Conceptualizing agility of enterprises

This article discusses and elaborates on the fourfold constituency of enterprise agility conceived by Trzcielinski (2007, 2009). With Trzcielinski (2009), agility consists of the following characteristics or properties of the enterprise: Brightness is the ability to quickly perceive market opportunities and threats emanating from the environment; flexibility is a feature of resources available for the enterprise, extending the repertoire of the tasks that can be executed with use of these company functions and finding intentional reactions in these situations; intelligence is the ability to understand the situations in which the company functions and to find intentional reactions in these situations; and shrewdness is the ability of an enterprise to quickly use the opportunities in a beneficial way. The article sets out from the viewpoint of opportunity theory and from that of entrepreneurial undertakings (i.e., actions directed toward them). A primary concern is to define in what sense and to what degree we can speak of opportunities and actions as factual in contrast to representational, and thus bridge conceptual notions and management praxis. Opportunities and actions are argued to have a factual and a representational aspect, which coincide in the enterprise praxis. The article suggests that, if validity and factuality claims are correctly addressed, both outer and inner aspects of actions and the representational and objective notions of opportunities can be treated as agility constituents of the enterprise and that their interaction provides for a comprehensive model of enterprise agility, where ontologically different constituents complement each other and interact. © 2010 Wiley Periodicals, Inc.