Agility in the machine: how the agile bureaucracy reduces administrative burdens in the digital era

Abstract In the digital era, mitigating the widespread and inevitable administrative burdens stemming from digital bureaucratic encounters has become an urgent imperative to ensure equitable access and social inclusion. While existing scholarship on mitigating these burdens focuses on policy design and technology empowerment, research from an organizational perspective, particularly through the lens of agile bureaucracy, remains scarce. To fill this gap, this study conducts a case study of China’s adoption of e-invoicing to investigate how agile bureaucracy reduces administrative burdens in the digital era. The findings reveal that agile bureaucracy effectively alleviates administrative burdens through the use of agile approaches. Concurrently, traditional bureaucracy facilitates the efficacy of these agile approaches by providing a hierarchical and rule-based framework. We argue that a synergy between agile governance and bureaucracy is essential for effective burden reduction. These insights extend our understanding of administrative burden reduction in the digital era.