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Introduction

.......................................................................................................................................... Over the last 20 years “HRM” has emerged as a global discourse. During that time it has mutated from its cultural origins in the US into an internationally recognized semiotic for “modern people management.” In terms of conventional usage, “Human Resource Management” offers a seemingly neutral framework for the analysis of a wide range of issues relating to management policy and practice, strategic planning and the business process, employee resourcing and development, work and work organization, organizational culture, motivation and performance as well employee relations and employment regulation (Boxall, Purcell, and Wright 2007). In consequence, HRM has come to occupy a significant role in the literatures of organizational behavior, strategic management, business policy, international management and inter-cultural management. And, as a discourse of change underpinning management practice in the so-called globalizing economy, HRM seems to enjoy unparalleled success. This chapter offers a critical account of the mainstream HRM literature through the medium of discourse analysis. No singular definition of discourse analysis is possible but, insofar as it is possible to generalize, discourse analysts are interested in the implications of how language (and other signs) are deployed to present and re-present social reality. “Critical” discourse analysis takes many forms and utilizes a very wide variety of methodologies (see Ch. 10, “Discourse and Critical Management Studies”). As an analytic perspective, it offers a variety of social

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scientific approaches through which particular “discursive constructions” or—to use Foucault’s term—“discursive formations” can be explored in order to expose their underlying assumptions about the projected nature of social reality. More generally, there is a concern with not only alternative possible readings but also with what particular discourses exclude or marginalize and with how discourse may be deployed to shape social subjectivities. In this respect, the core assumption informing “critical” varieties of discourse analysis is that “discourse” is inextricably implicated in the exercise of social power. Since the principal concern of this chapter is to account for the discourse of “academic HRM,” the most suitable analytic narrative to construct a “critical” account of HRM is to see it as a discursive cultural artifact.

Language, History, and Politics

.......................................................................................................................................... Unsurprisingly, HRM textbooks deploy the term as an unproblematic conceptual metaphor signifying the full range of policies and practices which can be applied when managing “human resources.” At one time—when what we now call HRM was known as Personnel Management—these were usually confined to the perhaps more routine aspects of managing employment relations: recruitment, selection, and training in the context of what was then called “manpower” planning; remuneration and wage systems, trade unions and bargaining, and all the various procedures involved in such routines. The arrival of HRM has led to a widening of textbook agendas to encompass a more expansive and more detailed concern with employee development and learning—which now self-consciously includes managers—as well as such issues as diversity and performance management, and—and this is perhaps the most significant change—a concern with both the international and strategic aspects of HRM policy and practice. To oversimplify: if “personnel management” addressed the managerial needs of industrial or “Fordist” production and organization then HRM has evolved to meet the perceived demands on managing human resources in the post-industrial or global economy. Such terms are a brutal characterization of an immensely complex process of continuous change. They refer to two associated changes in managerial practice in advanced western societies: first, a presumed shift from mass production to more flexible forms of work organization and, secondly, a presumed change of emphasis in managing the labor resource. Where managers had once sought to directly control what was seen as a reactive collectivized labor force they now attempt to engage and motivate what is seen as a more individualized and responsive labor resource. This shift of focus is reflected in the new agendas pursued by HRM textbooks (if not in HR practice) which is signified in the commonplace epithet

