It's time to take time seriously in the theory of temporary organizations

Time is at the heart of the theory of temporary organizations yet its implications are not well-developed, as the theory remains wedded to a narrow view of time. Different conceptualizations of time are pursued in isolation or framed as either-or choices, thereby lacking synthesis across the literature. To rectify this problem, we analyze the literature on temporary organizations and identify three prevailing streams of research on time as: a scarce resource, temporal structures, and processual flow. Accordingly, we augment extant theory with a combination of clock time, event time, and process time. We demonstrate how this time-based theory of temporary organizations offers new cross-fertilizations between either-or conceptualizations of time and cues for temporal theorizing.