An agile bureaucracy? Lessons from an ethnographic study of agile teams in the Norwegian public sector
基于挪威劳工与福利管理局软件开发团队的民族志数据，揭示公共部门采用敏捷方法时面临的三种核心张力，解释制度复杂性如何导致敏捷原则与实践脱钩。
As governments increasingly try to develop their own technological solutions to handle growing demands, a key response has been to move away from traditional “waterfall” methods and towards modern “agile” principles for innovation. While agile principles are advocated as crucial to handling the complexity of the public sector, they have also been found to be difficult to implement in practice. To advance our understanding of these difficulties, this article aims to unpack the challenges facing software development teams when trying to use agile methods in the public sector. The article draws on ethnographic data from a study of software development teams in the Norwegian Labor and Welfare administration (NAV). By analyzing these data through the theoretical lens of institutional theory – particularly emphasizing institutional complexity due to conflicting institutional logics – the article uncovers three critical tensions facing the development teams: between bottom-up methods vs. top-down delegation, flexibility vs. pre-planned mandates, and “fast” teams vs. a “slow” context. These tensions indicate a “decoupling” between proclaimed agility and practiced methodologies, with the practical reality of the teams' working environment being characterized as a mixture of elements from both waterfall and agile methods. By uncovering these tensions and contradictions, the article explores the institutional complexity of public sector innovation, in which workers struggle to navigate an institutional context characterized by conflicting demands.