Towards Critical Human Resource Management Education (CHRME): a sociological imagination approach

The ascendency and critique of contemporary HRM

The rise of the HRM paradigm in Britain from the late 1980s is closely linked with another seminal development; the cognitive capture of the political elite by the neoliberal ideology that challenged post-war consensus around Keynesianism and labour collectivism. This ideological impulse saw the renaissance of ‘market discipline’, the shrinking of the state and a shift of the balance of economic power from labour to capital (Harvey, 2007). The rise of this neo-liberalist agenda provided the backcloth to the change towards individualized employment relations and, in Britain, a burgeoning of academic interest in the study of the US import, HRM. An added fillip was the well-documented decline of trade union membership, collective bargaining coverage and strikes, and the evident eclipse of the once-dominant academic field of industrial relations (Darlington, 2009).

John Storey’s (1989) seminal text generated the ‘first wave’ of debate on the nature and ideological significance of the HRM model. One aspect of the debate focused on ‘hard’ and ‘soft’ versions of HRM. The ‘hard’ version gravitated towards the ‘resource’ concept to strategically manage work and the employment relationship. It was predicated on orthodox management theory that viewed workers as a cost that therefore must be controlled. The ‘soft’ HRM model, discussed in Walton’s (1985) early and influential article ‘From control to commitment in the workplace’, considers employees as assets rather than as a disposable liability. It emphasized the term ‘human’ and advocated high investment in employees to secure high motivation, and the performance benefits of shifting from ‘control’ to ‘commitment’ strategies to enlist employee skills and loyalty. This socially consensual management model became known by various labels, such as the ‘high-commitment workplace’. A determinate ‘bundle’ of HRM ‘best practices’ and ‘lean’ forms of work organization facilitated the possibilities of synergies, which, it was argued, provided a distinctive basis for sustainable competitive advantage (Barney, 1991). The newly imported HRM paradigm was heavily influenced by the ‘strategy’ concept (Porter, 1985). This led to the ‘second wave’ of debate on strategic HRM, which posited that to ‘survive’ HRM must be ‘integrated as a vital part of the planning system in organizations’ (Devanna et al., 1984: 11). In the 1990s, a ‘third wave’ of research and publication emerged that focused on the HRM–performance relationship. Designing a combination of determinate HRM practices became the issue in the HRM academic field (Ichniowski et al., 1996). The ensuing HRM–performance debate has been intense and often inconclusive (Gerhart, 2008), making the ‘performance goals’ of the research an ‘ill-fated project’ (Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010: 804). For some academics, the HRM model was a distinctive approach that signalled the beginnings of a new theoretical sophistication, while detractors characterized HRM as ‘old wine in a new bottle’ (Keenoy, 1990: 367).

In Britain, the HRM paradigm came under critical scrutiny from three academic fields: industrial relations (Godard, 1991; Guest, 1987; Hyman, 1987); critical management studies (Keenoy, 1990; Watson, 2004); and labour process theory (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). The antecedent of the industrial relations critique of HRM is found in an early contribution from Guest (1987) in which he drew connections between industrial relations and HRM. Employment relations under ‘old’ style personnel management were categorized as pluralist, collectivist and low trust, whereas, in contrast, new HRM regimes were characterized as unitarist, individualist and high trust. HRM was seen as a Trojan horse for union avoidance. Hyman (1987) offered a Marxian analysis arguing that employer commitment to employees is always conditional and both the control over and commitment from workers is the leitmotiv of the HRM model. Historically there is ample evidence of gender-based occupational segregation with men dominating ‘masculine’ industrial relations (IR) negotiating positions, while ‘soft’ HR practices, such as recruitment and training, was devolved to women (Legge, 1986). The academic discourse reflected the gendered perceptions of IR and HRM, with an agenda, largely, set by ‘important men’ in one discipline talking to other ‘important men’ in another (Townley, 1994: 16). A coterie of critical management studies (CMS) scholars emphasized the need to understand the wider social-economic context that shapes – if not determines – management action (Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010). Karen Legge (2005) provided a seminal critique of the HRM model, not least for the empirical mismatch between theory and actual HR practices, what has become an iconic description, the ‘rhetoric’ and ‘reality’ of HRM. Watson (2004) argued that HRM neglected the ‘unintended consequences’ and the ‘collateral damage’ to others resulting from the application of HRM practices. Post-Braverman labour process theory (LPT) unmasked the crucial role HRM techniques play in organizing and controlling the workforce. One of the key propositions of LPT is the indeterminacy of the employment contract – the mismatch between the capacity for work and actual work effort – and, concomitantly, the persistence of worker resistance to management control strategies attempting to close the gap (Thompson and Ackroyd, 1995). In this view, HRM constitutes a nexus of control practices, a technology of power, designed at making workers’ behaviour and performance calculable and predictable (Townley, 1994). This summary of critical voices is inherently more sceptical about the ‘progressive’ nature of HRM and its capacity to reconcile the competing interests of capital and labour. Like HRM, these critical approaches do not speak with one voice, but they have provided a useful antidote to prescriptive, normative approaches to HRM.

