Temporary Organizing with Nature: Reconfiguring the Organization-Natural Environment Interplay

While previous studies have emphasized the social and institutional embeddedness of temporary organizing, scant attention has been paid to how temporary organizing takes place within the natural environment. This study explores how organizations engage in temporary organizing to reconfigure their relationship with the natural environment. Pursuing a situated temporal view, we investigated three exemplary cases in different industries. Even though each case organization pursued another envisioned organization-natural environment relationship, which we label decoupling from, reconnecting with, and rekindling of the natural environment, they followed a similar process of temporary organizing, which we synthesize in an empirical model. In all three cases, the temporalities of non-human actors extended beyond the temporal boundaries of temporary organizing efforts, what we theorize as temporal overflows. We consider how the dynamics of these temporal overflows varied across cases and affected which scaling pathways organizations pursued. Finally, we discuss the implications for temporary organizing research.