Paper info

Inter-organizational relationships in temporary organizations: Interacting in an R&D consortium

Carl Anderson Kronlid and Enrico Baraldi

The paper was published at the 34th IMP-conference in Marseille, France in 2018.

This paper presents our preliminary findings of an investigation of how temporality, manifested in the time-bounded nature of a large inter-organizational projekt, relates with inter-organizational interactions. We rely on theoretical concepts from the IMP (Industrial Marketing and Purcharsing) perspective, project management and temporary organizations. We apply such concepts to a single case study featuring a complex inter-organizational project called ENABLE, which started in 2014 with the aim to support the development of new antibiotics. We find that entrainment-based pacing has a more prominent role as a temporal marker in this project, compared to event-based and chronological pacing. Moreover, we find no evidence that temporality hinders inter-organizational interactions of specifically weakens activity links, actor bonds and resource ties, expect possibly the ties involving the resource type products.