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This paper explores the consequences of researching temporary protest organizations through embodied ethnography, paying attention to how, when and why a researcher takes sides.

The authors employed embodied walking ethnography to study Lyra's Walk, a three-day, 68-mile protest walk held in May 2019 to advocate for peace in Northern Ireland. Data were primarily ethnographic, complemented by an analysis of social media, photos, videos and media coverage.

First the authors argue that embodied walking ethnography can provide an inhabited understanding of organizing. The social, physical and emotional experiences of walking encourage researchers to identify more closely with participants and obtain a greater understanding of the phenomena studied. Second, the authors identify that methodological choice can have a greater impact on side-taking than either the conflict setting or organization researched.

This paper demonstrates the promise and consequences of using embodied walking ethnography to study a mobile organization. It further illustrates the nuances and challenges of conducting ethnography in a temporary protest organization.

The paper makes two contributions. The novel use of embodied walking ethnography to study temporary protest organizations can lead the research to become intertwined with the temporary organization during its process of organizational becoming. With the researcher's body acting as a research tool, their sensations and emotions impact data collection, interpretation and findings.

This chapter addresses the challenges associated with temporary organising under conditions of institutional complexity. The authors draw on findings from an in-depth case study of a megaproject initiated to reshape healthcare in Sweden. At the centre of this transformation was the construction of a new, ‘world-class’ hospital to replace the former (historical and renowned) university hospital. The authors posit that organising such projects is largely a matter of creating, responding to, and re-creating temporal institutional complexity. Thus, their study identifies four distinct response strategies – innovating, partial decoupling, avoiding, and surfing – on which project actors relied when dealing with the multiplicity of temporal institutional requirements. The authors propose a model for explaining how these strategies affected the temporal institutional complexity faced by the project. Their chapter adds to the literature on temporary organisations by highlighting the nature and dynamics of temporal institutional complexity and by revealing how inter-institutional temporary organisations cope with such complexity.

The purpose of this paper is to set out to analyze the supervisor psychological contract as a new psychological contract focus. Furthermore, the relationship between this psychological contract and the organizational psychological contract is compared in the prediction of job satisfaction and organizational affective commitment among a sample of traditional (in-house) and temporary agency workers.

The hypotheses were tested with multiple group analyses in a sample of 444 Portuguese call center workers: 215 were in-house and 229 were temporary agency workers.

Results confirmed that workers, regardless of their status, distinguished these two foci of psychological contract. However, for temporary workers, the supervisor psychological contract partially mediated the relationship between the organizational psychological contract and attitudes; while for in-house workers the organizational psychological contract was relevant to explain job satisfaction and the two foci of the psychological contract related independently to workers’ affective commitment toward the organization.

The study is limited due to the nature of the sample (call center sector where temporary agency and in-house workers received similar opportunities and treatment) and the lack of a longitudinal design.

An important implication of this research is that employers should assume the relevance of the supervisor for temporary agency workers. The social exchange between them and the host organization occurs in part through his/her actions.

Although supervisor psychological contract has been acknowledged, as far as the authors know there are no empirical studies that support its existence or analyzes its relevance in worker-organization relationships.

The purpose of this study is to identify and determine the most prevalent factors influencing the performance of temporary disaster response teams.

After a literature review on team performance and temporary organizations, this study uses the grounded theory approach, based on 13 years of United Nations Disaster Assessment and Coordination mission data.

Generic individual skills and a heterogeneous team composition are key. Speed of deployment trumps thoroughness of preparation. Partner organizations should contribute supporting capacities. Necessary leadership skills are simple rather than arcane. Uncontrollable factors must be accepted. Creativity plays only a small role.

Prioritize transferable competencies when selecting team members. Compose teams with regional, but not global, diversity. Reduce team leader training to basic leadership skills.

The intersection between temporary organizations and the performance of multinational disaster response teams is unexplored. Research aimed at increasing disaster response performance can contribute to human lives saved and advance general management and organization studies.