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that “people are our most valuable resource”. However, there are also dangers in such linear historical generalization. While the precise origins of the term itself are obscure—Marciano (1995) claims the term “human resources” was first used by Peter Drucker in 1954—as a tangible academic management specialism, HRM appears in the US sometime in the 1960s (Strauss 2001; Kaufman 2007). However, as a culturally embedded discourse, it is Roy Jacques (1996: 136–142) who offers the most compelling and insightful account of the situated meanings which inform our contemporary understanding of HRM. In a ground-breaking discursive analysis of US management thought he argues the origins of “HRM” can be found in the ideas which emerged from the historical conjunction of scientific management, the employment managers movement and industrial psychology between 1900–1920. He demonstrates that a clear recognition of what was later to be called “the human side of enterprise” was in place long before the Human Relations movement. For example, a 1916 textbook includes the observation that: “As the engineers, or technical executives, learned to control physical resources by science, it now remains . . . to control the human factors in industry in accordance with the fundamental principles of human nature” (Jones 1916 quoted in Jacques 1996: 138). Despite the essentialist undertone, such a thought seems to presage more recent concerns with the ineluctable control of employee subjectivities (Rose 1999; Alvesson and Willmott 2002; Collinson 2003), the management of meaning (Gowler and Legge 1983) and the cultural construction of employee identities (Keenoy and Anthony 1992). The elements of this historic narrative are underlined by Kaufman (2007: 23): “If there were two themes that pervaded the 1920s HRM literature, it was that labor must be looked at as a distinctively human factor and that the central purpose of HRM is to foster cooperation and unity of interest between the firm and workers.” The managerialist implications of such a statement are self-evident. And it seems plausible that such emphases in US management thought—which reflect both the relatively unquestioned cultural status of “business” in the US as well as the historically more problematic social legitimacy of trade unions (Perlman 1928/1966)—may help to explain why the arrival of the discourse of HRM in Europe was, in contrast to the US, so much more intellectually contentious. As Strauss (2001) notes, HRM developed slowly in the US where it was seamlessly incorporated into management thought. In contrast, it appeared in British universities almost overnight in the mid 1980s and, by the early 1990s, its introduction had effectively transformed the language deployed to analyze employment relations. It not only presaged the final demise of Britain’s culturally distinctive “voluntarism” which had informed employment regulation for nearly two hundred years (Fox 1985) but, more generally, the post World War II pan-European political consensus which had prioritized the maintenance of full employment as a fundamental social “good.” This latter European socio-economic policy objective had generated a succession of “corporatist” tripartite initiatives between employers, unions, and

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the state designed to “manage” their competing and conflicting interests and, in particular, to protect employment levels and wages from the worst vicissitudes of the trade cycle (Lehmbruch and Schmitter 1982). Such collaborative institutional arrangements became most extensive in the 1970s. Discourse can only be understood in context and the historical link between HRM and what we might call the “globalization project” cannot be underestimated. Principally through a series of GATT agreements, the 1980s saw rapid and progressive deregulation of world markets in trade, labor, and—perhaps most importantly—finance. The latter permitted an increasingly free flow of capital between all continents. During this period, both the UK and the US aggressively pursued neoliberal economic policies designed to reconfigure socio-economic life. Utilizing “Chicago School” monetarist economic thinking to inform policy, the singular discursive (and ideological) consequence of “Thatcherism” in the UK and “Reaganomics” in the US was that the discourse of “the market” became the fundamental political and ethical touchstone of socio-economic regulation— trade unions were marginalized and increased unemployment was regarded as an acceptable “cost” of restructuring. Unsurprisingly in such a context, the rhetorical mantra of HRM—“people are our most valuable resources—was met with a combination of cynicism, ridicule, and disbelief in academia. And not just in the UK: Kelly (2003: 166), in a detailed historical comparison of the impact of HRM in the US, Britain, and Australia, suggests that HRM came to Australasia as “a sharp shock” in 1990. However, she also points out that the discourse of HRM was only one among a number of influences contributing to rise of neoliberal political and managerial polices for “In terms of the transmission of ideas . . . responses to the advent of HRM in three Anglophone countries were mediated by the disciplinary and academic traditions in those countries and the role of public policy.” Significantly, these historic changes were not replicated elsewhere in the social democracies of Western Europe. These societies have—to this day—demonstrated a far greater cultural resilience in protecting their historic methods of employment regulation (Ferner and Hyman 1998). While, in part, this reflects a greater commitment to the ideals of European cooperation through the European Union, it is—more importantly— also the case that none of these societies embraced the “neoliberal solution” to economic reform with anything like the conviction displayed in Britain, the US, and Australia. This very brief consideration of the history and emergence of HRM illustrates four important analytic points. First, it should be clear that discourses are best understood as historically situated and culturally conditioned artifacts. The term “HRM” has been exported to an extremely wide variety of contexts and, in this respect alone, it cannot have a singular definition or uncontested cultural meaning. This is why it is best seen as a “floating” or “symbolic” signifier—a generic term with a range of possible culturally situated meanings. In terms of the argument

