Connecting Temporary and Permanent Organizing: Tensions and Boundary Work in Sequential Film Projects

Abstract

This paper investigates the relationship between a permanent organization and a series of temporary organizations. It draws on an in-depth study of the process through which a Danish film production company, seeking to balance innovation and persistence in a troubled industry, struggles to realize a novel children’s film and its sequels. The study reveals tensions at different levels as well as boundary work and boundary roles that address them, bringing in shadows of past and future projects. The study extends the understanding of the dialectic between temporary and permanent organizing by emphasizing how ongoing work at different boundaries affects the permanent and temporary organizing’s connectedness and outcomes. It also challenges the overly bracketed view of temporary organizations, suggesting a temporality perspective on temporariness.

Time to learn? Assignment duration in global value chain organization

“…They analyze the timing of a make-or-buy decision and the option to reverse this decision, but do not discuss the duration of each value chain activity as we propose. Scholars are also examining time, timing, and related concepts of flexibility in temporary organizational forms (Stjerne & Svejenova, 2016), interorganizational projects (Ligthart et al, 2016), and "project-based firms" (Hobday, 2000;Sydow, Lindkvist, & DeFillippi, 2004) to a greater extent, due to their increased occurrence in a broad range of industries such as construction, film-making, human resources, new product development, and software development (Bakker, 2010;DeFillippi & Arthur, 1998;Lakemond & Berggren, 2006;Zwikael & Unger-Aviram, 2010). These types of organizations are established to achieve pre-defined goals and are characterized by an ex ante defined limited time of interaction between members, but their connection to GVCs is not the focus of this research.…”

Temporary Organizing: Promises, Processes, Problems

“…Since a temporary system is often embedded in more permanent ones like organizations, networks or fields, the tensions, contradictions and synergies emerging at the interfaces between the temporary and the permanent are not yet well understood; despite early contributions in Sahlin, Anderson and Söderholm (2002) and the study of sequential film projects by Stjerne and Svejenova (2016) in this Special Issue. The distinction between actors and structures as carriers of temporariness, put forward in our typology (see once again Figure 1), could be helpful for a more differentiated understanding of the respective relationship between the temporary and the (more) permanent.…”

Temporary Organizing: Promises, Processes, Problems

“…wellbeing. Since a temporary system is often embedded in more permanent ones like organizations, networks or fields, the tensions, contradictions and synergies emerging at the interfaces between the temporary and the permanent are not yet well understood; despite early contributions in Sahlin, Anderson and Söderholm (2002) and the study of sequential film projects by Stjerne and Svejenova (2016) in this Special Issue. The distinction between actors and structures as carriers of temporariness, put forward in our typology (see once again Figure 1), could be helpful for a more differentiated understanding of the respective relationship between the temporary and the (more) permanent.…”