Abstract:
There is growing interest in the concept of “agile organisations” amongst management
practitioners and academics. Early publications have been largely practitioner-oriented and
have been at pains to claim that this is a new idea, with fundamental differences to other
concepts such as flexibility and lean production. However, there has been little direct
explanation of what these differences actually are. A particular area of confusion appears to
be over the difference between “agility” and the established concept of “flexibility”, a
confusion which this paper starts to attempt resolving.