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to be developed here, in general, it is seen as a semiotic reflecting managerial— one might even say, corporate—ambitions in the age of the global economy. One problem with “floating” signifiers is that their social meanings are always “open.” In practice, there is a continuous iteration between the generality (how action is discursively projected or “framed”) and the contingent (how discourse is situationally “enacted’). More graphically, there is always a tension in translating what we “do” in terms of what we “say” we are doing. For example, Willmott (1993) explored the nature of corporate culture initiatives designed to empower individuals. What his analysis showed is that there are strong parallels between such initiatives and the “thought-control” exercised in Orwell’s Nineteen Eighty-Four. Secondly, it should be clear that the spread of the discourse of HRM appears to be intimately associated with the political adoption of neoliberal economic policies which, in turn—and thirdly—is reflected in the undisputed link between HRM and the global expansion of corporate capitalism. For example, Brewster, Sparrow, and Vernon (2007: 3), in highlighting the relationship between international corporations and HRM, assert “Multinationals are economically dominant” and note that some 63,000 transnational companies now account for two thirds of world trade. For such corporations, HRM seems to be a preferred discourse. However, it is also the case that a glance at HRM scholarship demonstrates the term has also been employed to account for employment relations in almost any country and in almost any workplace across all six continents. Whether it is appropriate or not to use the conceptual apparatus of HRM in the distinctive cultural contexts of China (Cooke 2005), India (Pio 2007), or Turkey (Ercek 2006) is not the question here: the empirical point is that HRM has, in effect, emerged as the dominant “discourse of choice” for the academic analysis of employment relations. As such, alternative accounts of how we can theorize or manage the employment—such as those which emphasize the conflict-based nature of the relationship—have been progressively marginalized. Fourthly, what these latter points vividly demonstrate is that “Language controls and structures possibilities for action and the signifier “HRM” is a powerful element in the emerging language of organizing” (Jacques 1999: 200). We now turn to the question of whether or not it is also a “powerful” medium in the process of “managing meaning” and “manufacturing the employee” (the title of Jacques, 1996 book).

The Nature of the Change

.......................................................................................................................................... The consequences of linguistic reconfiguration can be complex. While transplanting a culturally embedded construct such as HRM from the US will invariably

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mean something is “lost in translation’, the construct is not merely “translated”: in the process of being adapted for local use it is also “transformed.” This means that, in usage, it is subject to localized reinterpretations which add new meanings and additional nuances. Hence, reflecting the social action of academics, managers, consultants, publishers, and others who deploy the term in a multitude of localized meanings, the artifact is subject to a continuous process of change. While it can secure a relatively stabilized meaning in some institutional settings (such as university courses or corporate practice), it has no fixed or “fixable” identity (Keenoy 1997, 1999). This can be illustrated by briefly exploring what happened to “HRM” once it crossed the Atlantic. Of specific interest here is how the global “identity” of HRM has been developed and the implications of this for our wider understanding of how the labor resource is regulated (and controlled). In 1987 David Guest constructed what was to become an iconic model of HRM and he has subsequently emerged as a key figure in the developing the discourses of HRM. His model drew heavily on US sources and he suggested that: HRM comprises a set of polices designed to maximize organizational integration, employee commitment, flexibility and quality of work. (Guest 1987, 503)

His prime concern was to identify a range of hypotheses to test the impact of HRM in practice and his prescriptive template offered a very carefully circumscribed set of idealized conditions for the creation of “model” high-trust employment relations. In contrast, John Storey—who was among the first to conduct empirical studies of HRM in practice (outside the US)—adopted a more contingent approach and his nominal definition of HRM is: a distinctive approach to employment management which seeks to achieve competitive advantage through the strategic deployment of a highly committed and capable workforce, using an integrated array of cultural, structural and personnel techniques. (Storey 1995: 5)

