New publication on Temporal Work Enacting Tensions at the Interface between Temporary and Permanent Organisations

Acting in Time: Temporal Work Enacting Tensions at the Interface between Temporary and Permanent Organisations
Tensions and paradoxes in temporary organizing

Book Series: Research in the Sociology of Organizations - RSO

By Associate Professor Joana Geraldi, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS); Assistant Professor Iben Stjerne, Department of Organization, Copenhagen Business School (CBS); Associate Professor Josef Oehmen, DTU Management, Department of Technology, Management and Economics

Abstract
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.

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