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P R O J E C T : F U T U R E

Dr Helena Liu

2 1 8 8 9

Week 9 — The Failings of HRM

Last week in this subject, we examined the

colonial underpinnings of international

human resource management and its

prevailing tendency to essentialise

cultural/national identities.

REVIEW

REVIEW OF WEEK 8 IHRM PROCESSES Traditional approaches focused on training expatriates for technical

skills, ignoring the psychoemotional dimensions of international

assignments.

CROSS-CULTURAL MANAGEMENT Typically assumes an autonomous professional from ‘the West’ who

ventures into exotic cultures. These other cultures are usually treated as

fixed and homogenous.

IMPERIALIST BACKGROUND These assumptions are shaped by the established history of imperialism

where European colonialists sought to define the ‘Other’.

DECOLONISING HRM We need to identify and challenge the parochial nature of managerial

knowledge and practice, opening up space for alternate ways of

organising from beyond Anglo-American perspectives.

MULTIPLE CHOICE QUIZ REVIEW

QUESTION 1 Melissa believes that because Asian cultures are collectivistic, Asian employees are more dependent than Australian employees and will likely not perform well in leadership positions. What does Melissa’s belief best exemplify? a. Imperialism

b. Cultural essentialism

c. Racist language

d. Organisational violence

QUESTION 2 Julietta works for a multinational firm in Australia and accepted an opportunity to relocate to her organisation’s Chinese subsidiary. She received six months of intensive language training before she left for China, which continued after she arrived with ongoing weekly classes. What else would Boncori and Vine most critically advise Julietta’s organisation to do to support her expatriation? a. Psychological testing to ensure Julietta has the right personality for expatriation.

b. Rigorous talent management practices to ensure Julietta is adequately rewarded for her expatriation.

c. Cultural-fit strategies to strengthen Julietta’s engagement with her organisation while she works overseas.

d. Training practices that attend to Julietta emotional adjustment and ongoing wellbeing.

QUESTION 3 Hasan has recently established a not-for-profit community organisation with a team of employees and volunteers. He has been thinking about how they could ‘decolonise’ managerial practices in their new organisation. Which of the following practices would best exemplify decolonisation? a. Organisational members should all be paid a fair wage.

b. The organisation should implement a zero-tolerance policy for all forms of bullying, harassment and violence.

c. Organisational members should speak openly about forms of domination perpetuated within and by the organisation and strive to dismantle systems of power.

d. The organisation should recruit as many minorities as possible and promote them to positions of leadership.

THE FAILINGS OF HRM

AGENDA The failings of HRM

• Orthodoxy of managerialism

• Hyperindividualism

• Anglo-American hegemony

• Ethics of HR professionals

• The future of HRM

M A N A G E R I A L I S M S E C T I O N

To call a person a resource is already to tread dangerously close to placing that human in the same category with office furniture and computers.” — Michelle Greenwood (2002, p. 261)

The term “resource” is a metaphor. Seeing the strange in the familiar, “resource” is only one metaphor among many that one might apply to people working in organisations. Other metaphors include “troops”, “team”, “family”, “loyal company servants”, and “labour force”, each having quite different connotations from the others (Inkson, 2008). The point is not trivial. The words we use substantially influence our perceptions of the world, and our actions (Inkson, 2008). The more we are told we are resources, the more managers – the users of resources – and employees may come to accept it, and to behave accordingly (Inkson, 2008).

Managerialism describes the ways

management theorising and practice

reflect the ideology of neoliberal capitalism.

Management knowledge is expected to

serve managers, who are generally assumed

to pursue profit and growth at all costs.

MANAGERIALISM

MANAGERIALISM MANAGERS ARE RATIONAL EXPERTS Managers are constructed as rational and logical experts that make

decisions based on prescriptive and functionalist ‘scientific research’.

HUMANS ARE IRRATIONAL RESOURCES Ignoring asymmetrical power relations, employees are treated as

needing to be managed in order to have their potential realised for

more efficient profit-driven production. Performance and talent

management treats workers as perennially needing to be retooled to

achieve more.

FOR-PROFIT IS THE NORM The private sector organisation is presented as normative rather than a

contested site of struggle.

HRM IS OSTENSIBLY PRO-WORKER Topics like flexible work, diversity and inclusion or work-life balance are

presented as pro-worker but typically conclude with calls to action to

increase performative efficiencies in the workplace. In other words, HRM

reflects a unitarist ideology.