Using the “implicit models of the managers interviewed” Storey (1992, 34) compiled what he called a four-dimensional “ideal-type” model of HRM. This comprised: managers” beliefs and assumptions, a strategic managerial focus, the role and skills of line managers and a series of key levers which articulate the implementation of HRM. Both Guest and Storey were concerned to identify HRM as a distinctive approach to managing employees and both consistently demarcated themselves from the generic conception of HRM (that is, as a euphemism to cover any practice related to employment management). These two approaches complemented each other for, while Guest prefigured the discourse(s) of “high performance work systems,” Storey’s concern with strategy anticipated the significance of the resource-based view and the discourses around “strategic” HRM which emerged subsequently. Both “identifications” have proved remarkably resilient for either construction

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could be widely endorsed as a reasonable description of the taken-for-granted generic meaning attached to HRM by contemporary managers. Their wider historical significance lies in the way in which they redefined the analytic focus and agenda for the analysis of employment relations. The discursive clues to this lie in the way in which they framed their reinterpretations of the US-inspired conceptions of HRM (e.g., Fombrun, Tichy, and Devanna 1984; Walton and Lawrence 1985). Guest commences his definition with “HRM comprises a set of polices” while Storey refers to “a distinctive approach to employment management” (emphases added). Such characterizations of the floating signifier of HRM were a clear indication that, henceforth, the analytic priority was the managerial “problem” of improving employee performativity. More specifically, alongside this privileged managerial concern, both “identifications” emphasized the adoption of integrative, employee-oriented management practices. In this respect, they resonated deeply with the neoliberal “solution” to economic recovery and growth. In contrast to the analytical frameworks which HRM came to replace, the fundamental discursive shift involved the replacement of a “pluralist” framing of the issues (in which the employment relationship is understood to involve, articulate, and institutionalize differential interests) with a “unitary” framing of the issues (in which all members of an organization are assumed to have mutual interests). Hence, in neither (re-)construction of the employment relationship is there any space for trade unions or joint decision-making; there is no mention of workers or employee interests; and there is no role for social power—far less the commonplace idea that “legitimate industrial conflict” has to be managed through some form of negotiation or state involvement. Nor are there any wider concerns about social justice or the distribution of rewards: both approaches privilege individualism and subsume “ethics” within a taken for granted market mechanism. In effect, the new conceptual–theoretic framing offered by HRM—with its semiotic focus on “resourceful human beings” and the projection of “managers” as social actors intent on promoting integration, commitment, employee development, individualism, communication and empowerment—fundamentally reconfigured the academic approach to employment relations. One important discursive consequence of reframing the issues in this fashion was that, ineluctably, much mainstream academic analysis became subservient to the search for prescriptive solutions. And, as noted above, it is no coincidence that this “internationalized” discursive artefact appears just as a variety of fundamental socio-economic and political changes are being installed to deregulate the world economy. This necessitated the liberalization of labor markets, a process which was informed by the simultaneous projection of a seemingly humanistic “philosophy” of HRM to facilitate (and massage) the strategic shift from state and collective regulation to the “market” and the management of meaning (Peters and Waterman 1982; Townley 1994; Willmott 1993, Keenoy and Anthony 1992; Legge 1995/2005).

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Chasing the Shadows of HRM?

