Temporary Organizing and Institutional Change

Abstract

The relationship between the temporary and the permanent is a central issue in studies of temporary organizing. Recent research highlights that projects, as key forms of temporary organizations, both constitute and are constituted by their wider institutional contexts. However, there is still a lack of more detailed understanding of the actors and their activities through which projects produce and advance institutional change. To address this issue, we draw on extensive fieldwork to study the activities that constitute establishment of the Innovation University. This endeavour gained the status of a spearhead project and advanced nationwide university reform in one northern European country. Our central contribution is two-fold. We sediment a more robust approach to institutions within project literature by defining them as widely shared beliefs and practices that actors enact and (re)produce through their various activities. On this basis, we develop a model of an institutional project for regulative change and show that it is more parallel and multiplex and less sequential in nature than existing studies might convey. Our model also creates new understanding of the role of the ‘lock-ins’ shaped by projects to promote regulative change and casts light on the temporal linkages and temporal boundary objects in institutional projects. In closing, we discuss several future avenues for research in both project literature and institutional theory.