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CRITICALLY CHALLENGING SOME ASSUMPTIONS IN HRD
David O’Donnell, David McGuire and Christine Cross
David O'Donnell
Intellectual Capital Research Institute of Ireland
Ballyagran, Limerick County,
Ireland.
Tel: +353 876821032
Email: david.odonnell@ireland.com
David McGuire
(Corresponding author)
School of Management,
Napier University Business School,
Craiglockhart Campus, 219 Colinton Road, Edinburgh, EH14 1DJ,
Scotland.
Tel: +44 1314554340
Email: d.mcguire@napier.ac.uk
Christine Cross
Department of Personnel & Employment Relations,
Kemmy Business School,
University of Limerick,
National Technological Park, Limerick,
Ireland.
Tel: + 353 61 203086
Email: christine.cross@ul.ie
Reference as: O’Donnell, D., McGuire, D. & Cross, C. (2006): “Critically Challenging
some Assumptions in HRD”, International Journal of Training and Development, Vol.
10, No. 1, p. 4-16.
0
CRITICALLY CHALLENGING SOME ASSUMPTIONS IN HRD
Abstract This paper sets out to critically challenge five inter-related assumptions
prominent in the HRD literature. These relate to: the exploitation of labour in enhancing
shareholder value; the view that employees are co-contributors to and co-recipients of
HRD benefits; the distinction between HRD and HRM; the relationship between HRD
and unitarism; and, the relationship between HRD and organisational and learning
cultures. From a critical modernist perspective, it is argued that these can only be
adequately addressed by taking a point of departure from the particular state of the
capital-labour relation in time, place and space. HRD, of its nature, exists in a continuous
state of dialectical tension between capital and labour—and there is much that critical
scholarship has yet to do in informing practitioners about how they might manage and
cope with such tension.
Key words capital-labour relation; employment relation; HRD; critical modernism
Introduction
In recent times the employment relation in organisations is deemed to have
become more informal, apparently consensual, and loosely democratic. Human resource
development (HRD), at first glance, appears to be very much at home in this comfortable
and apparently sophisticated and progressive milieu. Notwithstanding the unquestioned
ascendancy of neo-liberal forms of capitalism in the developed world, the idea of ‘critical
intent’ did not disappear simultaneously with the collapse of the Berlin Wall in 1989. A
change in global politics?—yes; in the fundamental nature of economy and society?—
probably not.
HRD has emerged as a complex heterogeneous field serving many constituencies
with diverse purposes. This multiplicity of purposes has led to questioning about whether
HRD is concerned with developing such ‘resources’ for the benefit of employees or for
the benefit of organisations, or both. This form of questioning implicitly assumes benefits
accruing to both employees and organisations from engaging in HRD, but does not
determine either the nature or proportionality of such benefits within the employment
relationship, or whether this relationship is itself changing. To be more critically
precise—does HRD serve capital or labour? This is not a simple binary—the capitallabour relation is complex and is subject to a range of personal, historical, local, national,
global and ideological forces and mediations. Acknowledging this complexity, we do not
attempt to address the HRD field as a whole, but pragmatically focus here on a small
number of key assumptions prominent within the field. These relate to: (i) the
instrumental exploitation of employees to drive organisational performance and enhance
shareholder value; (ii) the view that employees are co-contributors to and co-recipients of
HRD benefits; (iii) the distinction between HRD and HRM; (iv) the perceived distance of
HRD from the unitarist HRM agenda; and (v), the view that HRD interventions are
effective in the creation of positive organisational and learning cultures and in the
inculcation of organisational norms and values.
The structure of the remainder of this paper is as follows. Firstly we set our
discussion in the context of the broader HRD literature and introduce our critical
modernist intent; the assumptions noted above, which in many ways are inter-related, are
1
then presented and subjected to an initial critique; from a critical modernist perspective
we argue strongly that these can only be adequately addressed by taking a point of
departure from the particular state of the capital-labour relation in time, place and space.
