Vrije U. Amsterdam, School of Business and Economics, Netherlands
Current literature indicates that organizations often deploy multiple governance models simultaneously to maintain effectiveness and flexibility. Large-scale agile methodologies promise to combine the best of both worlds, aiming to achieve organizational excellence. However, despite their increasing adoption, studies on large-scale agile transformations remain scarce, particularly regarding their true nature. This study argues that large-scale agile frameworks are best understood as frameworks for creating enabling bureaucracies. It examines how an organization deals with the duality between the existing organization and agile, focusing the shift on the dynamic relation between a coercive and enabling bureaucracy, and agile. Using an inductive qualitative case study, this paper investigates a major Dutch government agency. The findings reveal three key mechanisms driving the emergence of a form of enabling bureaucratic organization: autonomous bridging, selectively narrating, and architectural reengineering. These concepts illustrate how agile practices are incrementally contextualized within operations, while the organizational architecture gradually is adapted to support them. The interplay between the formal and informal organization facilitates this contextualization, leading to the gradual integration of the informal organization into the formal structure. As the transformation progresses, the tension between agile and the existing organization decreases, while agility in organizational units increases. This study contributes to bureaucracy literature by offering empirical insights and associated theoretical perspective, enriching our understanding of agile at scale.
