Connecting Temporary and Permanent Organizing: Tensions and Boundary Work in Sequential Film Projects

Research context

Denmark’s film industry makes innovative artistic films of international renown, alongside commercial films for the local market. The 1990s witnessed the most significant experimentation, marked by the birth of Dogme 95, the avant-garde film movement, which introduced an alternative set of film-making principles and conventions that sought to preserve purity and freedom from special effects and other technical modifications. The first Dogme-certified film was Thomas Vinterberg’s Festen (The Celebration), produced by Nimbus Film. This film company and Zentropa were the movement’s most influential film production companies (Stevenson, 2003).

Danish film making is supported by state subsidies through the Danish Film Institute (DFI)’s dual system of art and market funds. The art funds are earmarked for artistic films with cultural novelty and value, which enrich the filmic language, while the market funds support films with expected box office success. Funding for artistic films is provided through consultants who are industry insiders, often film directors and editors. A board with industry representatives grants funding to films with the highest commercial potential. Like other European film industries, in 1989 a new film law was implemented to support films with commercial appeal, which led to the making of popular films and sequels that built on prior methods, films and ideas. It also deepened the Danish film industry’s divide into art-house and commercial domains with distinctive taste, values, work practices and professional communities.

With the appearance and growing popularity of new online distribution channels and streaming services, and the industry’s inability to come up with successful new business models, in the 2000s the film market shrank significantly and investment in film became a riskier business than it had previously been. The first serious crisis in the Danish film industry was felt in 2007, when films supported by the DFI art fund experienced significant losses; this was less the case for films backed by the market fund (Deloitte, 2013). As a result, even the biggest Danish art-house production companies could not continue working in their customary ways. Zentropa was sold to a bigger player, Nordic Film, while Nimbus laid off a third of its employees and received sizable bank loans with its owners’ private property as collateral (Rottbøll, 2008). Overall, art-house film production companies began looking for new platforms and projects of a longer duration to ensure a more stable income. They turned their creativity towards TV series and sequels that had so far been characteristic of the industry’s commercial domain. As a result, highly popular political drama and crime TV series were created, such as The Killing, The Castle and The Bridge, collectively known as “Nordic Noir”.

Research site

Nimbus Film is the third biggest, and one of the most prolific, production companies in the Danish film industry, with over 40 projects – feature films, short films and documentaries – realized since its inception in 1993. Having won awards and received nominations at important international film festivals, it is also highly regarded among Danish media and film professionals who are eager to become involved in its projects. Established by Birgitte Hald and Bo Ehrhardt, Nimbus started with a vision of making films of high artistic quality. Its productions differed greatly from the dominant genre within the Danish film industry of family comedies, as well as from sequels, TV series, war films and other commercial genres. In the first decade of the company’s existence, the founders’ vision and their belonging to the Dogme 95 film movement led to a domination of the artistic focus and established Nimbus Films as an art-house. Over time, and particularly since 2008, the company has become more open to films with a wider audience appeal.

We examine interactions between Nimbus, considered a permanent organization, and its longer-term, novel project sequence Antboy as a critical case of a temporary–permanent relationship. Antboy was inspired by a 2007 book trilogy, the rights of which were acquired by Nimbus Film, enabling the possibility for sequels to be made. The story is about 12-year-old Pelle who is bitten by a genetically modified ant and as a consequence develops super powers and a secret superhero identity, albeit experiencing failure as he explores their limits. The original project’s distinctiveness and complexity resides not only in combining a Hollywood-style superhero genre with characteristic Danish humour and social realism for a children’s audience, but also in its being followed by sequels, which challenges the temporary–permanent relationship in film, providing more stability and a longer time horizon to the project.

Methods of data collection and analysis

We followed longitudinally the process of interaction between the permanent organization and the sequence of connected projects. Process research is particularly appropriate for addressing temporally evolving phenomena, as it unravels not only dynamic patterns in activities, but also the underlying mechanisms that help explain them (Langley, 2009). We distinguished three critical periods with distinctive connection between the permanent organization (Nimbus) and the respective temporary forms: initiation and abandonment (Antboy 0), revival and realization (Antboy I) and exploitation and renewal (Antboy II and III). For analytical purposes we considered the two sequel films together, as they had some similarities in terms of project routinization. Data on the first and larger part of the second period is retrospective, based on documentation and interviews with key participants. In the third period, the first sequel was followed ethnographically by the first author at the premises of Nimbus Film from August to November 2013, as it was in development, and in January and February 2014, as it was being prepared for production. At the start of the ethnographic study, the original film had not yet premiered in Denmark.

