Improvising Around and About Boundaries in Open Organizations

Individuals improvise, teams improvise, organizations improvise, and collectivities improvise. Improvisation has been convincingly approached in several extant studies. Nonetheless, the dissolution of organizational boundaries in the morphing into “open organizing” creates unexplored and uncharted territories in which improvisation unfolds. In fact, the encounter between organizations that are traditionally delineated by their boundaries with unknown yet active contributors (e.g., crowd members participating in online challenges, temporary “involvees”) creates the conditions for a novel form of improvisation. This novel form takes place at the (open) gates of the organizational boundary or across multiple organizational boundaries. As in other forms of improvisation, this peripheral improvisation is not immune from dark sides. Non-employed yet involved individuals may be exposed to liminality.