.......................................................................................................................................... The intellectual consequence of this process of discursive reconstruction has been both insidious and dramatic for it has led to a relentless academic concern with isolating a presumptively causal linear relationship between “HRM” and “performance”. Following Huselid’s (1995) celebrated analysis, the basic objective is to identify the “bundle” or “bundles” (MacDuffie, 1995) of HR practices which simultaneously promote employee “high commitment” and “high performance” in order to ensure, as Paauwe and Boselie (2005: 10) put it, “sustained competitive advantage [for] the organization.” Since it offers management the prospect of optimizing organizational outcomes by treating employees well, this project has obvious normative appeal. In addition—and more importantly for present purposes—it is also appears to be the core “belief ” which informs and sustains the contemporary discourse of HRM. For academic adherents it offers the prospect of pursuing knowledge which is of “practical” use—an object much valued by research-funders and those involved in HR consultancy. And for HR practitioners it offers the possibility of empirically demonstrating that HR practices “add value” to the organization to legitimize their claim to a distinctive “professional” contribution and underpins their ambition for a “strategic” role in business decision-making. Without such endorsement, the HR function might be reduced to an administrative support function of questionable legitimacy. It is little surprise proponents refer to the HR-performance project as the search for the “Holy Grail.” However, it is a project of immense intellectual ambition and ever-elaborating complexity (Legge 2001; Purcell 1999; Purcell et al. 2003; Paauwe 2004; Wright and Boswell 2002). It starts from two highly contestable and deeply ambiguous conceptual metaphors—“HRM” and “performance”—and assumes it is possible to identify precise statistical correlations in the chain of intervening variables which are presumed to link HR practices with employee/organizational performance. Thus far, this project has generated upwards of 400 articles (Hyde et al. 2006) and numerous “progress reviews”. In the most comprehensive of these, Boselie, Dietz, and Bon (2005: 80–81) analyzed 104 studies. Disarmingly, they conclude: “no consistent picture exists on what HRM is or even what it is supposed to do” and because of the “sheer variety of methods used for measuring HRM, performance and the relationship between the two, it is not possible to compare results from different studies.” Similarly, Wall and Wood (2005: 455), in a more targeted review of 25 “high quality” studies, conclude that evidence about the link between HR practices and performance “is promising but only circumstantial” while Purcell (1999) characterizes the intractable difficulties confronted by suggesting the complexities involved offer little but a choice between pursuing a chimera or racing headlong down a cul-de-sac. Hyde et al. (2006) found 387 papers for possible inclusion and,

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from these, identified 97 post-1994 “empirical” papers for analysis. The weaknesses identified seem little short of terminal: there is no agreement about the optimal “bundle” of HR practices . . . More than 30 different elements of HRM were used . . . and no single element was found to be superior to another in terms of its impact on performance. More than 30 different performance measures were used . . . and no single performance measure was dominant. The papers did not generally make explicit the theoretical perspective used . . . The majority of papers (up to 80 per cent) used methods which enabled them to show that HRM is associated with performance, but could not provide evidence that HRM causes changes in performance. The papers primarily relied on questionnaire surveys that used the responses of a single person in the organization, usually in management. (Hyde et al. 2006, x)

And, critically, they conclude: “There is very little about how or why HRM is linked to performance” (Hyde et al. 2006, 84). Legge (2001), the leading critical HRM scholar, has deconstructed the project in terms of its own positivist epistemological assumptions. She elaborates the variations and contradictions evident in the how “HRM,” “performance,” and the “relationship between the two” have been conceptualized and operationalized, identifies critical difficulties in assigning the direction of causality, and points out that— particularly in the US studies—little if any attention is paid to direct measures of employee performance. Bizarrely, not infrequently, employee performance—the critical “variable” in the project—is imputed from the financial performance of the organization (which, of course, may have little or no necessary causal connection to HR practices). As she concludes: “It is difficult to see how such studies can test causal relationships, as opposed to making theory-driven inferences about the correlations they find (Legge 2001: 28). Given the multiple situated meanings which can be attached to floating signifiers, the findings of all these reviews are unsurprising and predictable. These researchers are chasing the shadows of HRM. That seemingly normative truism—treating people well must lead to better performance?—seems self-evident. All are convinced the magic “silver bullet” (Legge, 2001) is out there somewhere; they can construct fleeting statistical associations between the elements but, on being corralled and interrogated, “HRM” fragments and, somehow, simply disappears from view (into what is now increasingly referred to as a “black box’). While technical weaknesses in specifying the objects being pursued account for some limitations, there are two more fundamental discursive problems bedevilling this ill-fated project.

The Discursive Consequences of “Method” One is beautifully, if inadvertently, exemplified in an impeccably conducted and—in its own terms—highly persuasive study by Wright, Gardner, and

