Theorizing temporary organizing to foster true cross fertilization: Focus on projects, processes and practices

Abstract

Extant scholarship in project studies is calling for fertilizing across disciplines to pave the way to stronger theorizing. This essay responds to this call by spurring a debate on how to theorize temporary organizing in new and creative ways — both broadly and with a particular focus on projects, arguably the most prevalent form of such organizing. We propose addressing projects and other forms of temporary organization as processual, practice-based phenomena that provide ample opportunities to foster cross-fertilization, in particular between the related disciplines of organization and project studies. To this end, we argue that theoretical advancements in a discipline can occur on a spectrum—ranging from leveraging reference theories from related fields (a top-down approach) to developing home-grown theories grounded in empirical research (a bottom-up approach). This spectrum serves as the foundation for this essay, as we develop this processual, practice-based perspective to project studies by illustrating how (1) reference theories from organization studies such as practice-driven institutionalism generate new insights on temporary organizing and (2) home-grown theories of temporary organizing generated by studying projects and other forms of temporary organization may have theoretical and practical implications beyond project studies.