Temporary Organizing: Promises, Processes, Problems

Abstract

Today’s turbulent environment is heralding an increase in organizing in flexible, ad-hoc manners that involve frequent adaptations to opportunities and changes. Research has documented a concomitant rise of temporary organizing principles in and across firms (Bakker, 2010)—ranging from managing short-term projects (Sydow et al., 2004) and forming temporary organizations (Kenis et al., 2009), through to navigating short-term networks (March, 1995), orchestrating field-configuring events (Lampel & Meyer, 2008), maintaining temporary clusters (Maskell et al., 2006), and hiring temporary contract workers (Kalleberg, 2000). This editorial bundles, investigates, and expands the current frontiers of “temporary organizing” research and highlights how temporary organizing interacts with more permanent organization, networks and fields. Temporary organizing captures the activities and practices associated with collectives of inter¬dependent individual or corporate actors who pursue ex ante agreed upon task objectives within a predetermined time frame (cf. Burke & Morley, 2016; Goodman & Goodman, 1976; Lundin & Soderholm, 1995). The temporality of these activities is directly tied to the expectation that this collaboration will terminate as agreed-upon. This “institutionalized termination” (Lundin & Soderholm, 1995: 445) separates temporary organizing not only from mainstream organizational theory that is primarily concerned with open-ended organizational settings, but also from Mintzberg's (1979) adhocracy, which does not capture temporariness as the unique and constitutive feature of temporary organizing (Burke & Morley, 2016). Notwithstanding the importance of intentionally finite time spans for temporary organizing, the actual duration of temporary organizational practices and forms may not only vary between short- and long-term but also, as many practical cases illustrate, deviate significantly from the agreement reached ex ante.