We conclude that HRD, of its nature, exists in a continuous state of dialectical tension—
but that critical HRD scholars have yet to adequately inform practitioners about how such
critical discourse is relevant, and more importantly, how practitioners might cope with
such tensions and draw on critical insights in informing their everyday HRD practices.
Beyond essentialism—How is HRD?
Schluchter (1987) notes the relation between increasing rationalization in the
economic sphere and the expansion of forms of ‘functional authority’, such authority
based largely on expertise, competence or know-how. Such know-how is linked to actor
knowledge, or to specific networks of actors, and not to particular organisational
positions, ‘official authority’, as in the heyday of bureaucratic Taylorism. In contrast to
de-skilling, which remains central in numerous industrial sectors, the emergence of
knowledge-intensive labour leads to structural problems in bureaucratic organisations as
they try to move from hierarchies towards teams, networks and forms of selfmanagement and selves-development (O’Donnell, 1999). This leads to the vexed relation
between management and employee development and the extent to which theories of
human resource development (HRD), human resource management (HRM) and
knowledge management (KM) are “latently strategic” in Habermasian (1987) terms or
ideological in that they serve particular interests. We adopt a critical modernist slant on
HRD here.
What is HRD? The call for papers for this special issue provides a generalist
definition of HRD as being concerned with “supporting and facilitating the learning of
individuals, groups and organisations” (McGoldrick, Stewart and Watson, 2002: 396).
Many other answers are possible to this essentialist question dependent on one’s
worldview. Where is HRD? Is it, for example, located at the dynamic and co-creative
elements of the bi-polar dimensions of self–other and agency–structure (Lee, 2003)? Or
perhaps there is no theory of HRD as such, as one is not really necessary given the
existence of numerous theoretical approaches that claim to explain human behavior
(Stewart, 2003). These authors acknowledge that HRD is constituted by an openness and
fluidity and is concerned with how individuals interact with their environments, moving
away from what Rigg and Trehan (2004) see as the narrow instrumental definitions of
HRD as “training” that permeate much of the extant literature. Essentialist “what is?”
questions, however, cannot fully disclose HRD to us (Henriksen et al., 2004).
How is HRD? HRD may be viewed as a negotiated reality of shared meanings
(Gunnarsson, 1997; Nermeyer and Stewart, 1998) that, somehow, becomes accepted as a
purposeful activity within organisational contexts. These meanings are constructed
through the medium of language within particular organisational lifeworlds and in
academic and practitioner discourses. The objective of any critical examination of HRD,
therefore, begins with an analysis of how HRD is talked about or perceived with a view
to identifying areas in which it is used for the purposes of control, domination, oppression
and exploitation. This is the system-lifeworld dialectic at the heart of critical theory from
Marx to Horkeimer and Adorno, and more recently from Habermas to Honneth.
Poststructuralism, often following Foucauldian insights on power, provides another
2
avenue of critique for those wishing to adopt a postmodernist stance (see Alvesson and
Deetz, 1996; Gabriel, 2001; Townley, 1994; Trehan, 2004)—but in this paper, following
Mezirow’s (1981) seminal introduction, we situate our critical discussion of HRD
broadly within the Frankfurt School critical modernist tradition. Where is HRD? In our
view, it is at home somewhere within the capital-labour relation; a basic insight so
obvious that it is rarely made explicit in HRD discourse. Having located HRD in
theoretical space, we can now address it in order to find out how it is. Following
Brookfield (1987), critical thinking is not an abstract process confined to academic
settings but an activity embedded in the ordinary everyday organisational contexts of
mundane employee and HRD practitioner lives. A critical modernist approach to HRD, in
maintaining faith in the original emancipatory intent of critical theory, aspires to nothing
less than individual, organisational and societal transformation (Brookfield, 1987, 2001;
Fenwick, 2004; Mezirow, 1981; O’Donnell, 1999; Trehan and Longmore, 2004; Young,
1989).
Critically addressing some HRD assumptions
Where do we begin our critique? Fenwick (2004: 194) notes that:
... erroneous assumptions of an identifiable HRD have created an
illusionary entity that is unified and fixed as an impenetrable opponent—a
perspective that fails to recognize its heterogeneous and fluid character.