The context of management education

Alongside the import of HRM, the context of management education has undergone monumental changes. These changes include: the increasing dominance of the HRM field at the expense of IR; the imposition of ‘market discipline’ in university education (Callinicos, 2006; Willmott, 1995) and a growing emphasis in teaching ‘employability’ skills (Yorke, 2006). The eclipse of IR by HRM is illustrated by the closure of Keele University’s department of industrial relations. The university’s rationale for closure was the claim that individual IR academics did not possess the ‘appropriate skill sets’ to teach HRM. The University’s decision, however, was widely interpreted as an ‘attack on the legitimacy of critical social science’ (Darlington, 2009: 1). While not to diminish the significance of the closure of the department in Keele, those of us who started our career teaching critical trade union and IR studies have reached an accommodation with the teaching of HRM by adopting a critical approach derived from the IR tradition. However, individual accommodation does not lessen the significance of the rise of the so-called ‘business-facing’ university. With research and teaching priorities designed to meet the needs of business, these new institutions are emblematic of the effects of competitive imperatives shaping university curricula and education.

Less obvious are the complex ways in which academics have become embedded in a nexus of academic procedures and practices, such as budgeting and bidding, and how these invisible technologies of power ‘estrange’ academics (Latimer and Skeggs, 2011: 393). An awareness of the neo-liberal context is an important consideration in the debate on university management education and pedagogy. Not least, because the perceived commodification of education and failure to problematize ‘client power’ can undermine efforts by teaching faculty to introduce critical management pedagogy (Sinclair, 2007). The Chartered Institute of Personnel and Development (CIPD) has had a direct effect on the university HRM curriculum by emphasizing explicit ‘what’ and ‘how’ knowledge, with less attention to its outcomes and the interests it serves (Watson, 2010). The trend towards teaching ‘what’ and ‘how’ knowledge and ‘competencies’ is, in part, driven by the CIPD and by research evincing that most preferred employers report they look to recruit graduates with ‘employability skills’, defined as ‘a set of achievements, skills, understandings and personal attributes, that make graduates more likely to gain employment’ (Yorke, 2006: 8).

The liberal concept of a university is to act as a centre of free thought where intellectuals can challenge beliefs and be the source of new thinking. Rarely, however, has this concept been realized for long periods. In the 1920s the French essayist Julien Benda, argued in The Treason of the Intellectuals (1928/2006) that scholars had abandoned the ideal of ‘disinterested judgement’ and had supported ‘flagrant injustices’ in their own countries. George Davie’s (1986) ‘democratic intellectualism’ resonated with Benda’s argument thematically. Today, scholars in business schools collectively are vulnerable to the accusation of intellectual betrayal. Far from acting as a catalyst for critiquing the dominant neoliberal agenda, business schools, collectively, have offered little intellectual opposition to free-market ideology. There are, of course, outstanding academics in Russell Group and post-1992 university business schools. The central argument is that the majority has neglected critical social science. The abandonment of the panoply of intellectual ideals has had the effect of legitimizing the neoliberal agenda and, arguably, management scholars are partly to blame for the 2008 crisis (Currie et al., 2010). That business schools largely failed to act as a counterweight to prevailing neo-liberalism ideology is perhaps best illustrated by the pointed observation by US economist, Paul Krugman: ‘economists have been part of the problem, not part of the solution’ (2012: 92). The failure of mainstream economics is further highlighted by recent reports of undergraduates challenging the dominance of orthodox free-market teaching and demanding a more eclectic curriculum that includes, among other issues, inequality (Inman, 2014).

