Abstract
This chapter emphasizes that agility is a doctrine of management promoting decentralized autonomous teamwork with short and iterative work sequences, involving some level of end-user feedback throughout the development process. Arguing for critical pessimism regarding the belief that agility makes an organization more democratic, the authors highlight that agility does not disrupt the institution of subordination peculiar to the employment relations and the domination it institutes. Building on Amartya Sen’s capability approach, the text shows that agility still represents some interest in the promotion of a democratic society, considering it contributes to the development of workers’ capability for democratic self-government of work. The text shows that Agility contributes to the development of professional self-awareness and to the institution of collective autonomy.
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Notes
- 1.
The Hudson-Vlerick Business School HR barometer polls HR directors from Belgium’s largest CAC40 public corporations.
- 2.
For instance, applied to the organizational context, Sherry Arnstein’s (1969) classical ladder of participation allows us to qualify different intensities of workers’ power in workplace decision-making processes. It is necessary to avoid the pitfall of calling whatever may not be fully fledged democratic self-government of work manipulation (Charles et al., 2018).
- 3.
Voice is understood in the sense of Hirschman (1970) tryptic Exit, Voice, Loyalty, where voice corresponds to the opportunity for individual and social actors to express their concerns and be heard. Workers’ voice captures most aspects of what we described earlier as workers’ participation.
- 4.
The Tribe lead and representatives are the functional hierarchy of the Squad members, defining their work content in alignment with the global strategy of the organization.
- 5.
Whereas “external clients” refers to actual clients of the firm, “internal clients” denotes any entity within Selecta Bank that stands to benefit from the Squad’s specific project.
- 6.
This is of course, a textbook understanding of Marx’s concrete/abstract distinction. Its use is interesting for heuristic reasons, but should not be taken literally as describing what happens at Selecta or in many workplaces in the twenty-first century. In real life, this abstraction is resisted by workers who, even though they may be stuck in this kind of transactional relationship, find and impose meaning in and around their work (see Ferreras, 2007, 2017; Vendramin & Méda, 2013).
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Jégou, O., Souayah, F. (2021). What Do Workers Get Out of Agility? Examining Workers’ Capability for Democratic Self-Government of Work. In: Pfeiffer, S., Nicklich, M., Sauer, S. (eds) The Agile Imperative . Dynamics of Virtual Work. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-73994-2_10
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