How institutions shape forms of project organizing: the selective PPP market of Qatar

This chapter shows that a growing body of PPP literature examines how entities comprising organizational fields can act either as enabling or inhibiting mechanisms for infrastructure PPPs, but there has been an increasing need to explore and unpack the impact of societal-level institutional dynamics affecting and shaping these PPP organizational fields. This chapter aims to contribute to the growing body of PPP literature that debates how PPP-enabling organizational fields at the meso-level affect the implementation of PPP projects. The chapter achieves this aim by adopting a macro perspective and providing a higher level of analysis that explores how the interplay among individual and organizational actors at the societal level determines whether existing organizational fields should support or block the uptake of PPPs. To achieve this objective, the chapter revisits Friedland and Alford's (1991) concept of institutional logics and emphasizes the need to further explore how non-market institutional orders, namely, community/tribe, family, and state, affect market dynamics. It connects the literature on institutional logics with that on the sociology of tribes in the GCC region to develop a theoretical framework that is used to analyze how institutional orders anchored at the societal level, such as community and tribe, affect the PPP-related organizational fields in Qatar. This empirical context is particularly relevant, since the supremacy of tribal tradition and family values seemingly affects all decisions related to the market and business activities in Qatar. Furthermore, the chapter examines the puzzle of why Qatar adopts PPPs only within the IWPP sector, and has not extended such practices into the wider economic and social infrastructure sectors.