During the ethnographic work, the first author interviewed and interacted informally with key members of the permanent and temporary organizations, as they engaged in developing ideas for the sequel, assembling the team, applying for funding and preparing for production. The authors conducted follow-up interviews in September 2015 to gain an insight into the sequels’ development, Nimbus’ strategic direction, and the connection to its other projects. A total of 30 interviews were conducted with 22 informants, who were relatively evenly distributed among the permanent organization, the projects and the Danish film industry (see Appendix for a list). The interviews amounted to 39.3 hours with an average duration of 1 hour and 20 minutes. They were transcribed and subjected to initial analysis in their original language (Danish or English).

Observations took place at different locations on the company premises, which provided exposure to, and enabled the collection of, impressions from different project domains, from the “upper office” where the creative triangle (director-writer-producer) was working on the project concept, to the “basement” where production designer and other production staff were “grounding” and materializing the project’s “filmic universe” (a term used by our informants to denote the ensemble of beings, things, events and phenomena that inhabit a spatio-temporal frame in a film – see Souriau, in Branigan & Buckland, 2013, p. 133). Further, the first author kept a diary, which complemented the interviews with observations and impressions, facilitating data interpretations. As the research evolved, it became clear that the projects’ sequence provided a different connection to the permanent organization than the single projects, which contributed to Nimbus’ persistence, yet challenged its ability for artistic innovation, representing a persistence–innovation balancing act.

In analysing the data, we used a grounded theory approach (Charmaz, 2006), travelling back and forth between data and theory until main themes emerged. Coding began during the data collection phase, allowing the exploration of insights and subsequently relating them to different theoretical categories (Charmaz, 2006), as well as prompting interviewees on emerging issues. In the process, the two authors read through the gathered material, discussing extensively on numerous occasions potential concepts for theorizing and their relationships, as well as further data needed to unravel emerging patterns. Data was associated with the following main themes: (1) selection of talent and career practices; (2) envisioning and materializing an idea; (3) defining and managing boundaries between the temporary and the permanent organizing; and (4) defining and managing boundaries among a sequence of temporary organizations. For the purposes of this study we focused on and delved deeper in the latter two themes.

In unravelling themes, our interest was in connections, challenges, tensions and boundary work between permanent and temporary organizing, as well as in temporality expressed in shadows of past and future projects. This analytical approach was followed through a focused coding process (Charmaz, 2006), informed by theories from the embeddedness perspective of temporary organization and boundary roles and work. Coding was done according to an incident-by-incident method for the observations (Charmaz, 2006). For the interview transcriptions, codes were given to units of meaning, which ranged from a sentence to a paragraph. If in Danish, relevant excerpts of the interviews were translated into English after main themes had emerged. Visual data and materials were used selectively, as complementary clues on the spaces in which boundary work and permanent–temporary interaction unfolded. Finally, we made conceptual leaps based on abduction (Klag & Langley, 2013).

Temporary organizing as a permanent organization’s persistence–innovation balancing act

Nimbus’ main balancing act, as an independent company in a film field in crisis, was about enhancing its persistence by ensuring sufficient audience appeal on selected films, while preserving its art-house’s innovative profile, i.e. making “artistic movies with an edge, leaving room for the broader audience appeal” (company homepage), “something that is fun … while bringing in money” (Nimbus’ CEO, 2014 ¹ ). Such movies, the CEO further explained, ensure visibility at major festivals and access to financing and network, which “makes us interesting/attractive to directors, actors, and manuscript writers”. Nimbus’ co-founder and company executive (2015) clarified further:

There is no room anymore for artistic films…the market is under so much pressure… if we make a feature film, … we have to be very, very focused on making the films that we can see have an audience. We can make a limited audience movie if it can be realized with a limited financial investment aligned with the learning potential.