Adopting a pragmatic critical modernist stance, this paper subjects five such assumptions
on HRD to an initial examination. These relate to: (i) the instrumental exploitation of
employees to drive organisational performance and enhance shareholder value; (ii) the
view that employees are co-contributors to and co-recipients of HRD benefits; (iii) the
distinction between HRD and HRM; (iv) the perceived distance of HRD from the
unitarist HRM agenda; and (v), the view that HRD interventions are effective in the
creation of positive organisational and learning cultures and in the inculcation of
organisational norms and values.
These assumptions are far from being totally distinct; they inter-penetrate and
influence each other and in our discussion we attempt to ground our examination of each
in the simultaneously universal, particular and dynamic nature of the employment
relation in time, place and space. We seek merely to surface the implicit, often unspoken, agendas of power, exploitation and control that often lie beneath the cosy, overly
humanist and unitarist surface exterior of much HRD discourse and practice by explicitly
situating HRD within the capital-labour relation. Some discontinuities between the
various rhetorics and realities of HRD are surfaced and exposed here and certain control
mechanisms and ideological discourses identified. We do not attempt to present any
naïve or premature conclusions in this paper—its general purpose is to raise the
consciousness and awareness levels of both academics and practitioners by subjecting
these particular assumptions to an initial critique. Nor do we address here the core
practical issue of how the critical insights raised might be appropriated by HRD
practitioners and, somehow, influence their everyday professional practices.
3
Assumption-1: HRD involves the instrumental exploitation of employees to drive
organisational performance and enhance shareholder value
The performance paradigm has been, is, and, for the foreseeable future, will be
the dominant driver of theory and practice in HRD. HRD is concerned with issues of
resource maximization, skills development, quality, productivity enhancement,
motivation, commitment to organisational goals (Beaver and Hutchings, 2004; Rummler
and Brache, 1995), positively and strategically influencing the bottom-line (Ruona,
2002), adding value (Beck and Beck-Gernscheim, 1996) and improving performance
(Nadler and Nadler, 1989). Hard, market oriented, functionalist and instrumental views
dominate such HRD discourses. This approach to HRD is broadly accepted and is
probably the form most widely practiced within organisational settings (Armstrong 1999;
Garavan 1991; Bergenhenegouwen, 1990). To exist, HRD has first to justify such
existence in economic terms—and this is the reality that HRD practitioners must first
address and live with in their everyday lives. The term ‘human resources’ reduces people
to the same category of value as materials, money and technology—all resources, and
resources are only valuable to the extent that they can be exploited or leveraged into
economic value (Oxtoby and Coster, 1992)—and social value. Labour remains a more
fundamental, and inherently honest, term. Based on the neoclassical economic
imperative, labour is a resource to be exploited for the benefit of the organisation’s
owners and shareholders. Whatever humanist, stakeholder or unitarist gloss HRD is
coated with, Capital maintains its unquestionable ascendancy within the capital-labour
relation. One doesn’t need a volume of ideology critique, or a mass of empirical
evidence, to substantiate such a claim and this is the critical realist point of departure for
any substantive critical discussion in the HRD field. The first assumption addressed here
is not really an assumption at all—we argue simply that it is a realist fact. In the first
instance, HRD owes its legitimacy to Capital.
O’Donnell and Henriksen (2002) draw on Harvey’s (1990) argument that many
manifestations of the so-called postmodernist world flow from the basic operations of
Capital. The present postmodern or knowledge economy is not really unique, or a major
break with the past, but rather a special case of culture in a line of development that can
be traced back to its genesis in the industrial revolution. Harvey, following the broad
neoMarxist approach of the Paris Regulation School views “recent events as a transition
in the regime of accumulation and its associated mode of social and political regulation”
(1990: 121). From this perspective, the emerging nature of economy and society in the
developed world can be viewed as arising from the transformation of the Fordist system
of mass production with its relatively fixed system of capital accumulation, its emphasis
on standardization, mass production, de-skilling, labour stability and control (critiqued by
Max Weber and the early Frankfurt School as the colonized, administered and
commoditized society), to its transformation in the 1970s to forms of flexible
accumulation, and since the mid 1990s to an ICT mediated and globalized knowledge
economy in both products and services. The forms and nomenclature may have
changed—the fundamental nature of the capital-labour or owner-employee relation has
not; its scope is simply global and its internal dynamic or form has become increasingly
complex in certain sectors.
