Published Research
Skade, L., Stanske, S., Wenzel, M., & Koch, J. (Forthcoming). Temporary Organizing and Acceleration: On the Plurality of Temporal Structures in Accelerators. Research in the Sociology of Organizations (VHB-JQ3 Ranking: B) – Download the paper here
“Acceleration”, i.e., the performance of activities in ever-shorter periods of time, is a distinctive feature of contemporary organizations and societies that is reflected in, and driven by startups’ attempts to scale up their businesses in ever-faster ways. Although prior research has highlighted that temporary organizing is a key way to accelerate the startup process, we know little about how actors do so. Based on a one-year ethnographic study at a startup accelerator, we explore how actors enact temporary organizing to attempt to accelerate the startup process. Our analysis shows that this process involves a plurality of partly conflicting temporal structures. As our study shows, such conflicts invoke tensions that actors live out in their daily activities. We identify three temporal practices—sequencing, freezing, and merging—through which actors engaged in temporary organizing enact acceleration in the startup process by reconciling these temporal structures. Our study has implications for understanding time in the expanding literature on temporary organizing and acceleration.