Succeeding programmes, failed projects: A lexicographical analysis of a disputed semantic terrain

This paper proposes that projects and programmes can be empirically distinguished by the way in which they are associated with expectations and evaluations of success and failure. Support for the proposition is grounded in analysis of over sixteen hundred examples of occurrences of the terms ‘project’ and ‘programme’ with ‘success’ and ‘failure’ derived from the Oxford English Corpus (OEC). The OEC is a structured and coded database of over two billion words of naturally occurring English collected from the World Wide Web. The analysis highlights that project and programme are each modified by the terms ‘success’ and ‘failure’ in significantly different ways, indicating that they are conceptually distinct phenomena. These findings imply that academics must be cautious in their use of language in investigations of project and programme evaluations, and that practitioners should consider the implications of considering programmes as ‘scaled‐up’ projects, given their propensity to different evaluation outcomes.

► The terms success and failure modify project and programme in different ways. ► Projects and programmes are therefore conceptually distinct entities. ► Project is more associated with failure; programme is more associated with success. ► Project and programme should be conceptually distinguished in analysis and practice. ► Treating projects and programmes as the same may obscure important features of each.