Collaboration for innovation and change across institutional domains is increasingly facilitated by inter-institutional temporary organizations. This paper presents an in-depth and processual case study of an innovation and change project involving diverse private and public-sector organizations. The case study shows how organizing developed recursively in response to diverging of timing, pacing, ordering, frequency and duration. With respect of time and timing we introduce the idea of temporal conditioning as a way of understanding how organizations cope with conflicting institutional requirements by making use of three primary strategies to shape and reshape the timing, pacing, ordering, frequency and duration. The paper adds to our understanding of temporality and the dynamics of organizing in temporary and institutionally pluralistic settings -settings that put greater pressures on our ability to deal with conflicting conceptions around time and timing.
We apply a situated temporal view to reveal the acute challenge actors face in making changes when their project moves toward its final deadline. A situated temporal view takes account not just of the dwindling time left to change the future but also the lingering past, the combination of which poses particular challenges to organizers. We discuss aspects of temporary organizing that make such temporal shifts challenging: the complex interplay between temporal structures and practices, multiple temporal orientations, and deferred timing of temporal shifts. We suggest ideas for further research to apply a situated temporal view to temporary organizing.
The effects of different temporal structures among actors in interorganizational projects can be hugely consequential, especially for large societal projects. By applying a temporal translation view to a real time study of an interorganizational project, we studied the influence of differences between such structures during the collaboration. We found that the three participating organizations, having distinctly different temporal structures, adopted different modes of translation, which we identified as integrative, adaptive, and transformative. These different modes of translations affected dramatically how the project unfolded, as they impacted differently the time and effort required to adapt to common schedules and deadlines. Our study contributes a processual extension of entrainment theory by shedding light on entrainment as ongoing accomplishment as enabled by a translation view. It also contributes to a processual understanding of the temporality of interorganizational projects.
scite is a Brooklyn-based organization that helps researchers better discover and understand research articles through Smart Citations–citations that display the context of the citation and describe whether the article provides supporting or contrasting evidence. scite is used by students and researchers from around the world and is funded in part by the National Science Foundation and the National Institute on Drug Abuse of the National Institutes of Health.