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Moynihan (2003: 22) designed to “shed light on the causal process through which HR practices affect performance.” The researchers” singular advantage was that they could more easily control for a wide range of potential sources of so-called “extraneous” variance. The research site was a decentralized corporation comprised of fifty geographically dispersed quasi-autonomous business units servicing the food industry. Each unit is of a similar size, has the same range of employees and basic products and the IT systems are more or less uniform across all units. The “only” significant variation related to HR “strategies” for “business units were largely free to manage their employees however they saw fit” which presented a “unique opportunity to study the relationship between HRM and performance in a controlled field setting” (Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan 2003: 27). And, having created measures of HR practice (nine items), organizational commitment (five items) and performance (six items), the research process generated a series of powerfully significant correlations between practices, commitment and performance. But any claim to establish direct causality is carefully avoided: “the study tends to support the hypothesized relationships of both HR practices and employee commitment with business unit operational performance (Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan 2003: 33, emphases added)”. Thus, even under almost entirely favorable research conditions it appears the desired object refused to manifest itself. Why might this be? Their analytic narrative is framed within the discursive template of a positivist epistemology. This key script—which specifies stringent methodological constraints on the research procedures and practices—determined not only how the research objects were to be discursively constructed but also, insofar as possible, that these objects were removed from their muddy interactive social habitats, cleaned up and placed under bright lights where they could behave in a statistically more visibly fashion. Indeed, the authors more or less confirm this: the “purpose of research design is to maximise the experimental variance, minimise error variance and control systematic variance” and, while their study “mimics a laboratory study conducted in the field,” it remains subject to “the same criticisms that are leveled at laboratory studies” (Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan 2003: 33). Ironically, for the authors, this only means the loss of generalisability. However, the concern here is more with the naïve ontological presumption that a “laboratory study”—which involves creating a sterile, a-social environment— might prove a suitable narrative framing to explore the dynamic, situationally contingent and complex socio-political phenomena which are labeled “HRM” and its effects. The narrative constraints of such a “method” not only invoke a complex of unidirectional linear casual relationships between an assemblage of local variables but also require that the semiotics (i.e., the “data”) which represent these variables are distilled into purified statistical artifacts. For example, “organizational commitment’—a complex and highly contested conceptual object (Martin, 2001)

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—was (re)presented as five relatively anodyne—even banal—questionnaire items. These included: “I feel a strong sense of belonging to this organisation” and “I am proud to be working for this company” (Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan 2003, 29). In fairness, the authors do concede they have failed “to actually assess the behavioural constructs we use to hypothesise the relationships between HR/commitment and performance” (Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan 2003, 33). However, this is far from acknowledging the excessive degree of oversimplification necessary to “construct” performative indicators of such complex “research objects.” In effect, the amorphous and distinctly ambiguous cultural artifacts of HRM have been refined and desiccated until they submit to reconstitution and agree to be extruded as malleable statistical epiphenomena. It is a discursive process which necessarily filters out all the living breathing human interventions required to enact social phenomena and eliminates all possible individual and collective experiences which give them their various and contested situated meanings. Whatever scientized defense might be constructed from the discourse of statistical reliability, the real question here is: is it possible to “capture” a cultural artifact like “HRM” in almost total isolation from the socio-political interaction through which it is continuously coconstructed by organizational actors? (Paauwe, 2004 offers a more situationally sensitive approach.) In other words, one of the main reasons why so many studies in this project end up chasing shadows is because the myopic observational process required to “fix” HRM into a satisficing statistical form translates it into a shadow of itself. Elsewhere—and this is not an argument against systematic analysis, disciplined observation or even positivist methodology—it was noted of HRM that “to explain it is to destroy it” (Keenoy and Anthony 1992: 238).

The Discursive Consequences of “Managerialism” My argument is about surfacing the conceptual–theoretic apparatus deployed by academics to make sense of social phenomena. In this respect, the other key script informing the HR-performance project is “managerialism.” In the present context, this term refers to research which unreflectively assumes the managerial perspective is the “natural” starting point for the analysis of organizational issues (Grey 1996; Parker 2002; Alvesson and Willmott 2003). For example, Wright, Gardner, and Moynihan (2003: 21) introduce their study by remarking: “Creating competitive advantage through people requires careful attention to the practices that best leverage these assets.” This reads like a matter-of-fact axiom but it would not be unreasonable to translate it into the theoretical question: “what is the best way to more effectively exploit the labour resource?” For managers operating in a market economy this is a legitimate question but any answer to it will not necessarily tell us anything—in the social scientific sense—about how HRM “works” (in or out