4
Assumption-2: Employees are co-contributors to and co-recipients of HRD benefits.
Humanism is perceived to be absolutely central to the HRD field with its core
emphasis on the inner motivation of employees to develop themselves (Addesso, 1996;
Aktouf, 1992; Knowles, 1998; Swanson and Holton, 2001). Is HRD concerned with what
Russ-Eft (2000) terms developing the ‘human resources of an organisation’ or developing
‘the resources of the human’? Humanistic views suggest that HRD embraces a form of
‘mutual gains agenda’ (Kochan and Osterman, 1994) enhancing the relationship between
employee and organisation. As participants in HRD interventions, employees are strongly
positioned within the literature and considerable attention is devoted to highlighting the
benefits of HRD to such employee ‘stakeholders’ (Garavan et al., 2004). Such discourse
would lead one to believe that labour has been elevated to an equal partnership in the
capital-labour relation? Not so. Much humanist discourse on HRD is one-sided,
politically naïve, often poorly informed, and perhaps latently strategic (McGuire et al.,
2005; O’Donnell, 1999). Many HRD techniques, discourses and practices reframe the
relational dependency between employee and organisation, particularly in the emphasis
on employability, with employees expected to conform and support the prevailing HRD
agendas (Bramming, 2004; McLagan, 1989). Labour is essentially forced into the role of
largely silent follower, even within unionized environments. Whatever form of
psychological contract is presented, the capital-labour relation remains a fundamentally
one-sided relation.
It is difficult to find an article about HRD without reference to linking HRD to
strategic organisational goals and economic performance (Garavan, 1991; Swanson and
Arnold, 1997; Trehan, 2004). Kuchinke (1998), in realist fashion, dismisses the primary
role of the employee in the HRD process in favor of the organisation—HRD is useful to
the degree that it contributes to the attainment of organisational goals and bottom-line
performance. McLagan’s (1989) definition also recognizes the organisation as the main
beneficiary of HRD activities. She defines HRD as a process comprising the integrated
use of training and development and organisational development, which benefits the
interests of both capital and career development. The pervasiveness of employability as a
concept within career development benefits the interests of capital by eliminating the
notion of a ‘job for life’ and placing responsibility for career development squarely onto
the shoulders of employees, while allowing organisations greater freedom to pursue
radical change management agendas to boost productivity, profit margins and stock
prices. This is especially evident when one explores the self-learning and selfmanagement discourses that rely on the inner motivation of employees to develop
themselves, often in their own time spurred on by an organisational rhetoric espousing
the benefits of career development and advancement, but promising nothing definitive—
tenure is rarely an option in commercial settings. There is, however, no clear-cut
universal match between cause and effect in relation to HRD practice (Lee, 2003).
From the seminal work of Hermansson (1964) up to the present the history of
human resource costing and accounting (HRCA) has attempted, if unsuccessfully, to
place a numerical value on such HRD processes and interventions and link these to the
bottom lines of profitability and shareholder value. At the broader societal level, human
capital theory and neo-classical economic models continue to dominate discussion and
policy-making on the link between education and skills and both economic growth and
standards of living in developed, developing and underdeveloped worlds—and such
5
models have unquestionably provided very valuable insights at the broad societal level of
analysis. The history and present condition of the capital-labour relation and its linkages
to processes of skill formation and utilization must, however, be further investigated in
particular organisational and societal contexts. Questions of power, which Foucault has
shown to be manifest in every single societal pore, are central to any critical discussion of
the dispersion of benefits emanating from HRD practice. Organisations are reflections of
broader production and domination processes extant within social and economic systems
at particular points in time, place and space (Ashton and Sung, 2002; Benson 1977; Clegg
and Dunkerley 1980; Harvey, 1990; Littler, 1982; Maurice et al., 1986). Such processes
socialize labour both before and during its organisational life.
