Call for Papers

Temporary organizing involves the reweaving of futures, pasts, and presents so as to unleash novelty, innovation, and change in particular moments of interacting (Stjerne et al., 2022a). These ‘particular moments’ are at the heart of temporary organizing, given that temporal routines are likely to be intendedly disrupted as termination nears (Braun & Lampel, 2020). As such, temporary organizing as manifested, among others, in projects (Sydow et al., 2004), agile forms of organizing (Stjerne et al., 2022b) short-term employment (Kalleberg, 2000), accelerator programs (Skade et al., 2020), events (Jones et al., 2016; Lampel & Meyer, 2008), festivals (Toraldo et al., 2019), as well as the forming of short-term organizations (Kenis et al., 2009) and inter-organizational networks (Sydow & Braun, 2023) has been considered instrumental to mobilizing novelty, innovation, and change even in more permanent and continuous organizing. Among others, this is because their temporariness may permit more agency to mobilize various pasts and create alternative futures (Stjerne & Svejenova, 2016; Wenzel et al., 2020). Furthermore, because their temporariness often entails temporal tensions e.g. between planning (Chronos) and opportune moments (Kairos) and engaging in ambitemporality may mobilize a break with presumptions and create new paths of action and creativity (Otto et al., 2024).
 
Thus, routine activity is often what temporary organizing sets to break with and transition from through alternative temporalities. This may include stepping out of the continuity of day-to-day work through the temporary engagement with ill-defined tasks or goals in less structured, simultaneous, and partly even chaotic ways (Mumford et al., 2002); the temporary necessities of responding to disruptions that may reshuffle temporary organizing itself and increasingly become a permanent demand (Vaagaasar et al., 2020); but also the temporary performance of routine tasks whose rhythm and pace, however, differ from more permanent or continuous organizing (Obstfeld, 2012). This co-constitutional relationship between the temporary and the permanent also poses questions of agency in temporal terms: If the temporary is always connected to, or can at least not be fully identified and understood without something that seems more permanent (Engwall, 2003), how can the temporalities of temporary organizing make a difference to those of permanent or continuous organizing? And by implication, how do the temporalities of temporary organizing produce agency for novelty, innovation, and change?
 
Hence, exploring the temporal dynamics in and of temporary organizing more fully is central for understanding innovation and creativity. We, therefore, invite submissions that engage with these dynamics and inherent tensions in particular, and with temporary organizing in its multifaceted manifestations more generally at or between any levels of analysis. Submissions may build on qualitative or quantitative data, or may be conceptual in nature. Literature reviews are equally welcome. The inclusiveness of this sub-theme, we hope, will fruitfully contribute to accomplishing the mission of the EGOS Standing Working (SWG) 13 on ‘Temporary Organizing’, which is to provide a platform for theoretically productive dialogues on the temporary aspects of organizing, and to spur critical debates that may challenge current trends toward temporary organizing.
 
Against this background, some but certainly not all of the questions that could be addressed within the scope of this sub-theme are:

• How does the structuring of time in and through temporary organizing give rise to, and sustain creativity and novelty?

• How are boundaries between the temporalities of temporary and permanent organizing accomplished and (re)negotiated? How do tensions around these boundaries contribute to creativity, innovation, and change?

• How do the rhythms and paces of temporary organizing enable or constrain creative work?

• What are the power dynamics behind the temporalities of temporary organizing? Who is drawn into these rhythms, and who is excluded?

• How do actors involved in temporary organizing mobilize, reconstruct, and ‘make’ pasts and futures through, e.g., narratives, practices, and materialities?

• How do varying temporal depths (near vs. distant) of pasts and futures as well as varying temporal directions (e.g., us moving toward the future vs. the future moving toward us) (re)constructed in temporary organizing enable or constrain creativity and innovation?

• In which ways do the temporalities of more recent forms and practices of temporary organizing such as agile differ from established ways such as project work (if at all), and with what effect?

References

• Braun, T., & Lampel, J. (2020): “Tensions and paradoxes in temporary organizing: Mapping the field.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 67, 1–13.

• Engwall, M. (2003): “No project is an island: linking projects to history and context.” Research Policy, 32 (5), 789–808.
• Jones, C., Svejenova, S., Pedersen, J.S., & Townley, B. (2016): “Misfits, mavericks and mainstreams: Drivers of innovation in the creative industries.” Organization Studies, 37 (6), 751–768.
• Kalleberg, A.L. (2000): “Nonstandard employment relations: Part-time, temporary and contract work.” Annual Review of Sociology, 26 (1), 341–365.
• Kenis, P., Janowicz, M., & Cambré, B. (eds.) (2009): Temporary Organizations: Prevalence, Logic and Effectiveness. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing.
• Lampel, J., & Meyer, A.D. (2008): “Guest editors’ introduction: Field‐configuring events as structuring mechanisms: How conferences, ceremonies, and trade shows constitute new technologies, industries, and markets.” Journal of Management Studies, 45 (6), 1025–1035.
• Mumford, M.D., Scott, G.M., Gaddis, B., & Strange, J.M. (2002): “Leading creative people: Orchestrating expertise and relationships.” The Leadership Quarterly, 13 (6), 705–750.
• Obstfeld, D. (2012): “Creative projects: A less routine approach toward getting new things done.” Organization Science, 23 (6), 1571–1592.
• Otto, B.D., Schüßler, E.S., Sydow, J., & Vogelgsang, L. (2024): ”Finding Creativity in Predictability: Seizing Kairos in Chronos Through Temporal Work in Complex Innovation Processes.” Organization Science, first published online on March 12, 2024; https://doi.org/10.1287/orsc.2020.14743.
• Skade, L., Stanske, S., Wenzel, M., & Koch, J. (2020): “Temporary organizing and acceleration: On the plurality of temporal structures in accelerators.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 67, 105–125.
• Stjerne, I.S., & Svejenova, S. (2016): “Connecting temporary and permanent organizing: Tensions and boundary work in sequential film projects.” Organization Studies, 37 (12), 1771–1792.
• Stjerne, I.S., Wenzel, M., & Svejenova, S. (2022a): “Commitment to grand challenges in fluid forms of organizing: The role of narratives’ temporality.” Research in the Sociology of Organizations, 67, 139–160.
• Stjerne, I.S., Geraldi, J., & Wenzel, M. (2022b): “Strategic Practice Drift: How Open Strategy Infiltrates the Strategy Process.” Journal of Management Studies, 61 (3), 820–856.
• Sydow, J., Lindkvist, L., & DeFillippi, R. (2004): “Project-based organizations, embeddedness and repositories of knowledge.” Organization Studies, 25 (9), 1475–1489.
• Sydow, J., & Braun, T. (2023): “Governance of inter-organizational project networks.” In: Müler, R., Sankaran, S., & Drouin, N. (eds.): Research Handbook on the Governance of Projects. Cheltenham: Edward Elgar Publishing, 356–365.
• Toraldo, L.M., Islam, G., & Mangia, G. (2019): “Serving time: Volunteer work, liminality and the uses of meaningfulness at music festivals.” Journal of Management Studies, 56 (3), 617–654.
• Vaagaasar, A.L., Hernes, T., & Dille, T. (2020): “The challenges of implementing temporal shifts in temporary organizations: Implications of a situated temporal view.” Project Management Journal, 51 (4), 420–428.
• Wenzel, M., Krämer, H., Koch, J., & Reckwitz, A. (2020): “Future and Organization Studies: On the rediscovery of a problematic temporal category in organizations.” Organization Studies, 41 (10), 1441–1455.
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