Almost 30 years ago, the renowned and well-cited Special Issue (SI) on Temporary Organizations was published in 1995 in the Scandinavian Journal of Management (SJM), which was born in the very first IRNOP, exactly 30 years ago. At the time of publication, the guest editor described the SI as a soul-searching activity in an emergent, but not yet well-established, research field (Lundin, 1995). What united the scholars’ contributions to the SI was their alternative gaze on projects as temporary organizations. This new perspective to studying projects awakened the theoretical and empirical curiosity of scholars mostly with organizational theory and sociological backgrounds, to understand why and how projects, as temporary organizations, differ from classic forms of organizations and organizing, that exist with an intention to survive and prosper over time.

The 30-year milestone opens an opportunity to re-open the questions raised at the time, take stock and reflect again about the soul of temporary organizations in today’s society. After all, in the past 30 years, projects have become mainstream. In practice, projects mushroomed and have become a dominant mode of organizing, both within and between organizations. Project studies, i.e. the study of organizing through projects, has grown and is now a large and legitimate research field, attracting acclaimed scholars. The field has also specialized and developed an ecology of concepts to discern myriad forms of organizing through temporary organizations, such as projectbased organizations, project ecologies, project lineages, etc. The dominance of projects in society accompanied with dramatic changes in society, from advances in information technologies to a growing recognition of eminent threat of planetary collapse. Amidst such fundamental shifts.

With this spirit in mind, this panel discussion aims to awaken Lundin’s early idea about soulsearching reflections on temporary organizations. We thus invite the panel and audience to engage in discussions and reflections in search of the soul of temporary organizations, the past, present and future.