Mabey (2003) notes the tensions, and differences of emphasis, that exist between
structural worldviews and HR worldviews. The former (of the system) views the
organisation in purely instrumental or teleological terms; the latter (largely of the
organisational lifeworld) tends to one-sidedly view organisations as opportunity spaces
for labour to develop itself. Such discussions on tension within the capital-labour relation
are healthy, but ultimately, where does the real power reside? Much here is beyond the
influence, let alone control, of any HRD practitioner. Managing employee development is
inherently political and involves relative power relations between functions and
individuals (Joy-Matthews et al., 2004). Develop, get on, or get out is often the
subliminal message. On the other hand, employees themselves may, and do, adopt purely
instrumental motives towards HRD initiatives to suit their own advancement and ends.
Such ends may relate to career development, intrinsic motivation to learn something new
for its own sake, or salary increase on the one hand to devious if latently strategic
compliance for the sake of a peaceful organisational existence on the other. In most nonunion environments, outright opposition to HRD interventions is rarely an option for
labour. Sometimes, employees can be co-contributors to and co-recipients of HRD
benefits. Labour benefits from HRD practice; and sometimes it doesn’t—capital benefits
from HRD practice; and sometimes it doesn’t. This assumption on how HRD benefits are
dispersed remains open to further questioning and empirical evidence.
Assumption-3: HRD is distinct from HRM.
The relationship between HRD and HRM is perceived to be ‘ambiguous and
elusive’ (Mankin 2003); it is ‘not helpful in this debate to think of HRD as a subset of
HRM, either in structural or functional terms’ (UFHRD cited in Walton 1999: 66); ‘HRD
has been born to accompany HRM’ (Sambrook and Stewart (1998: 172); and so on with
numerous citations in similar and gloriously contradictory vein available within the
academic HRD literature. Enough! One can reasonably question the continuing
usefulness of such discussion or whether such discourse has made any real contribution
to practice. Perhaps this is a symptom of an adolescent claim to a distinct identity within
schools of business and education—a claim that is met in parallel with professional
groups such as the Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) with
distinct interest groups and practitioner conferences. This debate on HRD identity for
both academics and practitioners is over—HRD is distinct from HRM; it is a field of
study in its own right and it has now moved well beyond the identity forming stage of its
development. On the other hand, it is pragmatically impossible for HRD to escape from,
6
or to function in splendid isolation from, its parental, twin or sibling (take your choice
here—it makes not one whit of difference to practice) relationship with HRM.
While HRD academics and practitioners may consider HRM as distinct, it is not
possible or in any way pragmatic to fully disown HRM. Both HRM and HRD function
within the capital-labour relation, involve management of and investment in labour and
both strive to attain competitive advantage through labour for the benefit of the
organisation, whether public or private. Sambrook (2004) argues that much HRD
research tends to be dominated by a performance orientation and situated within a
unitarist organisational perspective, avoiding any hint of the tensions inherent in the
nature of organisation itself. We concur. If HRD is considered a subset of HRM,
Sambrook continues, then HRD practitioners serve the interests of organisations first and
individuals second. Precisely; as noted above and this is undoubtedly the case in the
predominantly performative and learning outcome discourses (Elliot and Turnbull, 2002;
Trehan, 2004)—but this remains the case whether one brings HRM into the discussion or
not. The terms have become so interchangeable that some training and development
practitioners exhibit confusion over meanings and boundaries delineating HRM, HRD,
training, and learning and development (Darling et al., 1999). The reality is that HRM
and HRD, of pragmatic necessity, enjoy an intimate relationship. Training officers often
report to personnel managers, just as HRD managers often report to HRM managers. In
small firms personnel/HRM is a side responsibility of the chief financial officer with
employee training and/or development a secondary responsibility of operations,
production or service management—or, if in part, of employees themselves. To reiterate
the point make above: in the first instance, both HRD and HRM owe their legitimacy to
Capital.
