Alliance Manchester Business School, University of Manchester
Existing research on Agile practices is mostly appreciative inquiries arguing for its adoption due to its business benefits. These studies, mostly within the Western context, fail to account for vastly heterogeneous human elements in the practices of Agile. These elements are magnified in a Global South country like India due to the diversity in its cultural and historical backgrounds. Through this study, we try to understand the intricacies of how Agile is practised in the Indian IT industry. Through in-depth interviews of Agile practitioners in India, we try to understand how these practitioners construe the meaning of Agile. The major lines of inquiry try to discern if there are major differences in how Agile is practised compared to how it is prescribed as a practice. We are finding paradoxes in descriptions by practitioners, pointing to aspects like remnant bureaucracy in expectedly “post-bureaucratic” Agile and homogenisation of ways of working overlooking cultural elements.
