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Festivals are conceptualised in this chapter as temporary organisations embedded in more permanent structures (e.g. festival lead organisation). Festivals face a series of paradoxical tensions common to temporary organisations in creative fields. These tensions arise, in part, from the diversity of actors involved in festivals and the distinctive values and priorities they bring to their festival organisational involvement. Lucca Comics & Games (LC&G), which is one of the biggest comic-cons in the world, operates in the intersection of different institutional contexts, which include a wide range of actors involved. Thus, tensions appear within the LC&G domain as a result of these actors’ different levels of involvement in the festival organisation and their diverse identities. These tensions and their resolutions will be analysed from the perspective of extant theory on paradox. A specific focus of this chapter is on the belonging paradox, which concerns the role of competing identities among different types of festival participants and how these competing identities are manifested in the organisational identity of LC&G, its structures and processes. Our study provides evidence of identity tensions as both/and relationships that are not mutually exclusive or antagonistic. The authors also suggest that ‘place identity’ requires further examination as a distinctive feature of temporary organising in festivals, considering its role in mediating tensions arising from the belonging paradox amongst festival main actors (exhibitors, artists, public bodies and lead organisation employees).

Temporary organisations are time-limited organisations that are created with a deliberate termination point. Temporary organisations can increase flexibility, allow for innovative and transformative activities with less resource commitment, and reflect a ‘Zeitgeist’ of acceleration and time limitation in society. They also give rise to tensions and paradoxes that require new adaptive and coordinative practices. Research on temporary organisations has moved from primarily exploring the distinction between temporary and permanent organisations to using temporary organisations to study a range of phenomena such as temporality, acceleration, identity, and attachment–detachment dilemmas. This volume reflects this new orientation. We map empirical phenomena along the lines of events, projects and networks, and explore three conceptual themes that run through the nine chapters that comprise this volume: (1) temporality in temporary organisations; (2) the interaction between temporary and permanent organisations; and (3) the strategies and practices that temporary organisation develop in response to tensions and paradoxes.