(Ruggunan, 2016)

Managers often struggle with their own identity work and what it means to be a manager (Dent and Whitehead, 2013; Sveningsson and Alvesson, 2003).

The treatment of employees as “passive commodities” is ultimately dehumanising (Inkson, 2008, p. 270).

Yet given HRM practice varies significantly, it is more useful to analyse the organisational constraints on ethical action and ethical inaction.

(Lowry, 2006)

H Y P E R I N D I V I D U A L I S M S E C T I O N

American cultural scholars first identified

the phenomenon of ‘hyperindividualism’

where one is concerned almost entirely with

the self, leading to the erosion of

community.

HYPER- INDIVIDUALISM

“There is no such thing as society,” so said Margaret Thatcher in her 1996 Joseph Memorial Lecture at the Centre for Policy Studies.

We see ourselves as consumers and entrepreneurs instead of citizens and as self-reliant instead of interdependent.

(Giroux, 2003; McRobbie, 2008; Mohanty, 2013)

HYPER- INDIVIDUALISM In the workplace, hyperindividualism is reflected in a dominant

unitarist ideology (Greenwood and Van Buren, 2017). Practices

of performance and talent management, individual

pay/rewards and individual bargaining reinforce the notion

that workers and their companies share the same interests,

values and goals.

HYPER- INDIVIDUALISM Yet in this model, power structures become unspeakable and

organisational violence is left for individual employees to self-

manage (Gill, 2014; Kelan, 2014).

This individualisation is reinforced by psychologistic

interventions in HRM that promote self-confidence (Gill and

Orgad, 2015), resilience (Clay, 2019) and positivity (Collinson,

2012).

A N G L O - A M E R I C A N H E G E M O N Y

S E C T I O N

ANGLO-AMERICAN HEGEMONY ‘Strategic human resource management’ is a product of an

Anglo-American culture of business excellence emerging from

the 1980s.

Hegemonic Masculinity (Whiteness, Sexuality, Ability and Class) The ‘ideal worker’ also reflects Anglo-American cultural values.

In what hooks (2003, 2009) calls the imperialist, white supremacist,

capitalist patriarchy, the accepted way to manage is to dominate and

control. Work and organisations are recast as arenas for individual

competition.

ESSENTIALISED, EXOTIC ‘OTHERS’ Despite sustained critique, Anglo-American research tends to fall back on

reductionistic constructions of non-Western people as stereotypical

characters of a colonial myth: the spiritual; the childlike or the corrupt

(Tuhiwai Smith, 2012).

Xu (2008) argues that even when non-Western people are acknowledged

and valued, they can still be denied of their being; their right to self-define.

Excluding the voices of workers as well as

those who fall outside the Western

hegemony produces a parochial

understanding of HRM theory and practices.

MARGINALISED VOICES

T H E E T H I C S O F H R P R O F E S S I O N A L S

S E C T I O N

Many high-profile corporate scandals such

as Enron could be traced back to

problematic HRM policies and practices

that pressured employees to achieve

financial goals at any cost (Deckop, 2006).

ETHICAL SCANDALS

Performance-based pay schemes, like share options for executives, have been argued to encourage unethical behaviours (Deckop, 2006).

HUMAN RESOURCE ETHICS Human resource managers are idealised as rational, neutral

and objective.

Ethics for HRM Ethics then flows from that as straightforward laws and regulations or a

code of conduct that governs how HR professionals ought to behave.

Yet Sociologically… Human resource professionals are embedded within social relationships

and contexts.

HUMAN RESOURCE ETHICS Given the relational nature of their work, human resource

professionals have to:

1. Distance;

2. Depersonalise; and

3. Dissemble workers.

(de Gama, McKenna and Peticca-Harris, 2012)

For Linehan and O’Brien (2017), the key

question is not whether ‘HRM is ethical’ or

not, but what are the processes of ethical

decision-making (including the complex

emotions) for human resource professionals.

HUMAN RESOURCE ETHICS

T H E F U T U R E O F H R M S E C T I O N

A DIFFERENT LANGUAGE Kerr Inkson (2008) suggests changing “human

resource management” to “human partnership

management” in order to recentre the humanity of

workers.

This would recognise that employees are not just

organisational assets to be deployed by superior

agents, but are agents themselves who invest in their

own intrinsic and material profit.

IS THERE HOPE? Critics like Thomas Klikauer (2015) argues that

management knowledge can only exist for a

managerial class. Meanwhile, theorists and

practitioners “[fail] to highlight the inherent

contradictions between human existence and

management” (Klikauer, 2015, p. 212) as management

is inherently anti-democratic; hierarchy-creating and

sustaining; and based on power, domination, and

oppression.

