As public organizations increasingly adopt agile practices, understanding their opportunities, challenges, and transformative potentials is important. This article introduces the special issue on ‘The Future of Agile in Public Service Organizations: Macro, Meso and Micro Perspectives’ and explores the evolving landscape of agile in public service, drawing from diverse scholarly perspectives. To that end, we discuss various definitions of agile in the context of government and outline the potential benefits and drawbacks of the concept. We then delve into the macro-level characteristics and impacts of agile on institutions and society, its meso-level implications regarding organizational structures, processes, and outcomes, and micro-level determinants and effects on managers, employees, and teams. Referring to theoretical streams building the basis for agile on these different analytical levels, we build a conceptual framework of multi-level agile government. We introduce the six research studies and a book review included in this special issue and position them within this framework to highlight their contributions to understanding agile at each of the three levels.
{"title":"Introduction to the special issue ‘Towards a Multi-Level Understanding of Agile in Government: Macro, Meso and Micro Perspectives’","authors":"Caroline Fischer, Oliver Neumann","doi":"10.3233/ip-249007","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-249007","url":null,"abstract":"As public organizations increasingly adopt agile practices, understanding their opportunities, challenges, and transformative potentials is important. This article introduces the special issue on ‘The Future of Agile in Public Service Organizations: Macro, Meso and Micro Perspectives’ and explores the evolving landscape of agile in public service, drawing from diverse scholarly perspectives. To that end, we discuss various definitions of agile in the context of government and outline the potential benefits and drawbacks of the concept. We then delve into the macro-level characteristics and impacts of agile on institutions and society, its meso-level implications regarding organizational structures, processes, and outcomes, and micro-level determinants and effects on managers, employees, and teams. Referring to theoretical streams building the basis for agile on these different analytical levels, we build a conceptual framework of multi-level agile government. We introduce the six research studies and a book review included in this special issue and position them within this framework to highlight their contributions to understanding agile at each of the three levels.","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141360752","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Oliver Neumann, Pascale-Catherine Kirklies, Susanne Hadorn
While extensive literature exists on agile practices in private sectors, its application and outcomes in the public sector remain relatively unexplored. In light of recent theoretical debates on how using agile may improve the functioning and results of government organizations, we empirically investigate the outcomes of agile adoption on value creation in public administrations. Drawing on a theoretical framework on value creation in public service delivery, we conduct a comparative qualitative case study involving 19 agile initiatives across the three German government levels. Our findings reveal that agile leads to numerous positive outcomes at both individual (e.g., employee well-being, human-centric leadership, skill development) and organizational levels (e.g., cross-functional collaboration, increased efficiency and transparency). This study contributes to substantiating theoretical claims about agile benefits in government, offering in-depth qualitative insights and theory development.
{"title":"Does agile improve value creation in government?","authors":"Oliver Neumann, Pascale-Catherine Kirklies, Susanne Hadorn","doi":"10.3233/ip-230060","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-230060","url":null,"abstract":"While extensive literature exists on agile practices in private sectors, its application and outcomes in the public sector remain relatively unexplored. In light of recent theoretical debates on how using agile may improve the functioning and results of government organizations, we empirically investigate the outcomes of agile adoption on value creation in public administrations. Drawing on a theoretical framework on value creation in public service delivery, we conduct a comparative qualitative case study involving 19 agile initiatives across the three German government levels. Our findings reveal that agile leads to numerous positive outcomes at both individual (e.g., employee well-being, human-centric leadership, skill development) and organizational levels (e.g., cross-functional collaboration, increased efficiency and transparency). This study contributes to substantiating theoretical claims about agile benefits in government, offering in-depth qualitative insights and theory development.","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141357285","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"The Power of Language and Discourse in eGovernment","authors":"","doi":"10.3233/ip-249008","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-249008","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-06-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"141355027","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Despite citizen calls for agile government, public service organizations often default to hierarchy and adopt dual structure organization designs combining agile and non-agile units. However, ensuring effective collaboration and avoiding accountability challenges at the interface of line and agile units remains a vexing issue. Although accountability is implicitly assumed in agile organizing, it is not readily manifested or experienced. Through this interpretive case study of a public service organization in the Nordics, we examine through the lens of felt accountability, the reaction and roles of line managers to emergent accountability challenges precipitated by parallel maintenance of agile and non-agile unit combinations.
{"title":"When line meets agile in public service organizations: Exploring the role of felt accountability amongst line managers","authors":"Yashwant Singh Yadav","doi":"10.3233/ip-230057","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-230057","url":null,"abstract":"Despite citizen calls for agile government, public service organizations often default to hierarchy and adopt dual structure organization designs combining agile and non-agile units. However, ensuring effective collaboration and avoiding accountability challenges at the interface of line and agile units remains a vexing issue. Although accountability is implicitly assumed in agile organizing, it is not readily manifested or experienced. Through this interpretive case study of a public service organization in the Nordics, we examine through the lens of felt accountability, the reaction and roles of line managers to emergent accountability challenges precipitated by parallel maintenance of agile and non-agile unit combinations.","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-05-11","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140987151","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
Jakob Kühler, Nicolas Drathschmidt, Daniela Großmann
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.
{"title":"‘Modern talking’: Narratives of agile by German public sector employees","authors":"Jakob Kühler, Nicolas Drathschmidt, Daniela Großmann","doi":"10.3233/ip-230059","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-230059","url":null,"abstract":"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.","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-03-07","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140260521","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Erratum to: Policy Review: The Evolving Governance of Surveillance Cameras in the UK","authors":"","doi":"10.3233/ip-239912","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-239912","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-02-20","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140447540","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Christopher Ali (2021). Farm Fresh Broadband – The politics of rural connectivity. MIT Press: Cambridge, Massachusetts, USA","authors":"Jason Whalley","doi":"10.3233/ip-249002","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-249002","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"139621961","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
{"title":"Introduction to the special section on digital government and sustainable development goals: SDGs as a key challenge for digital government research","authors":"R. Medaglia, Gianluca Misuraca","doi":"10.3233/ip-249003","DOIUrl":"https://doi.org/10.3233/ip-249003","url":null,"abstract":"","PeriodicalId":46265,"journal":{"name":"Information Polity","volume":null,"pages":null},"PeriodicalIF":2.0,"publicationDate":"2024-01-15","publicationTypes":"Journal Article","fieldsOfStudy":null,"isOpenAccess":false,"openAccessPdf":"","citationCount":null,"resultStr":null,"platform":"Semanticscholar","paperid":"140506920","PeriodicalName":null,"FirstCategoryId":null,"ListUrlMain":null,"RegionNum":0,"RegionCategory":"","ArticlePicture":[],"TitleCN":null,"AbstractTextCN":null,"PMCID":"","EPubDate":null,"PubModel":null,"JCR":null,"JCRName":null,"Score":null,"Total":0}
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