Project management is omnipresent, but the growth of project management practices and discourses has
suffered – and is still suffering – from a lack of ethical reflection. Moreover, most of the existing
literature on project management ethics aims at universality and generalised frameworks. We take a
critical stance to such ambitions and draw upon a tradition of thought that relates ethics intrinsically to
community practices. We therefore present a rich account of an empirical case, that of the Swedish Road
Administration (SRA), where the context –the public sector, the construction industry, the project
managers relying on external suppliers – is extremely important in order to understand how ethics is
constructed. Drawing on critical perspectives on projects and gender, as well as on feminist ethics, we
read the empirical material and show how ethics is constructed in complex and sometimes contradictory
and surprising ways. We show how being (or seeming to be) in control becomes a central issue, at the
same time as the traditional dichotomy of a masculine ethics versus a feminine ‘ethics of caring’ is
problematic as such constructs are fluid and intertwined.