Beyond Temporary Organisation: Projects as Performative Processes of Value Emergence

The lexical shift in the literature from temporary organization (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995; Packendorff, 1995) to temporary organizing (Bakker et al., 2016) marks an explicit theoretical positioning. Choosing the gerund over the noun encodes this shift: the temporary organization is no longer treated as a given, observable entity (organization as a thing) but as the process through which that temporariness is continuously produced, negotiated, and enacted over time (organization as doing). The result is a change of perspective in which what remains observable - and productive - is the process itself. Two years earlier, Winch (2014) had already argued that equating “project” with “temporary organization” had long held back research in the field. In “Three Domains of Project Organising” he identifies project organizing as the field in which this equation became entrenched and specifies that project organizing is carried out by relatively permanent organizational forms that come together temporarily around a project. This paper takes that premise as its starting point, extends its implications, and adopts complexity as an analytical lens, given that complexity “is an increasingly prominent characteristic of contemporary society, business, and work” (Browning, 2023, in Winch et al., 2023a, p. 26). This raises the question at the core of the paper: what kind of organizational configuration does a project come to constitute over time, and through what processes is emergent value generated? The question is examined in the field of cultural management, where creative and collective work is organized through projects (Svejenova, Strandgaard Pedersen & Vives, 2011; Ćwikła & Jałocha, 2015; Bérubé, Freitas & Davel, 2025; Marcella & Rowley, 2015; Cunningham, 2002; Bettiol & Sedita, 2011). The unit of analysis - the project - is observed at the meso level rather than at the level of the single operational project (Daniel & Daniel, 2023). The paper’s contribution is twofold: it reconceptualizes projects as performative processes of value generation, and it offers an alternative theoretical lens for understanding the non-linear, relational, and processual nature of complex projects, opening a dialogue between project studies and the literature on the economy of community.