WEEK 10 Futurism

Radical reimaginings of our future

Read the required readings, attend the

lecture and tutorial.

NEXT WEEK

REFERENCES CRITICAL MANAGEMENT THEORY

Collinson, D.L. (2012), ‘Prozac leadership and the limits of positive thinking’, Leadership, 8(2), pp. 87–107.

* de Gama, N., McKenna, S. and Peticca-Harris, A. (2012), ‘Ethics and HRM: Theoretical and conceptual analysis’, Journal of Business Ethics, 111(1), pp. 97–108.

Deckop, J.R. (ed.) (2006), Human Resource Management Ethics, Charlotte, NC: Information Age Publishing.

Dent, M. and Whitehead, S. (eds.), (2013), Managing Professional Identities: Knowledge, Performativities and the ‘New’ Professional, New York: Routledge.

Fotaki, M. (2016), ‘Management teaching promotes inequality’, London School of Economics Business Review: http://blogs.lse.ac.uk/businessreview/2016/12/09/management-teaching-promotes-inequality/

Greenwood, M.R. (2002), ‘Ethics in HRM: A review and conceptual analysis’, Journal of Business Ethics, 36(3), pp. 261– 278.

Greenwood, M. and Van Buren, H.J. (2017), ‘Ideology in HRM scholarship: Interrogating the ideological performativity of “new unitarism”’, Journal of Business Ethics, 142(4), pp. 663–678.

Inkson, K. (2008), ‘Are humans resources?’ Career Development International, 13(3), pp. 270–279.

Kelan, E.K. (2014), ‘From biological clocks to unspeakable inequalities: The intersectional positioning of young professionals’, British Journal of Management, 25(4), pp. 790–804.

* = the required readings of the topic

REFERENCES CRITICAL MANAGEMENT THEORY

Klikauer, T. (2015), ‘Critical management studies and critical theory: A review’, Capital & Class, 39(2), pp. 197–220.

* Linehan, C. and O’Brien, E. (2017), ‘From tell-tale signs to irreconcilable struggles: The value of emotion in exploring the ethical dilemmas of HR professionals’, Journal of Business Ethics, 141(4), pp. 763–777.

Lowry, D. (2006), ‘HR managers as ethical decision-makers: Mapping the terrain’, Asia Pacific Journal of Human Resources, 44(2), pp. 171–183.

Ruggunan, S.D. (2016), ‘Decolonising management studies: A love story’, in Critical Management Studies in the South African Context, Cape Town: Acta Commercii, pp. 103–259. Available at: http://www.scielo.org.za/pdf/acom/v16n2/05.pdf.

Sveningsson, S. and Alvesson, M. (2003), ‘Managing managerial identities: Organizational fragmentation, discourse and identity struggle’, Human Relations, 56(10), pp. 1163–1193.

Xu, Q. (2008), ‘A question concerning subject in The Spirit of Chinese Capitalism’, Critical Perspectives on International Business, 4(2/3), pp. 1742–2043.

REFERENCES SOCIOLOGY

Clay, K.L. (2019), ‘“Despite the odds”: Unpacking the politics of Black resilience neoliberalism’, American Educational Research Journal, 56(1), pp. 75–110.

Gill, R. (2014), ‘Unspeakable inequalities: Post feminism, entrepreneurial subjectivity, and the repudiation of sexism among cultural workers’, Social Politics, 21(4), pp. 509–528.

Gill, R. and Orgad, S. (2015), ‘The confidence cult(ure)’, Australian Feminist Studies, 30(86), pp. 324–344.

Giroux, H.A. (2003), ‘Spectacles of race and pedagogies of denial: Anti-Black racist pedagogy under the reign of neoliberalism’, Communication Education, 52(3/4), pp. 191–211.

hooks, b. (2003), We Real Cool: Black Men and Masculinity, Hoboken: Taylor and Francis.

hooks, b. (2009), Belonging: A Culture of Place, New York: Routledge.

McRobbie, A. (2008), The Aftermath of Feminism: Gender, Culture and Social Change, London: Sage.

Mohanty, C.T. (2013), ‘Transnational feminist crossings: On neoliberalism and radical critique’, Signs: Journal of Women in Culture and Society, 38(4), pp. 967–991.

Tuhiwai Smith, L. (2012), Decolonizing Methodologies: Research and Indigenous Peoples, 2nd ed., London: Zed Books.

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