Temporary agency work (TAW) has increased enormously in recent decades. Most temporary agency workers are pushed involuntarily into this work arrangement and prefer permanent work arrangements. Therefore, the motive to find a permanent job through TAW is predominant for the majority of temporary agency workers. However, little is known about what helps in obtaining a permanent job in a client organization. The purpose of this paper is to examine the role of social skills by simultaneously considering the human capital aspects and motivational background of the individuals for transition success.

The paper is based on a questionnaire study of 151 temporary agency workers with two measurement points. The questionnaires were first administered at the very beginning of their work as a temp and again five months later.

The findings show that the social skills of temporary agency workers in contrast to various aspects of human capital and motives for temping had a significant impact on becoming a permanent worker in a client organization.

The generalizability of the finding that social skills help temporary agency workers to find a permanent job in a client organization may be restricted due to the particularities of the work setting in the clerical sector. The incidences as well as the determinants of transition success may depend on the industry sector because of the respective assignment characteristics as well as the clients’ reasons of using temporary agency workers. Future research should investigate more thoroughly the role of assignment characteristics for the experiences of the workers.

Social skills seem to play a crucial role for transition success in TAW. Qualification measures should therefore include the training of interpersonal behavior. It would be desirable when the involved organizations would assume responsibility in this respect. Furthermore, policy makers should provide adequate training formats since they promote TAW as a stepping stone opportunity for unemployed people.

This paper suggests that career mobility in the context of flexible work arrangements may be driven by more informal processes of social integration into the existing permanent team. While TAW is seen as a temporary solution in Germany, this study focuses on the individual determinants of transition success of temporary agency workers that is still rare in studies on the topic.

This study aims to discuss science governance in Europe and the network of associated nonprofit institutions. The authors posit that this network, which comprises both (partial) learning organizations and non-learning organizations, has been observed to postpone taking up “responsibility” as an issue in science governance and funding decisions.

This paper discusses the challenge of learning and policy implementation within the European science governance system. By exploring how learning on responsible innovation (RI) in this governance system can be provoked, it addresses the question how Senge’s insights in organizational learning can clarify discourses on and practices of RI and responsibility in research. This study explores the potential of a new organizational form, that of Social Labs, to support learning on Responsible Research and Innovation (RRI) in standing governance organizations.

This study concludes that Social Labs are a suitable format for enacting the five disciplines as identified by Senge, and a Social Lab may turn into a learning organization, be it a temporary one. Responsibility in research and innovation is conducive for learning in the setting of a Social Lab, and Social Labs act as intermediary organizations, which not merely pass on information among actors but also actively give substantive shape to what they convey from a practice-informed, normative orientation.

This empirical work on RRI-oriented Social Labs therefore suggests that Social Lab–oriented temporary, intermediary learning organizations present a promising form for implementing complex normative policies in a networked, nonhierarchical governance setting.

Based on this research funding and governance organizations in research, policy-makers in other domains may take up and create such intermediary organizations to aid learning in (science) governance.

This research suggests that RRI-oriented Social Labs present a promising form for implementing complex normative policies, thus integrate learning on and by responsible practices in various governance settings.

European science governance is characterized by a network of partial Learning Organization (LOs) and Non-Learning Organization (nLOs) who postpone decision-making on topics around “responsibility” and “solving societal challenges” or delegate authority to reviewers and individual actors, filtering possibilities for collaborative transformation toward RRI. social lab (SLs) are spaces that can address social problems or social challenges in an open, action-oriented and creative manner. As such, they may function as temporary, intermediary LOs bringing together diverse actors from a specific context to work on and learn about issues of science and society where standing organizations avoid doing so. Taken together, SLs may offer temporary organizational structures and spaces to move beyond top-down exercise of power or lack of real change to more open, deliberative and creative forms of sociopolitical coordination between multiple actors cutting across realms of state, practitioners of research and innovation and civil society. By taking the role of temporary LOs, they may support existing research and innovation organizations and research governance to become more flexible and adaptive.

The purpose of this paper is to analyse whether a social exchange relationship between temporary workers and organizations is possible. The authors aim to consider whether, when training is perceived by an employee as an organizational practice that promotes his or her employability, this entails a social exchange relationship.

