Research has documented a concomitant rise of temporary organizing principles in and across firms – ranging from managing short-term projects and forming temporary organizations, through to navigating short-term networks, orchestrating field-configuring events, maintaining temporary clusters, and hiring temporary contract workers.

A special issue of “Organization Studies”, edited by Rene Bakker, Bob DeFillippi, Andreas Schwab and Jörg Sydow  bundles, investigates, and expands the current frontiers of “temporary organizing” research and highlights how temporary organizing interacts with more permanent organization, networks, and fields. It offers an integrative overview of different emerging perspectives in the temporary organizing literature, points to key opportunities and challenges in the study of temporary organizing, and introduces a set of papers with significant contributions to a theory of temporary organizing.

Temporary organizing captures the activities and practices associated with collectives of interdependent individual or corporate actors who pursue ex ante agreed-upon task objectives within a predetermined time frame. The temporality of these activities is directly tied to the expectation that this collaboration will terminate as agreed. This “institutionalized termination” separates temporary organizing not only from mainstream organizational theory that is primarily concerned with open-ended organizational settings, but also from Mintzberg’s adhocracy, which does not capture temporariness as the unique and constitutive feature of temporary organizing. Researchers see three main approaches toward temporary organizing: temporary organizing as process; temporary organization as form; and temporary organizing as a perspective.

The process perspective on temporary organizing typically puts temporality or, more precisely, temporariness center stage, and explicitly captures and conceptualizes the dynamics of change. Temporary organizing as form focuses on the temporary organizations that the process of temporary organizing creates, i.e., formal organizations or other types of social system (e.g. temporary alliances) that are designed to disintegrate within a predetermined time frame. In the case of “project enterprises” the disintegration of this organizational entity is tied to the completion of a specific task within a given time frame. An illustrative example is a company founded to produce a specific film with the help of inter-organizational projects (IOP). The third way in which researchers have viewed temporary organizing is as a perspective. Research taking this view considers temporary organizing as a fundamentally different “logic of organizing” with high prevalence and impact for the understanding of organizations. Related research attempts have developed theories of temporary organizing to explain why temporary organizations exist, in what respects they differ, and how they are produced, reproduced and transformed. Taking projects as the most popular form of temporary organizing, we see research having evolved from a focus on optimization and “success factors,” to later adopting contingency and comparative perspectives, hence over time having become increasingly behavioral, processual, multilevel, and relational.

The articles of the Special Issues are as follows:

•  Rene M. Bakker, Robert J. DeFillippi, Andreas Schwab, and Jörg Sydow: Temporary Organizing: Promises, Processes, Problems
•  Rik Ligthart, Leon Oerlemans, and Niels Noorderhaven: In the Shadows of Time: A Case Study of Flexibility Behaviors in an Interorganizational Project
• Alfons van Marrewijk, Sierk Ybema, Karen Smits, Stewart Clegg, and Tyrone Pitsis: Clash of the Titans: Temporal Organizing and Collaborative Dynamics in the Panama Canal Megaproject
• Iben Sandal Stjerne and Silviya Svejenova: Connecting Temporary and Permanent Organizing: Tensions and Boundary Work in Sequential Film Projects
• Patricia Prado and Jonathan Sapsed: The Anthropophagic Organization: How Innovations Transcend the Temporary in a Project-based Organization
• Sampo Tukiainen and Nina Granqvist: Temporary Organizing and Institutional Change
• Anna Swärd: Trust, Reciprocity, and Actions: The Development of Trust in Temporary Inter-organizational Relations
• Mark Ebers and Indre Maurer: To Continue or not to Continue? Drivers of Recurrent Partnering in Temporary Organizations