The relevance and value of critical social science is illustrated by Gillian Tett’s (2009) searing narrative of the global financial crisis. She argues that finance is presented as a string of mathematical equations and that the economic models used by the bankers did not give enough emphasis to all the ‘human issues’. Thus ‘the finance world’s lack of interest in wider matters cuts to the very heart of what has gone wrong’ (2009: 298). In essence, politicians, financial regulators and bankers failed to employ what Tett calls ‘holistic thought’, one that analyses personal or local problems collectively and, often challenging social elites, with full understanding that these problems are linked to wider macro and global structures. The central argument put forward here is that management scholars palpably failed to employ holistic thinking too.

HRM: A discipline in crisis

The post-global financial crisis context has cast a long shadow over business schools and HRM education therein. The crisis in the academic management discipline of HRM takes several forms. The first is the discrepancy between the rhetoric and social reality of HRM. In this ‘age of austerity’ insecure zero-hour contracts, low pay, underemployment, in-work poverty, income inequality and seven-figure bonuses to ‘supermanagers’ (Piketty, 2014: 315) sit uncomfortably with the widely espoused principle ‘people are an asset’; which impacts negatively on the moral authority of managers generally, and HRM professionals in particular. The second is the consensual HRM-inspired high-commitment workplace model. The global financial crisis has highlighted not only the problems of reconciling control–cooperation dynamics but, at both an intellectual and practical level, it raises the perennial question whether global free-market capitalism can deliver on the promises of mutuality (Thompson, 2003). Those organizations that have achieved performance gains through the appropriate HRM practices are ‘not immune from destructive effects of enhanced demand for shareholder value’ (Thompson and Harley, 2008: 161).

A third consideration is the status of academic HRM. It is evident that its internal coherence has again become problematic. As an intellectual construct, ‘carved out of the general managerial function’ (Kaufman, 2008: 34), HRM-performance research provides compelling evidence that the boundaries and subject matter of HRM need to be redefined. Thus, research that conceptualizes the HR ‘black box’ as a relational construct suggests that as an academic discipline HRM has to be defined in a more broad, generic way to include, for example, theories of leadership, organizational culture and organizational behaviour. By implication this would justify bolting the academic discipline of HRM back onto the general management function. Individual scholars with a background in research and teaching in HRM would find themselves vulnerable to redundancy because they have an inappropriate skill set to teach general management: a case of déjà vu.

Post-2008 developments have put an unforgiving spotlight on economics teaching in Britain’s universities (Inman, 2013, 2014). A similar dynamic could operate in management teaching. Like their peers studying economics, if management students perceive that the prescriptive HRM ‘toolbox’ approach bears little relation to the way organizations function, HRM teaching will come under pressure to embrace inequality theories and alternative governance models to undermine the dominance of orthodox management theories. There is now a body of work (e.g. Alvesson et al., 2009; Delbridge and Keenoy, 2010; Thompson, 2003; Watson, 2010) that implicitly or explicitly acknowledges the need for critical management pedagogy. Specifically, it is argued that if business schools are to contribute to finding solutions to a variety of crises they have to engage their students in a type of learning that will produce leaders who are able to make organizations effective in a variety of different ways: more efficient, more ecologically sustainable, more satisfying, more equitable and more democratic.

Reynolds (1999) enunciates four broad principles of critical management pedagogy: questioning the taken-for-granted assumptions in the theory and practice of management; making explicit power relations in management practices; challenging claims of rationality and objectivity; and movement towards an emancipatory or democratic ideal. Sinclair’s (2007) approach to critical leadership pedagogy emphasized the need to challenge leadership orthodoxy and to expose management students to critical ideas of power beyond role. Although transformative and original in terms of the business school debate, critical HRM education (CHRME) is derivative from the wider debate on critical management studies. The motif of CHRME is to stretch the discipline boundary beyond the concerns of HRM-performance issues and to use the ‘sociological imagination’ to explore critically HRM and business and the relationships between business and society.

