A theory of the temporary organization

The incident command system (ICS) is a particular approach to assembly and control of the highly reliable temporary organizations employed by many public safety professionals to manage diverse reso...

https://www.jstor.org/stable/pdfplus/3069401.pdf

The Incident Command System: High-Reliability Organizing for Complex and Volatile Task Environments

Inquiring into the temporary organization: new directions for project management research

This paper brings together the research on temporary organizational forms. Despite a recent surge in publications on this topic, there have been few attempts to integrate knowledge on what we know of such temporary forms of organization. In order to correct this, an integrative framework is proposed around four central themes: time, team, task and context. Within each of these themes, the paper offers an overview of the literature, the gaps in what we know, and what future directions might be taken by scholars hoping to contribute to this important and rapidly growing field.

/pdf/taking-stock-of-temporary-organizational-forms-a-systematic-4x05cy9crf.pdf

Taking Stock of Temporary Organizational Forms: A Systematic Review and Research Agenda

Despite the ascendency of temporary organizations to common practice in many industries, and their expansion as an area of academic inquiry, research evidence on their genesis, development and impact remains fragmented across diverse fields, many of which fail to engage with each other. Our purpose in this article is to bring greater systematics to the scholarship on temporary organizations through documenting their evolution and assembling their bricolage. To this end, we first define and delineate the concept of the temporary organization and we develop an inductively derived framework for organizing the literature comprising individual/team attributes and interior processes, task attributes, tensions between the temporary organization and the permanent organization, networks and organizational fields and performance/outcomes of temporary organizations. Following an explication of these attributes and the dominant relationships between them, we suggest how this nascent area of inquiry might advance thro...

On temporary organizations: A review, synthesis and research agenda

The literature about organizations focuses on those of the permanent variety and tends to ignore temporary or transitory associations of either the voluntary or non-voluntary type. The main purpose of this paper is to introduce the concept of 'transitory organizations' and to suggest some differences between transitory and more permanent organizations.' The ideas presented were engendered by some observations made by the author while participating in a conference on race relations. A subsequent review of the literature uncovered very few attempts to deal with transitoriness of organizations. However, the ideas presented are based upon the available literature as well as personal observations.

Bartolomeo J. Palisi

Papers

Some Suggestions about the Transitory-Permanence Dimension of Organizations