Recent studies of temporary organizing and project-based work explain how organizational actors establish and maintain clear role structures and harmonious relations in the face of precariousness by engaging in stabilizing work practices. This focus upon ‘order’ undervalues conflict-ridden negotiations and power struggles in temporary organizing. This paper demonstrates that in temporary organizing conflict and order may exist in tandem. Drawing close to the collaborative dynamics in a large-scale global project, we analyse the political struggles over role patterns and hierarchic positioning of client and agent in the temporary organization of the Panama Canal Expansion Program (PCEP). In such projects, the agent typically takes the position of project leader. In this case however, the client was formally in charge, while the agent was assigned the role of coach and mentor. The diffuse hierarchy triggered project partners to engage in both harmony-seeking social and discursive practices and to enter into conflict-ridden negotiations over authority relations in the everyday execution of the PCEP project. Our study contributes to existing literatures on temporal organizing by presenting a case of simultaneous practices of harmonization and contestation over mutual roles and hierarchic positions. We also show that studying collaboration between project partners involves, not merely analysing project governance structures, but also offering a context-sensitive account of everyday social and discursive practices. Finally, we reflect on a view of ‘permanence’ and ‘temporariness’ as themselves contested categories and symbolic sites for struggle.

Organizational studies of collective identity tend to describe how identities are discursively enacted through claims of a group's uniqueness and the articulation of distinctions between a putative 'us' and 'them'. The ethnographic case study presented in this paper describes organizational actors' collective identity talk which follows a fundamentally dissimilar pattern. Staff members of an international non-governmental organization (NGO) - a Dutch human rights organization working in development aid - do not polarise, but instead depolarise differences between themselves and their 'Southern' partners in their identity talk. For ideological (egalitarian) and strategic (partnership-building) reasons they smooth out, trivialise or upend differences by (i) adopting a 'thin' notion of cultural identity, (ii) depicting one's self as 'strange' and adjusting to 'normal' others, (iii) levelling out hierarchical differences, and (iv) constructing an inclusive 'we' in talk of personal relationships. Our exploration shows, first, how organizational actors build and maintain partnerships across social and cultural boundaries in their identity discourse. Second, it opens up new ways of thinking about the formation of identity by drawing attention to various discursive practices of identity construction which are essentially different from the forms of collective identity talk usually described in the literature. Finally, we contribute to studies of organizational identity by sensitizing research to the fundamental variety and situatedness of collective identity talk.