Two Sunny Berlin Days with Candace Jones and Stewart Clegg
Berlin, July 11-12, 2017
The DFG network “Temporary Organizing” coordinated by Timo Braun, School of Business & Economics, Freie Universität Berlin, held its first workshop right after EGOS. In this respect, we could benefit from two talks by Candace Jones (University of Edinburgh) and Stewart Clegg (University of Technology Sydney) on How temporary projects lead to institutional stability (by Candace) and Temporal Conditioning and Institutional Pluralism: Exploring the Nature and Dynamics (by Stewart).
The paper presentations as well as talks by six network members and further guests were rounded off by several theory-focused formal and informal meetings such as Promises, Processes, and Problems of Temporary Organizing (Jörg Sydow), Challenges of Temporary Organizing (Arnold Windeler), Dark sides of temporary organizing (Timo Braun, Olivier Berthod & Jörg Raab), and Making temporary organizing permanent (Matthias Wenzel).
Besides our interest in theorizing temporary organizing, we have a strong empirical focus on projects but also on routines. Two of our members presented their papers on consulting projects and fire brigade (Roles, routines, and the emergence of temporal coordination in consulting projects by Blagoy Blagoev and It’s all about timing: Toward a relational understanding of time in routine performance by Anja Danner‐Schröder).
In terms of theory-building and methodological perspectives, the presentations helped us identify overarching topics and provided for much inspiration for our ongoing research. For example, we started two project teams: (1) A practice lens on temporary organizing for tackling grand challenges – e.g. temporary organizing in the refugee crisis (Blagoy, Anja, Timo) and Multi-level perspectives on the interplay of temporariness and permanency (Indre, Andranik, Stephan).
We will continue our conversations on temporary organizing in several sessions during the upcoming Academy of Management Meeting in Atlanta, as well as at two workshops in Cologne (November 2017) and Tilburg (summer 2018). Hope to see you there!