Thus, producers employed at Nimbus are given leeway to carry out projects if they can convince the team of their artistic merits and market viability. This presupposes stronger project integration in the company, compared to earlier years when film directors had ownership of both idea and project. Despite this strengthened attachment between projects and company, a gap remains that producers, through boundary work and roles, aim to close via their dual attachment to project and company: “There is often a huge boundary between the production and the house [Nimbus]. … We are the link, the producer and the producer assistant…. it’s special being split between two domains” (producer assistant, Nimbus, 2015). Discussions related to Nimbus’ project portfolio take place at the “Thursday meeting”, a strategic gathering that happens in the company’s lunch room, whereby CEO, executives, permanent producers and head of administration discuss topics such as the potential of new ideas to become projects, who to hire on projects, as well as how to solve problems with projects in progress. CEO and executive producer, as company partners, have the final say on the initiation and continuation of projects. An idea formally becomes a project once it has been assigned a project number.

Nimbus experienced a strong need for a persistence–innovation balancing act in 2007, when the industry faced a crisis and the films it had made did not attract the expected audience. As a result, the initiation of new projects and company survival were at stake. Despite the 2008 box office success with the film Flame and Citron, Nimbus was barely surviving and thus changed strategic direction, moving towards a 50/50 investment in feature films and TV series. As explained by Nimbus’ CEO (2015), opening up to longer-term projects had several benefits:

That we now want to make sequels and … more business of it, that is because it has become very difficult living on those art house movies … it’s the same film people we use … The big difference for us is the length of the projects and the economy in it. … it gets much easier for us to predict things and adapt the organization. We can also invest in equipment that we can use ourselves and it gives a possibility for long-range planning.

Within this longer-term company orientation, developing Antboy into a film and two sequels “was the plan from the beginning. We wanted to have a format that we could build on, not having to start over each time” (company executive, Nimbus, 2015). However, while increasing predictability, Antboy also brought Nimbus into the unknown territory of superhero-realism children’s films and sequels. Because of the boundary crossing and borrowing across genres, tensions appeared and required ongoing boundary work and roles.

Boundary work and roles in connecting temporary and permanent organizing

We identified three stages in the process of connecting temporary and permanent organizing – (1) initiation and abandonment, (2) revival and realization, and (3) exploitation and renewal – each discussed along main challenges, tensions, boundary work and roles, shadows of past and future projects, and outcomes (see Table 1 for an overview).

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Table 1.

Temporary and Permanent Organizing in Antboy’s Film Project Sequence.

Stage	Initiation and abandonment	Revival and realization	Exploitation and renewal
Sequence of TO & project type	Antboy 0, a social realism children’s film	Antboy I, a superhero-realism innovative children’s film	Antboy II & III, superhero-realism sequels
Film title & timeline (initiation –production – release)	— Spring 2010 –discontinued before production in autumn 2010	Antboy Spring 2011 – October 2012 – October 2013	Antboy: Revenge of the Red Fury May 2013 – February 2014 – December 2014 Antboy 3 March 2014 – July 2015 – February 2016
PO–TO connection	Detachment	Strong attachment	Moderate attachment
TO’s main challenge	Alignment	Experience	Optimal distinctiveness
Tensions at boundaries	- TO’s staffing (TO–F): TO’s genre-bridging needs vs field’s limited talent	- Core TO team’s authority (in TO): inexperienced core vs rest of team experienced in social realism - Budget (PO–TO): PO’s resources for project vs superhero genre’s demands - Funding (TO–F): core TO team’s inexperience vs art-fund’s experience requirements	- Timing (across TOs; TO–F): urgency to advance sequels for freshness in audience memory and child actors’ aging vs field norms for core team’s involvement from start - TO’s collaboration (across TOs): renewal vs routinization/(non)rehiring - Budget (PO–TO): PO’s surplus expectations vs TO’s quality ambitions - Funding (TO–F): first sequel’s flopped performance vs market fund requirements
Boundary work/roles	- PO gives TO autonomy to develop project without investing in boundary work or roles	- TO’s core team self-selected (trust, shared references, commitment) with PO’s approval and crosses genre boundaries to define novel filmic universe - CEO subsumes TO into PO; crosses TO–PO and TO–F boundaries (becoming producer, moderating with DFI, ensuring budget) to overcome inexperience	- PO gives TOs more autonomy, yet insists on limited budgets and return on investment - CEO crosses TO–PO and TO–F boundaries (intervening in who/what roles (not) to rehire in the TOs to prevent former tensions and performing nexus work to get sequels started and funded) - TO’s core team blurs and crosses role boundaries to resolve production problems
Shadows of past and future TOs	Past: no similar projects as reference (Danish children’s and youth films lack artistic ambition and quality) Future: PO’s vision for children’s films (manifesto) shapes project expectations	Past: Antboy 0’s experience influences what to avoid for genre innovation to happen; prior TO members’ collaborations offer trust and shared references Future: “Pitches” of active projects at Nimbus allow core team to enrol into the TO; PO’s vision that film will become a sequel influences TO team’s approach and commitment	Past: Antboy I’s success legitimizes sequels’ funding (“bragging book”) and frames audience expectations for filmic universe; Antboy II’s box office failure endangers Antboy III’s public funding; sequels’ theme and team adjusted with feedback from preceding films Future: sequels’ theme and team adjusted with vision to protect PO’s and TO team’s artistic reputation; expectations for PO’s return on investment in project series keeps TOs’ budget low
Outcomes	- Public art fund refuses support for lack of novelty - PO dissolves Antboy 0’s TO, retaining project idea	- Public art fund supports TO - Antboy I over budget, innovation (1st Danish children superhero film), commercial and artistic success	- Public market fund supports TOs - Antboy II improves artistic quality, winning awards and worldwide distribution; falters at box office - Antboy III made on budget

