ABSTRACT
Th e chapter explores and clarifi es the tensions placed on a project leader who is under the strain caused by diff erent modes of action during a project. Th e aim is to describe these diff erent modes and to understand opportunities for changing modes and each mode’s inherent pertinence. We hypothesize that March’s studies (1991) on ambidexterity in management science can help clarify these tensions, because March focused on the question of arbitration between exploitation mode and exploration mode in organizational learning processes. However, this view of ambidexterity fails to account for all the modes of action that a project leader can enter during a project, and we therefore suggest complementing it with the notion of ambidexterity put forward by Mintzberg (1994). We also apply James’s (1907) principle of pragmatism to a comparative case study of events during two very diff erent polar expeditions: one in the Arctic, called ARC, and the other in the Antarctic, called ANT.
