“Narratives in Project Leadership”

Call for Papers – Special Issue: “Narratives in Project Leadership”

Journal: Project Leadership and Society
Publisher: Elsevier
Impact Factor: 4.5 | CiteScore: 8.7
Submission deadline: 31 December 2026

This special issue focuses on the role of narratives in project leadership, exploring how stories, discourses, and framing practices shape project justification, identity, legitimacy, and outcomes. It invites scholars to examine how project leaders and stakeholders use narratives to construct meaning, mobilise action, manage uncertainty, and navigate power, identity, and affect in complex, multi‑stakeholder settings.

Why this issue matters

• Narratives are not just “stories” but core instruments of sensemaking, persuasion, and identity work in projects. They structure how actors understand why a project is needed, what it signifies, and how its future is imagined.

• In megaprojects and other complex initiatives, competing narratives—around cost, sustainability, innovation, and social impact—shape alignment, resistance, and decision‑making across governments, communities, firms, and frontline teams.

• Recent work in Project Leadership and Society and related journals shows that narratives influence legitimacy, value construction, and innovation, while also revealing power, emotion, and ethical tensions that are often hidden in standard project‑management narratives.

Core themes and research questions

The special issue welcomes theoretical, empirical, and method‑oriented papers that connect project leadership and narrative studies. Key themes include:

• Narratives and meaning construction

  • How do project narratives organise lived experiences, create order from complexity, and stabilise shared understanding among stakeholders?

  • How do leaders craft, communicate, and adapt narratives over time to justify investment, sustain commitment, and negotiate crises?

• Identity, vision, and image

  • How do project narratives shape internal identities (e.g., “responsible innovators”) and external images of projects and organisations?

  • How do tensions between internal and external narratives play out over the project lifecycle, and how are they negotiated?

• Time, anticipation, and the future

  • How do project leaders use future‑oriented narratives (e.g., smart cities, green growth, resilience) to mobilise present‑day action under uncertainty?

  • How do antenarratives and framing contests influence which futures become performative and which are discarded?

• Power, discourse, and ethics

  • How do dominant narratives marginalise certain voices (e.g., local communities, frontline workers, non‑human actors) and whose interests they serve?

  • How can critical‑discourse and narrative‑justice approaches illuminate power, legitimation, and resistance in project settings?

• Emotion, affect, and materiality

  • How do narratives evoke hope, fear, pride, or nostalgia to stabilise or destabilise project trajectories?

  • How do buildings, artefacts, dashboards, and digital platforms themselves become narrative devices that embody and communicate project values?

• Culture, temporality, and global circulation

  • How do narratives travel across cultural and policy contexts, and when do they lose resonance or get reinterpreted?

  • How do local project stories connect with grand societal narratives (e.g., SDGs, decarbonisation, national modernisation myths)?

• Methodological innovation

  • How can longitudinal ethnography, archival work, digital‑trace analysis, and multimodal methods deepen the study of real‑time, evolving narratives?

Guest editors

• Dr. Natalya Sergeeva, The Bartlett School of Sustainable Construction, University College London, UK

• Dr. Johan Ninan, Delft University of Technology, Netherlands

• Dr. Rehab Iftikhar, University of the West of Scotland, UK

• Dr. Stephanie L. Dailey, Texas State University, USA

Submission process and timeline

• Journal submission system: Elsevier’s Project Leadership and Society portal:
  https://submit.elsevier.com/PLS

• When submitting, select article type “Project narratives: Looking into the future”.

• Authors may optionally submit a 300–500‑word abstract by email to the Guest Editors for feedback on fit and relevance.

• Full‑paper submissions are open now and run until: 31 December 2026 (with rolling review and publication rather than a batch deadline).

This special issue is ideal for project‑management, organisation‑studies, and qualitative‑methods scholars interested in how narrative practices shape leadership, legitimacy, and societal impact in projects and megaprojects.

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