Negotiating and Sustaining Temporary Organizing Through Affective Practices

In this study I investigate how collaborative relations in temporary organizing are mobilized and aligned towards a creative vision using affective practices. Building on the current literature, I argue that affective relations are a central to understanding the tension ridden negotiations of collaborative relations in temporary organizing. I draw upon the notion of affective practices to conceptualize how collaborative relations are shaped through joyful and sad affects in organizational practices. These affective practices are then analyzed based on an affective ethnography of an artistic enterprise and one of its long-term participative art projects which creates a modular growing picnic blanket in public space with the support of a shifting configuration of partners, collaborators, volunteers and participants. The analysis carves out enticing, articulating, attuning and opposing as four affective practices that are used in the collaborative process to mobilize support and address resistance in temporary organizing and shows how these practices work with affecto-material presences to inflect collaborators affectively towards the collaborative process. With this study I advance the literature on temporary organizing, by theorizing how affective practices shape and sustain and collaborative relations through forging affective coalitions, and by discussing how affect theory creates inroads to a more embodied understanding of how temporary organizing is negotiated towards transformation.