BIROn - Birkbeck Institutional Research Online

    The rhetorics of ‘agile’ and the practices of ‘Agile Working’: consequences for the worker experience and uncertain implications for HR practice

    Roper, I. and Prouska, R. and Chatrakul Na Ayudhya, Uracha (2022) The rhetorics of ‘agile’ and the practices of ‘Agile Working’: consequences for the worker experience and uncertain implications for HR practice. International Journal of Human Resource Management 33 (22), pp. 4440-4467. ISSN 0958-5192.

    [img] Text
    Roper et al (2022) The rhetorics of agile and the practices of Agile Working_pre-pub.pdf - Author's Accepted Manuscript
    Restricted to Repository staff only

    Download (434kB) | Request a copy
    [img]
    Preview
    Text
    48027a.pdf - Published Version of Record
    Available under License Creative Commons Attribution.

    Download (2MB) | Preview

    Abstract

    The various rhetorics of ‘agile’, ‘agility’, and ‘agile working’ (AW) set an agenda for new ways of working and have gained traction in popular management discourse recently, particularly in the wake of the COVID-19 pandemic. Yet conceptually, these varieties are underdeveloped in the academic literature. In this article we examine the stream of AW by first locating separate streams and rhetorics of ‘agile’ in the literature, each seemingly unaware of each other, and then situating AW within this typology to show its distinctiveness from other streams of ‘agile’. To understand a particular version of reality being mainstreamed by the AW rhetoric, we then examine its conceptualisation as a new way of working, as promoted by dominant actors within the UK work context. We then consider existing studies of worker experiences under different employment arrangements that can be subsumed under the heading of ‘AW practices’. Our analysis highlights voids between what may be considered as mainstream HR practices when applied to standard employees compared to a spectrum of ‘non-standard’ workers. The implications for the role of HR in the implementation of AW and in managing the worker experience are discussed and future avenues for this under-researched area are offered.

    Metadata

    Item Type: Article
    School: Birkbeck Faculties and Schools > Faculty of Business and Law > Birkbeck Business School
    Depositing User: Uracha Chatrakul Na ayudhya
    Date Deposited: 18 May 2022 12:56
    Last Modified: 02 Aug 2023 18:16
    URI: https://eprints.bbk.ac.uk/id/eprint/48027

    Statistics

    Activity Overview
    6 month trend
    56Downloads
    6 month trend
    111Hits

    Additional statistics are available via IRStats2.

    Archive Staff Only (login required)

    Edit/View Item Edit/View Item