Towards CHRME

The broader antecedents to CHRME are derived from the wider debate on critical management, the traditions of industrial relations, critical HRM teaching and the sociology of work traditions (as reflected in the pages of WES and in its readers).Taken together, its five principles offer HRM educators a radical alternative to current approaches to teaching HRM in universities. The five principles of CHRME include:

Michael Collins (1991: 118) contends that transformative pedagogy ‘needs to be informed by a theory of justice and social theories of action with which its practitioners can engage’. Re-interpreting Collins’ thesis, CHRME is a potential transformative force in that it sees the main task for workplace scholars is to challenge all taken-for-granted assumptions about management practices, to ask hard-hitting questions on power and inequality and to encourage critical reflection on employment issues and their place within both their societal and global contexts. Further, from the view of a transformative pedagogy, CHRME privileges a concern with influencing HR policy and practice, on the one hand, and purposively seeking ways to create a more equitable, dignified and sustainable workplace. If these shared commitments coalesce, CHRME would evade complicity with prevailing forms of mismanagement, social injustice and environmental degradation.

Conclusions

The global financial crisis and, especially in Britain, the enduring focus on maximizing short-term profits and share price, rather than risky new investment by ‘ownerless corporations’ (Hutton, 2014), provides a cogent case for critically examining management education. Within this contextual framework, there seems to be common ground that university management education has to obsess less on ‘employability’ and focus on studying the hidden moral assumptions of all the management theory: the efficient distribution of wealth; exploring how management choices affect workers, society and the environment; and alternative governance models and industrial democracy. Academic HRM has a responsibility for educating a new generation who can better address the competing demands for profit, social justice and environmental protection. Related to this responsibility CHRME plays a pivotal role in the unmasking of a world of structural inequalities, indeterminacy, indignities and often tyranny: workplace life as it is. Paraphrasing Julien Benda (1928/2006), philosopher George Davie (1986) and economist Thomas Piketty (2014), the main task for HRM educators is to offer social leadership, to inform democratic debate, to subject all positions to constant critical scrutiny and to be attuned to the realities of domination, exploitation and discrimination. CHRME is a contribution to a wider debate in university education on the tradition of critical social science (Elger, 2009; Watson, 2009, 2010) and the need to make management education more ‘critical’ (Currie et al., 2010). Since 1989, the voluminous literature on HRM affirms a process of ‘maturity’ of a discipline that looks ‘outwards’, to different societal effects, and ‘inwards’; that is, it is concerned with cause–effect issues (Boxall et al., 2007). The enhanced status these developments have given to the discipline should not be under-estimated. This article is not, then, seeking to privilege CHRME over other critical academic traditions. There are two points worth noting, however. The CHRME impulse advocated puts the onus on management educators to make the academic field of HRM less partisan and more critical by using a systematic set of principles to extend the analysis of HRM to largely excluded voices and cause–effect chains: a greater concern with questions of ‘by whom’ and ‘for whom?’ Second, CHRME, by broadening the scope of the subject beyond workplace-level analysis, connects analytical HRM, employment relations, the labour process and critical management traditions. Third, CHRME principles can contribute towards unmasking the reality of structural inequalities in workplace life. Anything less is to falsify and impoverish the notion of critical social science in the academic field of HRM and management generally.

The focus of this article has been on critical pedagogy and in the context of ‘disconnected’ global capitalism much has been omitted due to space. Thomas Piketty’s book Capital in the Twenty-First Century has effectively punctured the myths of neo-liberal economic agenda and made a compelling case for a ‘return to the state’ (2014: 476) in the present crisis in inequality. This work strongly suggests that state labour market policies and union strategies are integral to CHRME. There is also a plausible case to be made that given tuition fees and the commodification of higher education, it is easier to research and publish critically than it is to teach critically, and management scholars need to know whether the effects of the 2008 global economic crisis have changed what is taught in UK business schools: whether, for example, the crisis has produced HRM modules that challenge mainstream thinking similar to Manchester University’s ‘Bubbles, Panics and Crashes’ economics module. Finally, further research needs to consider the potential and limits of alternative industrial democracy models. To take one example, the Common Weal agenda of the Jimmy Reid Foundation (Duffy et al., 2013) could be subject to robust conceptual and empirical examination. CHRME is a contribution to thinking about the pedagogical tools for exploring such issues.