Investigating agility organizing from a performative angle

In Management and Organization Studies, agile is predominantly conceptualized as a dynamic capability, defined as an organization’s capacity to reconfigure resources in response to changing environments in order to enhance performance. While influential, this view has limitations: It allows only for retrospective assessment, assumes a normative link between agility and superior performance, privileges external over endogenous change, and overlooks the micro-level activities through which organizations attempt to become agile. This dissertation supplements the dynamic capability perspective by investigating agile organizing from a performative angle. Drawing on theories of performativity, it conceptualizes agile not as a pre-existing capability but as something brought into being through communication, process, and socio-material practices. Empirically, the dissertation comprises three qualitative single case studies in two technology-intensive organizations. Study 1 analyzes how agile organizing is enacted through the writing and reception of a “Manifesto of Agile Work,” showing how foundational texts allow organization to master the challenges of future-making. Study 2 examines how agile organizing is performed through temporal processes in a distributed project team, developing a model of how a shared present is established in remote and asynchronous collaboration. Study 3 explores socio-material visibility practices in innovation work, identifying strategies for balancing transparency and opacity. Across the studies, agile organizing emerges as a dynamic, contested, and materially mediated phenomenon. The dissertation contributes to current debates in Management and Organization Studies by introducing a novel terminology and conceptualization of agile, by extending the predominant dynamic capability perspective, by advancing research on the performativity of management theories and concepts, and by discussing connections between agile and the future of work.