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Tensions arising from temporary versus permanent forms of organising are a managerially relevant and commonplace phenomenon. How ensuing tensions unfold and what implications this has for organising responses across different levels of organising is the key concern of our inquiry. The authors draw upon a case study of what has been dubbed the German refugee crisis to make three contributions to the literature on managing temporary organisational phenomena: First, the authors offer a temporal continuum along which one can distinguish between comparatively fast responses of emergent temporary organisations on the micro-level and relatively slow responses by macro-level institutions that are predominantly engaged in permanent organising. The authors built upon this continuum to highlight the role of temporal lags, which arise from the different reaction times of micro- and macro-level organisations and which is filled by the respective other organisational form, a phenomenon the authors label temporal co-dependence. Second, the authors offer a distinction between deliberate and emergent forms of temporal organising. Third, the authors unearth boundary conditions that make the likelihood of this interplay between different levels possible.

‘Acceleration’, that is, the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, little is known about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, the authors explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Their analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As their study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. The authors identify three temporal practices – sequencing, freezing, and merging – through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Their study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.

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.

The purpose of this paper is to contribute to the theory development of “temporary organizing.”

The paper advances the theory of the temporary organization by applying a process ontological-perspective.

This research note conceptualizes “the temporary organization” as constantly changing across time and space; as shifting between two empirically driven modes: “goal seeking” and “goal oriented.” This is done through the shift of the trajectory of the particular “project” at hand.

Based on the theoretical suggestions in the paper, further research is encouraged to find empirical support of and to develop its claims.

Despite a call for taking the “organizing”-aspect of temporary organizations seriously, there is still a need for theory development of the area. By introducing the concept of “trajectories” into the studies of temporary organizations, the paper builds a theoretical framework through which such studies may be undertaken.

The creation of a new venture is at the heart of entrepreneurship and shares parallels with project-based organizing: embedded in an institutional context, founders have to assemble a team that works on specified tasks within a strict time constraint, while the new venture undergoes various transitions. The purpose of this paper is to explore parallels between both streams of research and an increasing projectification of entrepreneurship.

The study is based upon a case study of the Berlin start-up ecosystem including the analysis of interviews (n=52), secondary documents, and field observations.

The paper reveals that – shaped by their institutional context – patterns of project-like organizing have become pertinent to the new venture creation process. It identifies a set of facets from the entrepreneurial ecosystems – more specifically different types of organizational actors, their occupational backgrounds, and epistemic communities – that enable and constrain the process of new venture creation in a way that is typical for project-based organizing.

This study thus elaborates on how institutional settings enforce what has been called “projectification” in the process of new venture creation and discuss implications for start-up ecosystems.

The purpose of this research note is to address theory building in the field of projects and temporary organizations.

This research note builds on commenting and deriving arguments from three main sources (the Transition paper, the End‐states paper, and the Chunk paper) that all contribute to theory building in the field of temporary organizations and/or projects. In addition to an Introduction section in the beginning and Discussion section at the end, this research note is organized to comprise four sections: Time, End states, Boundaries, and Chunk.

This research note expands the temporary organization view to include dimensions that fall outside the organizational dimension. Such dimensions include logic‐related, immaterial, maybe even entrepreneurial issues that may reside outside the boundaries of any organizational entity. Furthermore, such dimensions include end states and potentially objects that (may) affect the end states such as opportunity‐seizing or risk‐taking attitudes, or accidental or serendipitous incidents/events that would occur “outside the temporary organization” in the uncertain environment (the environment being collaborative, competitive, or “random”). This discussion relates to the challenging question of defining boundaries and understanding their dynamic and ever‐changing nature. The discussion part of the paper introduces the term “business enterprise” in contrast to the terms “project” or “temporary organization”, when referring to logic‐related and other aspects that would otherwise fall outside the organizational dimension.

Based on the findings of this paper, further conceptual and empirical research and academic debates on temporary organizations and projects is needed. This would elevate combinations of existing theories and propose several new theories, not just one theory.

Existing theories on temporary organizations and projects and the ways in which they are used in individual studies are too single‐sided and therefore not too helpful in explaining the new organizational forms referred to in this paper. Therefore, cross‐disciplinary combinations of several existing theories are needed, and potentially new theories also need to be developed. This research note and the three main sources (the Transition paper, the End‐states paper, and the Chunk paper) serve as a good start for such future theory‐building and theory‐combining studies.

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 study aims at understanding how professional sports events compete with each other to attract spectators, sponsors and media coverage, by referring to the resource-based view (RBV) theory, which interprets firms as a bundle of idiosyncratic resources and capabilities. Specifically, the authors aim to identify the value-creating resources that support event success in the long run.

The authors conducted a literature review on RBV and sports events, which provided the analytic categories used for on a cross-case analysis of popular cycling events held in Italy.

Each event has different value-creating resources, depending on its governance model. Specifically, organisational knowledge accumulated over time by a stable event promoter/organiser enables an understanding of stakeholders’ needs and leads to a competitive advantage. As for events with temporary organising committees, event reputation is decisive to their long-term success. Here, event promoters play a key role in managing reputation over time, i.e., properly selecting host countries, balancing their cultural differences and supporting their capacity to produce long-term benefits.

Sports events may be leveraged within place-branding strategies to increase the attractiveness and level of socio-economic development of a destination. It is thus important to understand the competitive dynamics among sports events. The existing studies have focused on event organisers while underestimating the contribution of sports organisations and/or private companies that promote sport events. This study adopts a broad perspective that takes account of both promoters and organisers in order to verify whether and how the governance model affects the resources relevant to the event’s success.

Temporary and permanent organisations have contrasting yet co-dependent perspectives regarding time; temporary organisations are made to ‘die’, yet most of them exist to enable permanent organisations to ‘survive’. The authors studied the temporal tensions of strategic initiatives – that is, temporary organisations that aim to implement strategic change in permanent organisations. Our empirical data identified three temporal tensions emerging when senior managers timed their strategic initiatives: ambition versus realism when enacting the time horizon, patience versus urgency when enacting the pace, and clock time versus event time when enacting the temporal perspective. By evoking the literature on paradox and temporal work, the authors extend the view of temporality at the temporary and permanent interface and indicate how temporal work played an important role in creating, reinforcing, or transforming temporal tensions. The authors conclude by providing implications for theory and practice.