incomplete (Turner, 2004; Lewis and Roehrich, 2009), resulting in an extensive degree of freedom for involved firms to what extent and in which ways they translate their contractual agreements into necessary project governance structures, hierarchies, work processes and control mechanisms.
Thus, governance aspects can and should not only be dealt from a contractual, but also from an organizational perspective (Grün, 2004, p. 105; Lewis and Roehrich, 2009). In the past, several researchers called for a more intense...