This proposal deals with regular and temporary staff’s (temps’) meaning making in terms of interaction, knowledge, and motivations. The aim is to study whether regular and temp personnel in a project organization differ in their perceptions and if there are some qualitative aspects that can be considered as particularly significant.

A special form of learning is associated with the concept of competence. Competence refers to “an individual’s potential to act in relation to a certain task, situation or context,” that is, “to successfully... do a job, including the ability to identify, exploit, and, if possible, extend the space of interpretation, action and measurement that the work tasks offer” (Ellström, 1992, p. 21). Based on the concept of competence, it is valuable to study the nature of learning preconditions that may be associated with temps. Such a study may partly contribute to research on learning in project organizations and partly illustrate the learning in terms of competence transfer between the regular staff and temps.

Here is competence transfer equated with the “process through which organizational actors—teams, units, or organizations—exchange, receive, and are influenced by the experience and knowledge” (van Wijk, Jansen, & Lyle, 2008, p. 832). This type of knowledge transfer is considered here to be partly synonymous with competence transfer and partly important for the organization as a whole and for the cooperation between regular and temp personnel.

Research on improving management efficiency of knowledge and expertise within organizations often assumes that competence transfer is desirable (Bartsch, Eber, & Maurer, 2013; Carlsson, 2003; Ragab & Arisha, 2013). Other research shows that the project owner has a clear responsibility for knowledge transfer between project and parent organization (Bakker, Cambre, Korlaar, & Raab, 2011, p. 502). One objective of this proposal is to show that this is not always true. Further, research on project organizations reported tensions between project and parent organization (Scarbrough et al., 2004), social aspects (Bartsch et al., 2013), gender (Cartwright & Gale, 1995; Lindgren & Packendorff, 2006) and inter-project learning (Prencipe & Tell, 2001). The analysis level of our study covers competence transfer between regulars and temps within an interorganizational project organization.

Theoretically, aspects of organizational culture and dimensions of learning are combined. We will build on Martin’s three versions of organization, integration, differentiation, and fragmentation, but not use her concept of “organizational culture”. Instead, we will consider the organization as a background that can be referred to when invoking various manifestations of participation that indicate preconditions for learning.

There are three key dimensions of learning that may be related to the abovementioned organizational backgrounds (Illeris, 2009): Social Interaction, which refers to action, communication, and collaboration; Content, which is characterized by knowledge, understanding, and skills; and Incentive, associated with motivation, emotion, and will.

We consider learning a meaning-making process in terms of Weick’s (1995) unit of analysis that involves an empirical indication of preconditions for learning (cue) that is set against its (relationship) background (frame). The logic is that manifestations in terms of Social Interaction, Content, and Incentive give rise to a particular type of mental associations (interpretations) when they are related to a particular organizational background, and it is this process of meaning making that is analyzed.

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