Call for Papers
Temporary Organizing
Organization Studies Special Issue
Guest Editors: Jörg Sydow, Freie Universität Berlin; Robert J. DeFillippi, Suffolk University Boston; Andreas Schwab, Iowa State University; Rene M. Bakker, Queensland University of Technology
Today’s turbulent business environment is heralding an increase in organizing in a flexible, ad-hoc manner that involves a constant adaptation to opportunities and change. One salient, yet understudied, way in which firms are changing as a consequence, is on their temporal attributes. Specifically, recent research has documented a rapid rise of temporary organizing principles in firms (Bakker, 2010), ranging from managing short-term projects (Sydow et al., 2004) and forming temporary organizations (Kenis et al., 2009), through to navigating short-term, constantly changing networks (March, 1995), orchestrating (field-configuring) events (Lampel & Meyer, 2008), maintaining temporary clusters (Maskell et al., 2006), and hiring temporary contract workers (Kalleberg, 2000). Such processes have in common the fact that they are explicitly (and intentionally) transient in nature, characterized by intentionally finite time spans. The present special issue seeks to bundle, investigate, and push further the current frontiers of such “temporary organizing” research and deepen our knowledge of how temporary organizing interacts with more permanent organizing forms such as organizations, networks and fields.
The present Special Issue invites manuscripts that aim to deepen our understanding of temporary organizing by applying a processual, temporal lens.
Deadline for submission of Papers is September 30, 2014.