Struggling to 'fit in': On belonging and the ethics of sharing in project teams

This paper explores the links between belonging and ethics, which remain largely underdeveloped in project studies and are overlooked in everyday practice of managing projects. It focuses on belonging as the process articulating identity-construction of an inter-organisational project team from a global management consulting firm that was working in IS design. As the team?s experienced ?sense of place?, belonging becomes the space which highlights preferred affiliations and exposes how ? individually and collectively ? ethics are played out in the context of the management of projects. Four in situ belonging-narratives (of opposition, pragmatism, reflexivity, and the habitual narrative) represent ethics as part of lived action and of a life-world that emerge from deconstructing and reconstructing ?the team? and an ideal worker in projects. The team?s struggles to ?fit in? were experienced both when resisting and when collaborating with the dominant collective narrative of belonging. Modes of belonging are constituted in the relationship between self, others, and ?otherness?, creating a situated ethical imagination of how to ?be professional?. Implications concern the politics of belonging and call for a renewed practical ethics that engages with the social nature of ?being?, to change the current view of professional identities in projects.