Название: The Agile Imperative: Teams, Organizations and Society under Reconstruction?
Автор: Sabine Pfeiffer, Manuel Nicklich, Stefan Sauer
Издательство: Palgrave Macmillan
Серия: Dynamics of Virtual Work
Год: 2021
Страниц: 264
Язык: английский
Формат: pdf (true), epub
Размер: 10.2 MB

In an ever-changing working environment, customer and workplace demands have brought new challenges to how we organize and manage work. Increasingly, this is addressed by the idea of 'agility.' From its beginning, agile work has claimed to be a radically different approach which allows organisations to react flexibly to changing environmental demands whilst also offering a ‘people' centered approach to management.

While the literature often examines agile instruments from a business perspective, this edited collection advances the discussion of the efficacy of agile working, by applying a more critical social science perspective.The chapters scrutinize whether agility is just a discursive imperative, or whether it is in fact a genuine organizational and institutional strategy that is meant to better deal with complexity and volatility.

The answers to these questions can vary at different levels, and the editors therefore examine agility at the level of teams, organizations and societies. By assembling different perspectives on the sustainability and virtue of agile instruments, and by bringing together international scholars from a variety of disciplines, the project stimulates a comparative discussion.

In the Manifesto for Agile Software Development, one of the principles specifies self-organizing teams. At many early conferences on the Agile software development, emphasis was on adoption, and resistance to self-organization was a common concern. In the years afterwards, research involved study of the many human aspects of agile processes, including the social nature of agile teams. Team bonds were found to be impressively strong, involving cohesion and a sense of identity that led to self-efficacy. This kind of environment may not be easy to create and support, and more recent qualitative studies by Hoda, Noble, and Marshall show the challenges and strategies that can be involved.

Agile software development is no longer new, and the Agile Manifesto is now 20 years old. In recent work, we have examined the state of applied practice using data from a study of software professionals in Switzerland. In particular, we examined the issue of overall satisfaction with their development methodology. We looked at a range of practices and how they influenced projects, but the most striking single correlation to satisfaction was the level of adoption of self-organization.

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