F, field; PO, permanent organization; TO, temporary organization.

Connection between temporary and permanent organizations

Our study showed how the permanent organization changed its attachment to the projects in the series, drawing and redrawing boundaries and, in that way, influencing projects’ outcomes. For example, in the first stage, the company was detached from the initiated project, providing its team with leeway to develop it, albeit within unclear boundaries. The project’s evolving in a direction that did not fit to the company’s vision led to its abandonment, especially as it also failed to gain support from the field’s funding institution due to a lack of novel artistic value. As Engwall (2003) has noted, which project ideas survive depend on how relevant they are to the permanent organization and how they are aligned with the norms and values of the organization.

We extend Engwall’s (2003) strategic view of projects in two ways. First, our case study shows that choices related to temporary organizing involve not only a permanent organization’s strategic considerations, but also its balancing acts. The need to combine persistence with innovation determined a longer time horizon for some projects and stronger connectedness among them (e.g. sequels). Second, depending on the nature of the balancing act, challenging an organization’s routines could be precisely what projects are needed for. For example, the abandoned project Antboy 0 was no less strategic for the company than Antboy I, which was then realized. However, the former did not defy institutional norms and values enough, failing to borrow across genre boundaries and fulfil its envisioned innovation potential. Third, the relationship between company strategy and project support could also work in reverse, i.e. the closer the project’s attachment to the permanent organization (due to its champion or its affiliation in the organization), the more likely it is that the project is better aligned with the parent organization’s strategic priorities and has more opportunities for survival, given the longer past and future and the shadows which the company can bring in. For example, Antboy 0 had little attachment to Nimbus, its team failing to understand and align sufficiently with the production company’s strategic vision. Thus, we extend Engwall’s (2003) insights, suggesting that to understand a project’s likely survival, it is important not only to acknowledge its strategic importance for the company, but also to account for the boundary work in which the latter engages in realizing the project’s strategic potential, creating or removing boundaries through shadows of past and future. Such boundary work allows for better adjustment of expectations between temporary and permanent organizations.

Connections among past, present and future temporary organizations

Examining a project sequence challenges affirmations about temporary organizations as “left-bracketed”, without a common history (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995) and allows an insight into their connectedness and the nature of their boundaries. Antboy I was a creative project (Obstfeld, 2012), borrowing from a superhero genre, of which temporary and permanent organization had no experience nor shadows from the past to bring in. That challenged film-making routines, creating tensions due to a lack of past practices to inform present decisions. However, the lack of past shadows also allowed for experimentation that made Antboy I an innovative film with a distinctive filmic universe. For Nimbus, Antboy I was an investment in the future and thus exceeding budget was acceptable, due to shadows from future gains, i.e. expected future income from the sequels.

