The Role and Recognition of the Gestation Phase in Temporary Organisations.

Research led by Dr Katherine Bloomfield

With the support of:

Dr Vedran Zerjav, Professor Michael Lewis and Professor Mike Yearworth.

A collaboration between Hull, UCL, Bath and Exeter Universities

Despite the growing prominence in various forms of temporary organising, there is little recognition attributed to the early gestation phase of these temporary structures. Drawing upon the notion of the boundary organisation and boundary work, we find that the bounded structures implemented in one-off projects, multi-stakeholder and multi-organisational settings are not so much about the dialectic relationship between the temporary and permanent organisation but about what drives the project into existence. We conduct an in-depth case study analysis on a corpora publicly available ‘Crossrail’ documents, retrieved from the UK government’s archives. Using this textual data, and applying a Latent Dirichlet Allocation (LDA) topic modelling technique, we generate a set of empirical results which identify the various drivers that characterise a project’s gestation, and its causal relationship with the ensuing temporary organisation.

Project completion has been forecast for November 2020.