Temporary Organizations as Vehicles of Disruptive Institutional Work

This paper investigates how institutional change agents used temporary organizations to disrupt institutions at the center of an organizational field. Our empirical study pertains to the Karolinska University Hospital in Stockholm, the flagship of the Swedish healthcare field. The disruptive institutional work consisted in changing the dominant organizational principle from a professional logic to a market logic in a context of significant institutional maintenance work. We identified four consecutive phases in their disruptive institutional work: discursive, structural, legal and behavioral. We found temporary organizationsto enable advancement from one phase to another when organized as a megaproject and reinforced by a public-private partnership contractual agreement. Our findings suggest that temporary organizations represent a potentially powerful and under-recognized vehicle of disruptive institutional work that, in combination with discursive and material forms of such work, enable institutional change agents to effectively disrupt institutions at the center of a field, overcoming even intensive institutional maintenance work.