TY  - JOUR
A1  - Kühler, Jakob
A1  - Drathschmidt, Nicolas
A1  - Großmann, Daniela
T1  - ‘Modern talking’
BT  - narratives of agile by German public sector employees
JF  - Information polity
N2  - Despite growing interest, we lack a clear understanding of how the arguably ambiguous phenomenon of agile is perceived in government practice. This study aims to alleviate this puzzle by investigating how managers and employees in German public sector organisations make sense of agile as a spreading management fashion in the form of narratives. This is important because narratives function as innovation carriers that ultimately influence the manifestations of the concept in organisations. Based on a multi-case study of 31 interviews and 24 responses to a qualitative online survey conducted in 2021 and 2022, we provide insights into what public sector managers, employees and consultants understand (and, more importantly, do not understand) as agile and how they weave it into their existing reality of bureaucratic organisations. We uncover three meta-narratives of agile government, which we label ‘renew’, ‘complement’ and ‘integrate’. In particular, the meta-narratives differ in their positioning of how agile interacts with the characteristics of bureaucratic organisations. Importantly, we also show that agile as a management fad serves as a projection surface for what actors want from a modern and digital organisation. Thus, the vocabulary of agile government within the narratives is inherently linked to other diffusing phenomena such as new work or digitalisation.
KW  - agile government
KW  - agility
KW  - narratives
KW  - public administration
KW  - public sector organizations
KW  - fashion
KW  - digital transformation
KW  - interpretative research
Y1  - 2024
U6  - https://doi.org/10.3233/IP-230059
SN  - 1570-1255
SN  - 1875-8754
VL  - 29
IS  - 2
SP  - 199
EP  - 216
PB  - IOS Press
CY  - Amsterdam
ER  -