Knowledge Diffusion Mechanism Of Mega-project Management

The mega-project management(MPM)involves more and more complexities.Such complexities put a dilemma for the traditional project management body of knowledge(PMBOK),which cannot satisfy the need in the management issues came from the mega-projects practice any more.In recent years,a large volume of literature have been conducted for various issues of management of mega-projects.These literature provide plenty of knowledge for MPM,enriching the understanding on the complex phenomenon of management issues in mega-projects from the perspective of philosophy of science.This necessitates deeply research on the knowledge system of MPM to make it as an independent discipline and advance its knowledge progress.Previous studies were largely conducted personal judgement and professional experience,focusing on the content of the MPM knowledge.Investigation of MPM knowledge should not only focus on the knowledge itself,but also on the associated scientific activities.MPM knowledge is not conducted independently.The conduction relays on effective knowledge transfer,adoption,combination and reconstruction,involving numerous researchers and practitioners.Moreover,MPM develops quickly in recent 20 years,the systemic research framework and body of knowledge is emerging.Thus,the individual MPM knowledge does not exist independently.The total knowledge in MPM are associated with each other to some extend,and progress dynamically.This thesis systematically studied the mechanism of the knowledge diffusion of MPM from the perspective of Management Science and Engineering.In contrary,this study did not research on the content of knowledge,but on the spatial relations and dynamic characteristics of knowledge diffusion.On one hand,the knowledge diffusion in MPM are structured with each other and progressed from past to now.In specific,the MPM knowledge does not diffuse independently.All the knowledge of MPM were correlative for diffusion,and they evolved temporally.On the other hand,the diffusion level of single MPM knowledge has some laws in dynamic.On the basis of critical review and summary of relevant literature,the presenting study applies theories of scientology and innovation diffusion to profoundly investigate the academic achievements of MPM in perspectives of knowledge structure,major knowledge diffusion paths and dynamic mechanism of knowledge diffusion.Additionally,this study develops a mythological framework that integrates scientometrics,social network analysis(SNA),main path analysis and Bass diffusion model to provide more convinced results based on a relatively large dataset.The research content and major contribution to the body of knowledge are as following.This study studies the static structure features of MPM knowledge diffusion.Such static features result in convergence and divergence of themes and citations.Most of previous studies investigating the academic achievements of MPM have only been carried out by analyzing the content.There has been little quantitative analysis of these academic achievements of MPM.This study applies the scientometrics and SNA methods to establish the topic network and co-citation network of MPM literature.Furthermore,the network properties and structure have been identified.According to the identified properties and structure,the study discusses the associations underlying the knowledge of MPM,and evaluates the knowledge status of MPM.This study measures the major knowledge diffusion paths of MPM.Most of previous studies treat the embedded knowledge in the academic achievements of MPM as event,which simply presenting the topic shift by time.This overlooks the underlying associations among those academic achievements.This study employs the citation-based analysis to trace the knowledge flows of MPM by constructing a citation network.Then the main path analysis is used to streamline the major knowledge diffusion paths out of the complex citation network.These paths represent the MPM's knowledge transformation from past to present,helping to illustrate the characteristics of knowledge progress.This study investigates the dynamic mechanism of knowledge diffusion of MPM literature.Prior studies focus on the factors that impacts on the knowledge diffusion level.However,to date there has been little effort on modelling the dynamic mechanism of knowledge diffusion of MPM literature.This study models the dynamic process of knowledge diffusion based on Bass model,representing the non-linear relation between the diffusion level and time.After that,this study identifies MPM classic publications as database using G-index.Also normal publications of MPM are randomly selected to make comparison.By fitting the collected data to the developed model,this study analyses the dynamic mechanism of knowledge diffusion of MPM literature through the view of independent adoption mechanism and imitate adoption mechanism.Moreover,the mechanism difference between classic and normal MPM publications are highlighted.This study systemically research on the mechanism of MPM knowledge diffusion,enriched the studies of scientific knowledge of MPM,and provide novel research framework for the scientific knowledge of MPM;through the methods of network science and scientometrics,the thesis provides foundations for evaluating the features of static structure and progress;based on citation analysis,this thesis identified the main paths of MPM knowledge diffusion,and uncovered the evolutive features of MPM knowledge diffusion;expend the potential explanations of the dynamic mechanism of MPM knowledge diffusion based on the behaviours of adopters.