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of the laboratory). Linguistic construction matters for, as this “axiom” illustrates, it remains impossible to discursively represent the social world without implicitly theorizing it (Keenoy 1997). In unreflectively privileging the managerial perspective, the majority of these studies have marginalized if not excluded not only the wider context of social action but also the voice of all but the presumed managerial interest. Hence, analytically, the managerialist perspective tends to reduce social science to a mere “servant of power” (Baritz 1960; Brief 2000). As noted above, the new definitions offered by Guest and Storey reconfigured a “normal science” intellectual issue—how should we analyze the management of the employment relationship?—into a managerial issue—how can managers better motivate and/or control employees to ensure predictable behavior in uncertain times? In consequence, the idea of a “politics,” an “economics” or a “sociology” of the employment relationship—all of which necessitate attention to the cultural and structural contexts of social action—were progressively abandoned in mainstream HRM. And—echoing the discourse of “the market” which privileges the “individual’—this shift in focus has been accompanied by an increasing emphasis on the psychology of the employee with its a-structural focus on such factors as individual motivation, discretionary effort, commitment and organizational climate/culture. These days, the contents of that “black box” are presumed to lie in the construction of HRM “systems” which “ensure that unambiguous messages are sent to employees that result in a shared construction of the meaning of the situation” so that “employees appropriately interpret and respond to the information conveyed in HRM practices” (Paauwe and Boselie, 2005: 23). In other words, it seems, we need “systems” which ensure that employees not only do what they are told to do but also believe what they are told to believe. However, this presumption that “performative” individuals could be “manufactured” in such a linear “stimulus– response” fashion seems not only manipulative but also naive for it implies that employees are little more than cultural dopes.

HRM and CMS

.......................................................................................................................................... The critical response to HRM has been vibrant and—although rarely anything but a token presence in the mainstream (Keegan and Boselie 2006)—comes from a variety of perspectives. Foremost among the critics is Karen Legge who has deconstructed almost every aspect of the discourse of HRM (see, especially, 1995/2005, 2001). Her work is complemented by that of Watson (2004) who has demonstrated how critical social science can articulate the linkages between geo-economic developments, inequality and the micro-politics of managerial HR choices while

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Winstanley and Woodall (e.g., 2000) have produced a sustained ethical critique of HRM. And, in a wide-ranging evaluation, a special issue of Organization brought together a collection which includes poststructuralist, ethical, and philosophical commentaries on the “inhuman” aspects of HRM (Steyeart and Janssens 1999). More recently, there have been highly focused critical accounts of HRM from both the labor process (Thompson and Harley 2007) and critical realist perspectives (Hesketh and Fleetwood 2006) as well as the emergence of a much needed postcolonial approach (Prasad 2003; Cooke, 2004; Tonelli Wood Jr., and Cooke 2007). What unites all these critical perspectives is a concern with the absence of any meaningful consideration of social power, differential interests, cultural variation and potential value conflict in the HRM literature. However, arguably, the most common approach has been through some form of discourse analysis. This chapter has focused on two key discursive analytic themes. First, the brief historical overview illustrates the enduring continuity of the core “HR problem”: in the context of market-relations how do managers control the labor resource through some form of employment relationship? Since market-relations are powerrelations involving variable dependencies, employment contracts are always indeterminate (i.e., an employer can buy labor but specifying precisely how that labor will behave is a matter of persuasion and negotiation after the contract has been signed). In consequence, employee relations are routinely associated with potential tension and conflict. Hence, both historically and analytically, the employment relationship has long been characterized by “three great struggles” over interests, control and motivation (Keenoy and Kelly 1998). In one respect, “HRM” is merely the latest managerial discourse deployed to massage the perennial issue of how to optimize labor costs and ensure employee performativity while simultaneously stimulating and maintaining employee motivation to work. Such massage has not been without effect and, more specifically, I have also sketched how, over the last two decades, a local US cultural artifact has emerged as a global “naturalized” discourse which informs the social practice of international corporations and refracts the neoliberal political programs which have driven localized economic deregulation (a more accurate term than “globalization”). The social construction of this quintessential managerial discourse is now underpinned by what is being propagated as “the academic management discipline of HRM” (Boxall, Purcell, and Wright 2007: 4). Secondly, I have summarized the reasons why the search for the fundamental research object pursued by mainstream HRM researchers—that “silver bullet” which will transform “individualized” employees into contemporary Stakhanovites (Siegelbaum 1988)—has proved unsuccessful (and indicated that this quest is likely to remain futile). It might seem ironic, but this failure to “prove” the seemingly self-evident truism that “the role of human resources can be crucial” (Becker and Gerhart 1996: 779) has had virtually no significant impact on the credibility of the discourses of HRM. Quite the contrary; for the intrinsic “brilliant ambiguity”

