Prof. Dr. Mari Elken

Facilitating excellent, groundbreaking research is a key priority for national governments, research councils, and individual institutions. Centres of Excellence (CoEs) are one such measure, designed to promote excellence through the creation of temporary research units. Although CoEs resemble projects, they share many features of more permanent organizations. They operate as distinct units with their own rules, structures, cultures, and identities, embedded within a permanent university context. Unlike short-term projects, their extended time frame allows for organization-building and more open-ended engagement with the process of producing high-quality research. We conceptualize CoEs as semi-permanent entities, with predetermined endpoints and temporary participants, yet sufficiently long-lived to develop their own organizational identities. The purpose of this study is to investigate how temporality becomes entangled with identity construction in CoEs. Theoretically, the analysis combines perspectives of temporary organisations and organisational identity. We are particularly interested in identity work, the ongoing practices through which organizational members construct, negotiate, and sustain a sense of “who we are” (Alvesson et al. 2008), and utilise this as a means to explore temporal tensions in the centres (Söderlund et al 2025). While the literature on temporary organizations is expanding, important theoretical gaps remain – particularly regarding time and temporality, which differentiates temporary organizations from other forms and marks the boundaries of their existence (Bakker et al 2016, Sydow & Braun, 2018, Ika et al., 2025). The analysis builds on case studies from Norway and Denmark, building on interview data with leaders and staff in Centres of Excellence for research.

This presentation draws on joint research conducted with Rachel Fishberg (Department of Political Science, Danish Centre for Studies in Research and Research Policy, Aarhus University).

Mari Elken is an associate professor at the Department of Education at the University of Oslo, and holds an adjunct position as a Senior Researcher at the Nordic Institute for Studies in Innovation, Research and Education. At the University of Oslo, she is the current leader of the research group HEDWORK: Knowledge, Learning and Governance: Studies in higher education and work. Her research interests include organization, policy and governance of higher education, often taking a starting point in institutional theory and primarily working qualitatively. Currently she is working on research about the relationships between organisational structure and work, academic freedom and internationalisation. She is the PI for the project Coupling: Organisational coupling of higher education institutions, funded by the Research Council of Norway.