Project production networks or PPNs are now the primary means for organizing in many industries including fashion design and manufacturing, moviemaking and construction projects. PPNs enable professionally and geographically distributed participants of a common project to bring their expertise and resources together to achieve an economically and technically superior product than a single firm could produce.

Relatively little analysis has been done of the ways in which PPNs govern themselves, however. In this paper, Professor Nicole Biggart, and Associate Professor Thomas Beamish of the UC Davis Department of Sociology report here on PPN governance in commercial construction focusing on the role that social heuristics as shared rules-of-thumb play in both aiding personal decision-making while also helping to govern network coordination across economic and social space.