Antboy II was also a rather creative project, as Nimbus had not previously made a sequel and had no routines for it. However, Antboy I’s filmic universe, the learning experience and the feedback from critics provided shadows of the past that fed practices and expectations into the sequel. Antboy II had to surpass Antboy I in mastering the hero genre and universe, in order to keep the artistic reputation of the project crew and film production company intact. Furthermore, shadows of past tensions were eliminated through boundary work, e.g. by not rehiring certain professionals. Shadows from Antboy I provided a story of success, which both ensured funding from the DFI market fund and posed the need for Antboy II to surpass the preceding film, thus making Antboy II more expensive. That, in turn, challenged Nimbus’ future expectations for returns from Antboy III.

Antboy III, as a second sequel, involved routinization (Sydow, 2009), benefiting from and being constrained by the preceding projects. On Antboy III, many past shadows provided cues for present actions and limited experimentation, which made it difficult to create an innovative film. The need to further professionalize the project in the superhero genre posed further challenges to the normal Danish commercial feature film budget. As a result, innovation happened in the practice of cutting the number of production days.

Overall, temporary organizations conceived in a connected sequence are expected to have an optimal distinctiveness (Zuckerman, 2016) from one another, that is, a degree of similarity with the original project, warranting a recognizable filmic universe, and a degree of difference from it and from one other, bringing in sufficient novelty and ensuring each project’s unique identity and place in history (Lundin & Söderholm, 1995). Previous projects from the sequence carried a shadow of the past (including unresolved tensions) over to subsequent projects, while the possibility for subsequent projects (i.e. knowing that sequels will evolve from an initial project) as well as the existence of a book trilogy, on which the film adaptation was based, carried a shadow of the future back to the original project. Thus, our findings challenge affirmations that “project members operate in a protective bubble, guarded from the shadow of the future and the burdens of the past” (Miles, in Bakker & Janowicz-Panjaitan, 2009). We also address Engwall’s (2003, p. 789) call for increasing research’s temporal scope, “analysing how project practices evolve through history over prior, present, and future projects”. In that respect, research on alliance portfolios could bring helpful analogies and potential insights (Wassmer, 2008).

Connection between temporary organizations and a field (mediated by a permanent organization)

As previously noted in the literature, projects are embedded not only in permanent organizations, but also in institutional fields, whose norms they may occasionally challenge (Cattani et al., 2011; Sahlin-Andersson, 2002). Institutions provide resources, materials, knowledge and practices but also set regulatory restraints and enforce institutional conventions (Sydow & Staber, 2002). While the relationship between a project and a field was not at the heart of our study, it did unravel some aspects of it that have implications for project outcomes, especially as the series of projects we followed were motivated by willingness to defy certain institutions (Sahlin-Andersson, 2002), that of Danish children’s films. The first connection between project and field, in terms of the latter’s public funding institution supporting the former, was regularly mediated by the permanent organization due to resulting tensions. The mediation involved creating a joint front with the temporary organization, signalling expertise (Jones, 2002) through the CEO becoming the project’s executive producer, bringing in shadows of previous successful projects (e.g. through the bragging book) and using social skills to mobilize support (Fligstein, 1997, 2001) from leaders of core organizations in the field (e.g. the film theatre directors).

The second connection concerns the malleability of the institutionalized system of project roles that helps coordination (Bechky, 2006), especially when a project has to be managed by a rather inexperienced core team. This malleability does not only involve interventions by the producer as someone who defines role boundaries. It includes a multi-party effort and willingness to blur, contest, or at times even ignore established role boundaries in the project’s interest. Similar to Long Lingo and O’Mahony (2010), we found that when there were attempts to challenge the expertise of the director, the production company “stepped in”, e.g. it intervened by changing the composition of the sequels’ teams (despite expectations for rehiring). Overall, by looking at the connection between projects and aspects of the field, we address Engwall’s (2003) call for research on temporary organizing to increase its organizational scope, analysing how project practices connect with long-term institutions.

The study has limitations that invite further research. First, our vantage point was the permanent organization, which influenced our perspective of connections with temporary organizations. Further research should examine the relationship from a project team’s perspective, as that may provide new and diverging insights on potential tensions and boundary work. Second, we investigated the relationship of a single organization with its projects. A comparison across parent companies would provide an opportunity to discern whether the nature of strategic balancing acts pursued has an influence on the attachment to their projects. Third, we advanced a temporality view of temporary organizing, showing how shadows of past and future projects are reinterpreted for the needs of present projects. In this way, we focused on projects that were conceived as connected. Further research into the temporality view of temporariness should look at other manifestations of such reinterpretations of a project’s history and future.