Following delayering there was and continues to be much discussion of
devolvement of employee development to line managers with HRD professionals in a
supportive role. And what of self-management and the illusion of empowerment whose
end-point is an employee addictively obsessed with self-development, often outside
working hours, in order to maintain employability? With such an internalized, if
psychologically warped, value system—who needs internal HRD professionals?
Outsource to the regulated dealers who can then provide addicted employees with their
HRD fix similar to the blue pill in the Matrix or Aldous Huxley’s soma that is available
to all in his dystopian Brave New World. HRD does not, and cannot, exist in a functional
vacuum. The HRD practitioner is as much a captive of the capital-labour relation as is
labour—as is HRM. Time to move on. This assumption is yet another fact—albeit
qualified by the brief discussion presented here. The logic of the capital-labour relation
dictates that both HRD and HRM are subserviently situated side-by-side within it.
Assumption-4: HRD is not associated with the unitarist HRM agenda
Capital-labour or labour-capital—this is the real question here? In the limit case,
unitarist ideology would need to demonstrate an equivalence or commonality of interests
between labour and capital—which is not apparent in the open question on HRD benefits
dispersion discussed above (Assumption—2). More pragmatically, it is certainly in the
interests of HRD practitioners and labour, at the present time, to contribute to the survival
of capital’s imperative—otherwise redundancy and job losses will ensue; migration to
another global system is only possible in the realms of science fiction. Such
7
considerations can be considered from a more pragmatic, if critical, pluralist
perspective—which we argue is a more realistically accurate perspective for HRD theory
and practice to adopt. Any critique of unitarism, however, begins with revisiting the issue
of ownership.
Pourceau (2003), with the European Federation of Employee Share Ownership
(EFES), notes that financial participation by employees has flourished mainly in the U.S.
and the U.K. where profit sharing, gain sharing, savings plans, share based plans,
employee stock ownership plans (ESOPs), stock option schemes and so on have become
relatively widespread on a voluntary basis allied with government encouragement
through favorable taxation treatment. In continental Europe, employee financial
participation has been more influenced by profit-sharing. In part the privatization of state
owned companies has contributed to wider employee ownership. In the European union,
Pourceau notes that Ireland, France and the U.K. stand out as exemplars of friendly tax
regimes in encouraging employee financial and stock ownership participation.
There is evidence of increasing usage of stock ownership and stock option
schemes by many, certainly not all, organisations. Over one-fifth of U.S. private sector
employees—24 million workers—own stock in their own companies, and 8 million
participate in employee stock ownership plans (Rousseau and Shperling, 2004). In
Ireland, stock ownership schemes have become institutionalized over the past decade in
much of the ICT and Pharmachem sectors (O’Regan et al., 2005). In the U.K. almost one
third of the nearly 1000 organisations across both public and private sectors responding
to a CIPD (2002) study offered share-option schemes. Rousseau and Shperling (2003,
2004), from a decidedly unitarist perspective, argue that there is some convergence on the
roles of owner, manager and worker, particularly in knowledge-intensive firms. They
claim that this shift “occurs concomitantly with expanded worker participation in
ownership and related privileges in the firms that employ them”, including access to
financial information and greater freedom in decision making (Rousseau and Shperling,
2004: 562).
The standard agency theory argument here is that capital grants stock options to
create incentives for executives and employees (labour) to make decisions that benefit
shareholders (capital). Capital provides a small gift of itself to labour—but its strategic
purpose remains its own capital accumulation. Other reasons proposed for granting stock
options include attracting and retaining key elements of labour, conserving cash, reducing
reported accounting expense (hence boosting reported earnings), and deferring taxes.
The intangible and socially very complex nature of intellectual capital creating processes
is exceedingly difficult, if not impossible, to fully monitor (O’Donnell, 2004). Hence, the
plausible argument that broad-based ownership concessions to labour may reflect
employer efforts to retain, motivate and tie in the relational collective of value creating
knowledge workers—by granting them a little ‘piece of the action’ (Coff and Rousseau,
2000). No strong empirical evidence exists, however, linking stock options to firm
performance—nor is there any consensus on what factors drive capital’s decision to adopt
broad-based stock option plans—and the recent accounting regulation on “expensing”
stock options, which will reduce capital’s earnings, makes the future of labour’s
participation in ownership even more difficult to unravel or predict (Tracey and
O’Donnell, 2005).
