Agile methodologies appear in the 1990s in the software development industry as a response to accommodate rapidly evolving technologies and customer needs in IT systems. These methods have since then spread out in an increasing number of organizational context and diverse industries. In this paper, we examine the identity work of actors in an aerospace company that undergoes an Agile Transformation. We first describe how the change unfolds and identify several identity work patterns, some successful other not, that actors engage. To understand the identity work we use a theoretical bricolage between the narrative identity and the psychodynamic theory, essentially based on a Lacanian perspective. We then try to understand why some actors survive this transformation and others not.
Building upon the extensive scholarship on organizational change from a processual perspective, as well as incorporating the theoretical insights from the field of organizational social movements, this article suggests that contemporary changes should be view as "hybrid" processes, combining both top-down and bottom-up approaches, in order to better understand their complexity. Drawing on the sensemaking process perspective, we focus on the Thales Group culture change in the context of its digital transformation, based on a deliberate social movement like strategy. We describe the double mechanisms and challenges of hybridization, and how social aspirations of the internal activist’s community generated a sensemaking drift, affecting the purpose and the process of change. The challenges and opportunities for implementing hybrid cultural change in multinational companies are discussed.
