Walking through Temporal Walls: Rethinking NGO Organizing for Sustainability through a Temporal Lens on NGOBusiness Partnerships

What are the challenges and possibilities related to NGO organizing for sustainability through partnerships with business analyzed through an explicit temporal lens? Guided by this overarching research question, this dissertation employs an abductive qualitative research approach, drawing a case study of the Danish Red Cross. This case study inspired the engagement of an explicit temporal lens, which is grounded in the inherent temporal character of sustainability and the intrinsic temporal ambiguity of organizing through NGO-business partnerships for sustainability. This means that the dissertation studies time as an empirical phenomenon in its own right, and that it explores how NGOs experience, use, organize, interpret, and enact time in partnerships with businesses for sustainability. In so doing, the dissertation draws primarily on organization theory, cross-fertilizing and building upon theoretical insights on time and temporality to propose new theoretical avenues. The dissertation’s theoretical contributions are grounded in an understanding of sustainability as an inherently and preeminently temporal concept, and include new conceptual tools that can enhance understanding of temporal tensions in NGO-business partnerships for sustainability and how actors attend to them. Furthermore, the dissertation’s findings have implications for practice, elucidating how particular approaches to time and temporality can support or diminish substantive sustainability goals, opening up for a more nuanced and temporally sensitive managerial approach in NGO-business partnerships for sustainability.