Iben Stjerne, Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark
Jennifer Whyte, University of Sydney, Australia
Alfons van Marrewijk, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam (VU), The Netherlands
Jonas Söderlund, Linköping University, Sweden
Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin, Germany
Temporary organizing was initiated as a research field almost three decades ago, and is still of increasing importance to organizations and the organized in and between societies, which is witnessed in, among other things, the “projectification of society”, the central role of planned and unplanned events in mobilizing change, and the rise of temporary employments (Lundin et al., 2015). Organizations can be more or less temporary. Even relatively permanent organizations tend to operate to a greater extent following a logic of urgency, instantaneity and immediacy, while impact, transformation and endurance are often the entire premises on which the benefits of such temporary organizing builds on. Temporary organizing is thus becoming important for all kinds of organizational contexts.
Temporary modes of organizing have been said to hold the potential for innovation and, as it is removed from the daily operations,
it can attract new talents and ensure cross functional and/or interorganizational development and coordination etc. (Bechky,
2006; Jones & Lichtenstein, 2008). Also, the temporary mode of organizing is important for carrying out strategies in organizational
and interorganizational practice by translating them in strategic initiatives (Englund & Graham, 1999; Geraldi et al., 2020)
or trying out new ideas without putting the entire organizations production at stake (Engwall, 2003; Johansson et al., 2007;
Sydow et al., 2004).
Forms of temporary organizing, such as setting up meeting within an organization (Jarzabkowski & Seidl, 2008) or to install
an interorganizational group (Schopler, 1987), even support the development of strategies. Other forms are used to organize
series of more or less field-configuring events such as film festivals (e.g. Rüling & Pedersen, 2010), sport competitions
(e.g. Thiel & Grabher, 2015), climate conferences (e.g. Schüssler et al., 2014) and trade fairs, sometimes conceived as “temporary
clusters” (e.g. Bathelt & Schuldt, 2008). Still other forms are used to plan for and execute rescue and rapid-response operations
(e.g. Berthod et al., 2017; Schakel & Wolbers, 2021).
At the same time, we know that, despite its advantages of the diverse forms of temporary organizing, there are equally many
disadvantages and challenges such as power struggles (Van Marrewijk et al., 2016), the project learning paradox, perhaps most
obviously often surpassed budgets and deadlines, and temporary employment causing trust and commitment issues.
Hence the temporariness of temporary organizations become both its greatest strength and weakness.
In the search for ways to analytically and conceptually further our knowledge on the challenges and opportunities that individual
and organizational actors face when dealing with temporariness we will build on the notion of temporary organizing that broadens
the scope by including temporary work and work relations.
Our goal is to strengthen the insights on the temporary aspects of organizing and strengthen the organizational aspects that
can bring a more critical and theoretically fruitful debate, that may challenge the current tendency in organizations (and
society at large) towards “projectification” (Midler, 1995), and short-term orientations, to better accommodate the challenges
we face, collectively. SWG 13 invites views from, for example, the sociology and psychology of time and institutional theory.
There is much work in organizational networks, sustainable transition, system change areas that seeks to understand the temporary
aspect of organizations and practices of organizing from a broader perspective that we see as highly relevant to our goals.
The four sub-themes of SWG 13 are structured around the following three different, yet interconnected and partly overlapping
foci:
Iben Stjerne is an Associate Professor in the Department of Engineering Technology at Technical University of Denmark (DTU), Denmark. Her
work centers on how time and temporality organize managerial and strategic practices. Her research interests lie in the intersection
between temporality and temporary organizations such as shared futures and pasts through events and projects. Iben has published
her work in journals such as Organization Studies, Journal of Management Studies, Project Management Journal, and International Project Management Journal.
Jennifer Whyte - tba
Alfons van Marrewijk is Full Professor of Construction Cultures at the Faculty of Architecture and the Built Environment of the Delft University
of Technology, The Netherlands, and Adjunct Professor of Project Management at the Norwegian Business School BI Oslo, Norway;
furthermore, he is Associate Professor at the Department Organization Sciences, Vrije Universiteit Amsterdam, The Netherlands.
In his academic work Alfons uses anthropological theories and methods for studying inter-organizational collaboration and
cultural change in technically oriented organizations and complex mega-projects.
Jonas Söderlund - tba
Jörg Sydow is Professor of Management, holding the Chair of Inter-firm Cooperation at the School of Business & Economics of Freie Universität
Berlin, Germany. His research focuses, among others, on strategic alliances and networks, management and organization theory,
temporary organizing, creativity and innovation, high reliability organizations, and industrial relations.