THE WORLD OF SIMPLICITY

Modern knowledge work has undergone a transformation in the past 15 years. Notions of agility and adaptability in recent management literature suggest that the change is an extension of the individual-oriented project and network logics of the 1980s and 1990s. But the new business methodologies promote regulation and result orientation. Based on a corpus of 12: books on agile development and project management, I apply Boltanski and Thevenot's French-pragmatic framework to construct an order of worth where simplicity and clarity are the key principles justifying change. The article starts with a short presentation of the concept of generalized worlds of worth and is a brief introduction to French-pragmatic action theory. I discuss why I began searching for a world of simplicity before presenting the methodical approach and selection. In the discussion section, I present the world of simplicity in light of Boltanski and Thevenot's grammatical setup, and in conclusion I argue that the world of simplicity represents a general form of worth separate from others.