Surveys from 240 call centre workers were analyzed using correlation and multiple regression to explore relationships between training to promote employability, perceived organizational support (POS) and affective commitment.

The data support the idea that social exchange theories are useful frameworks in explaining temporary workers' affective commitment towards organisations. Organisational investment in training was positively related to the affective commitment of these temporary workers. However, employees attributed greater importance to the fact that training increased their employability than to the number of training hours received. The relationship between this human resource management practice and affective commitment partly occurred through the perceived organisational support. Such perception partially mediates the relationship between training as a promoter of employability and this positive attitude.

The study is limited due to sample nature and the lack of longitudinal design. It does not provide implications for other types of commitment that may be relevant for temporary workers (continuance commitment, for example).

An important implication from this research is that employers should not assume that training is an investment without return from temporary workers. Developmental opportunities, while important to all employees, did make temporary workers more committed to organizations.

The paper is the first, to the authors' knowledge, to assess training as promoting employability with a specific measure. While the results are simple, they refute many stereotypes of temporary workers and add an important perspective to the human resource management literature.

Discusses the process of imitation using the vocabulary of translation, taking as an example the temporary organization Stockholm – Cultural Capital of Europe 1998. Describes the process of change in an organizational order that can be characterized as (con)temporary. The description reveals several paradoxes typical of today’s organizing and focuses in particular on a temporary organization’s struggle for immortality.

The purpose of this paper is to discuss the limitations of existing approaches for guaranteeing the quality of a joint output in temporary enterprise networks such as virtual organisations and to identify possibilities for future research on solving this problem.

The paper works towards the analysis of requirements for managing quality in temporary networks such as virtual organisations. Afterwards, it discusses the problem and thus the limitations of existing approaches to guarantee quality of the joint output of such networks.

The review shows that in temporary networks, individual organisations often do not have the right concepts to control inter‐organisational information exchange within the network. Nevertheless, inter‐organisational information exchange gain is important, because it influences the quality of the network's joint output. Existing approaches to define communication structures to support information exchange on the inter‐organisational level do not seem to be sufficient and represent a risk in guaranteeing the quality of a joint output.

This paper explores new directions in quality management from an inter‐organisational perspective in temporary enterprises networks. The findings contribute to supporting the need for the further development of existing approaches to competence management in order to address quality aspects in temporary enterprise environments. This work contributes to the theoretical demand for interlinking quality management with highly dynamic collaborative relations. This point of view goes beyond the internally focused perspective with the goal of integrating converging quality management processes with an inter‐organisational perspective.

Business consortiums for temporary projects have limited time and less attention from individual organisations concerning leadership alignment. Recognising the need to study relationships in alliances, this study aims to identify the fundamental organisational beliefs perceived by the leaders in a construction business consortium and relate them to the companies’ belief system as conceptualised by Simons.

The research adopts a positivist qualitative approach with semi-structured interviews, literature review and document analysis through a case study in a temporary business consortium formed by three large construction companies.

It was possible to verify alignment between the beliefs of the consortium and its leadership and infer that the flow of beliefs can be affected by the duration of the project. The research underlines the importance of the belief system within an organisation and how differences can cause internal conflicts, whilst alignment can improve competitiveness. The authors concluded that conflicts emerge due to a lack of alignment regarding the business’ core beliefs and the presence of different cultures and the duration of the project. Also, it was possible to create two different propositions for future studies regarding the project timeframe and improve competitiveness with the alignment of beliefs.

Whilst there is academic literature that identifies challenges in successful project execution attributed to the misalignment of teams at a cultural level, organisations today still largely neglect the importance of team alignment. A better understanding of beliefs across organisations could have significant impact on social aspects resulting in improvements concerning projects timescales and quality of deliverables.

The main contribution is to explain how beliefs flow from individual parties to a temporary business consortium. This research addresses the lack of empirical studies relating to the alignment of temporary projects whilst providing recommendations to inform future research.