TY - CHAP

T1 - Temporary organizing and acceleration

T2 - On the plurality of temporal structures in accelerators

AU - Skade, Lorenzo

AU - Stanske, Sarah

AU - Wenzel, Matthias

AU - Koch, Jochen

PY - 2020/9/17

Y1 - 2020/9/17

N2 - ‘Acceleration’, that is, the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, little is known about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, the authors explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Their analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As their study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. The authors identify three temporal practices – sequencing, freezing, and merging – through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Their study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.

AB - ‘Acceleration’, that is, the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, little is known about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, the authors explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Their analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As their study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. The authors identify three temporal practices – sequencing, freezing, and merging – through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Their study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.

KW - Management studies

KW - temporary organizing

KW - acceleration

KW - tensions

KW - temporal practices

KW - ethnography

KW - Accelerators

U2 - 10.1108/S0733-558X20200000067011

DO - 10.1108/S0733-558X20200000067011

M3 - Contributions to collected editions/anthologies

SN - 978-1-83909-349-4

T3 - Research in the Sociology of Organizations

SP - 105

EP - 125

BT - Tensions and paradoxes in temporary organizing

A2 - Braun, Timo

A2 - Lampel, Joseph

PB - Emerald Publishing Limited

ER -