8
In more critical vein, there is some evidence that favorable accounting and tax
treatment may have resulted in inflated earnings, raising the concern that capital may
heretofore have adopted broad-based stock option plans to provide an artificial boost to
earnings rather than for sound business reasons, or indeed any ‘unitarist’ recognition of
labour’s role in value creation or capital accumulation. Lest we get carried away here
with this evidence from the more developed sectors of the developed world we do not
forget that most organisations largely ignore their workforces when issues related to
ownership arise, not even, in many cases, describing them as assets, let alone granting
them any stock or ownership rights (for a review, see Budwar et al., 2002). We remain
highly skeptical of any unitarist oriented HRD discourse or of any drift of HRD theory in
such a direction. Critically oriented pluralism is a more realistically accurate perspective
for HRD theory and practice to adopt as it more realistically discloses the inherent
tensions within the capital-labour relation and how such tensions may impact on both
professional HRD practice and on the developmental activities of labour.
Assumption-5: HRD interventions are effective in the creation of positive organisational
and learning cultures and in the inculcation of organisational norms and values.
It is widely accepted that patterns of beliefs, rituals, values, routines and practices
within organisations combine into a set of shared meanings. These meanings, in turn,
create a common understanding amongst employees often referred to as ‘the way we do
things around here’. The organisational community is bound together by a shared concern
to achieve organisational goals, an objective underpinned by a commitment to knowledge
sharing and continuous learning and development (Harrison and Kessels, 2004).
Strategic HRD exposes this link between HRD and corporate goals in more explicit terms
by maintaining that it is the function of strategic HRD to construct a learning culture
within which a range of training, development and learning strategies both respond to
corporate strategy as well as simultaneously attempting to shape and influence such
strategy. Such views clearly prioritize organisational exigencies, while devaluing the
supposed humanist HRD agenda of supported employee self-actualization (McCracken
and Wallace, 2000).
The relationship between the organisation and learning processes for either
individual or organisational benefit is, once again, contested terrain. In the education
arena economic relevance dominates the curriculum, not only in the content of what is
taught but in the processes that are used to teach it—with narrow economic forms of
vocationalism and competence prevailing in an educational marketplace that has become
increasingly commoditized and credentialized (Cunningham, 2004; Martin, 2000). The
drivers for change in learning processes at work relate more to product, market and
technological change, particularly in e-learning, than to conscious support for any new
learning philosophy (Harrison and Kessels, 2004; O’Donnell and Garavan, 2003).
Fenwick (2004) calls for a clearer demarcation of learning from managerialism and the
market; Rubenson (1989) highlights the real risks for HRD of legitimizing or even adding
to social and economic inequalities through the close association of HRD with certain
managerialist agendas; and Bierma (1997) argues that employees should exert greater
control over their learning. Again, how can employees exert such control? Such largely
prescriptive arguments are easily stated—but what can a HRD practitioner realistically
do? Grounding HRD within the capital-labour relation demands that both sides of the
9
Janus faced dialectical tension within it be addressed. Critically reflective practitioners
may then learn to better cope with such tensions—which are unavoidable.
Organisational culture, norms and values are also relevant here. Mabey and
Salaman (1995) criticize the corporate-culture school, because it ignores pluralistic
reality in assuming a single organisational culture. This notion of a simple and unified
organisational culture, open and available for change remains too often unchallenged.
Such discourse focuses, over-optimistically in our view, on the central role played by
HRD interventions in both creating and changing organisational culture. This ignores
reality; employees very quickly see through the type of spin that may be offered by such
latently strategic HRD activities—and regularly ignore, or resist, them. Again we note
some shift in historical focus—from the centrality of rigidly directing the Taylorist ‘hired
hand’ to the subtlety of influencing the thinking, values and self-managing norms of
labour. The “objects of management control are decreasingly labour power and behavior
and increasingly the mindpower and subjectivities of employees” (Alvesson and Deetz,
1996: 192) Such subtle domination may be rooted in organisational ideology, a set of
systematic norms, beliefs, values and attitudes that labour is socialized into accepting
unquestioningly as guides to everyday thinking and behavior (Rusaw, 2000); more rarely,
it may be a pragmatically negotiated compromise agreeable to both capital and labour.
Fostering a supportive positive organisational environment, however, where
employees share experiences, disseminate knowledge, do productive work, espouse
supposedly similar sets of values, respect individual choice, amply reward participation;
and listen to employee voice—is a very positive dialectical trade-off. We certainly do not
criticize such organisations here—nor do we become over excited at whatever democratic
egalitarian or paternalistic veneer might emanate from the upper echelons of such
organisations. The capital-labour relation remains much closer to a dictatorship, however
benign in certain spaces, than any democratic relation that we can find in the extant
discourse on deliberative democracy. There are fine organisations to work for; and there
is rampant exploitation in others—wherein the roles adopted and the psychological and
political tensions that HRD practitioners must cope with are decidedly different.
Conclusion
The mere fact that some of the HRD assumptions challenged here are now the
subject of some, if as yet insufficient, levels of critical discourse is sufficient grounds for
stating that critical HRD discourse is, perhaps, moving from the adolescent to a more
mature stage. As academics and critically reflective practitioners, however, we have yet
to inform practitioners about how such critical discourse is relevant, and more
importantly, how they might implement such insights into their HRD practice. Without
action, critical discourse on HRD remains mere abstraction. We endorse Fenwick’s
(2004: 206) assertion that a first task presented by this type of critical discussion is to
continue our exploration of:
...
apparent fundamental contradictions between managerialist
performance and radical orientations neither representing human resource
managers as the unequivocal oppressors nor slipping into naturalized
illusions of unitary worker/manager interests or the existence of
unproblematic safe dialogic spaces among them. Particular vigilance
10
might be needed to keep distant from current soft humanistic management
recipes for empowerment—what Alvesson and Willmott (1996: 229)
disparaged label as “a fatally crippled, ideologically polluted version of
‘emancipation’ that merits harsh critique”.
Following Benson’s (1977) seminal take on organisations almost thirty years ago,
we claim that HRD exists in an unavoidable dialectical tension between the imperatives
of capital accumulation and labour. HRD, of its nature, acts on and with labour; and
much of labour, particularly in the high skilled and educated segment of the labour force
in the developed world, is generally content with the present state of this relation. Even in
non-unionized environments such labour is well capable of communicating its views of
its own training and development imperatives to both managers and HRD practitioners
who may have the power to act, gain the requisite resources from capital, and make such
opportunities available. In the intangibles and knowledge economy, human capital has
some voice in its relations with capital—and the capability of ‘exit’ to experience other
better paid, more interesting or challenging variations of capital; hence the massive
managerialist discourse on retention. In some cases, as noted above, this may be manifest
in token share ownership or stock option schemes—not to any great revolutionary extent
as yet, but significant nonetheless.
In much of the rest of the world, and in the secondary and casual segments of
labour markets in the developed world, labour remains a commodity to be hired and fired,
subject to particular societal legislation, and HRD in such markets is largely driven by
narrow instrumental concerns. Labour here is simply a commodity. As Marx (1977: 43)
put it in the very first sentence of Capital:
The wealth of those societies in which the capitalist mode of production
prevails, presents itself as ‘an immense accumulation of commodities’, its
unit being a single commodity.
HRD, whether in the high-skills knowledge economy, or in the sweat shops of either the
developed or developing worlds, is first and foremost subservient to Capital—yet its
espoused purpose is to assist the development of labour. HRD professionals must
somehow cope with unavoidable tensions within the capital-labour relation—a dialectical
relation that, we claim, needs to be at the forefront in professional development and
certification programs in HRD. Prescription, however, is of limited value—we need
further research (case studies, ethnographies and psycho-biographies) on how reflectively
critical HRD practitioners manage and cope with such tensions in the process of both
contributing to the survival and growth of their employing organisation and enhancing
the quality of employee lives.
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