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of its conceptual apparatus (Keenoy 1990) has greased the adoption of every “new” people-management initiative from the learning organization, “boundaryless” careers and knowledge workers (which promote individualism) to a raft of performance measurement initiatives and labor-cost reduction strategies designed to institutionalize the resource-based view of labor (which engender performativity). As noted elsewhere, “there is no inconsistency in HRM embracing the logic of the market while—at the same time—“valuing” its human resources. They are valued for their “resourcefulness” (and what that costs) not their “humaneness” (and what that might deserve)” (Keenoy 1997: 836). Insofar as it is possible to generalize, this suggests that, as discourse of control, HRM embodies a discipline of “individualized performativity.” What emerges from this is a third analytic theme. That “HRM works” is not in dispute; the real puzzle concerns how it works and, in particular, how it impacts on individual sensibilities. As Alvesson (2008: 21) has observed: “Arguably, a key feature of much CMS is the interest to relate “subjectivity” to broader institutional and ideological arrangements.” This concern with understanding the nature of individualized performativity has generated a wide range of studies. Central to these is the work on Townley (1994, 2004) who offers a powerfully persuasive and sustained Foucauldian critique of HRM discourse and practice. HRM is seen as a regime of “governmentality” comprised of a wide variety of personnel/HRM techniques such as appraisal schemes and job evaluation which, collectively, constitute the “disciplinary practices” regulating social behaviour at work. Such “power– knowledge” mechanisms play a discursive role in constituting employee subjectivities and ensuring that employee performance(s) can be “managed.” The “discursive formation” of HRM is seen to act on the body, movement and even everyday gestures for it “assumes the existence of an alienated individual whose potential lies repressed, waiting to be unleashed or self-actualized when his or her true nature is uncovered. A Foucauldian conception of the subject emphasizes the constitutive role of practices in forming an identity” (Townley 1994: 109). While such a seemingly over-deterministic interpretation has not gone unchallenged (Newton 1998), the increasing resort to surveillance (Lyon, 2001) through public measures of performance such as audit (Power 2001) or even such routines as constructing a career (Grey 1994; Alvesson and Kärreman 2007) and managerial attempts to colonize the “person” are evident. Indeed, Costea, Crump, and Amiridis (2008: 670)—in a wide ranging analysis of a raft of managerial initiatives over the last twenty-five years which have focused on the “self ”—suggest managerial ambitions now embrace “the subject in its totality as an object of governance”. One example of how this translates into everyday managerial practice is vividly illustrated in Hochschild’s (1983) exploration of how emotional labor is “programed” into the work of flight attendants and bill collectors. Such service work roles involve employees being trained to display particular feelings and—in the extreme—being given detailed instructions about clothing and personal grooming. Their public

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subjectivity involves acting out emotional displays according to specific disciplines. This seeming “invasion” of the self—Rose (1999) depicts it as an attempt to “govern the soul’—holds clear implications for the social construction of identity (see Ch. 8, “CMS on Identity”). However, it is important to note that organizational discourses are rarely totalizing and there is also evidence of employee and managerial resistance in the analyses of authenticity, dis-identification and misbehavior in contemporary work organizations (Brown 2006; Fleming and Spicer 2003; Reedy 2008; Francis 2006; Ackroyd and Thompson 1999). This flawed potential of HRM to constitute the subject in terms of “individualized performativity” is elaborated in Carter and Jackson’s (2004: 473–474, 476) poststructuralist essay on rhetoric which draws together a number of themes informing this chapter. Managers, they suggest, need rhetoric because “while it may be possible to enforce compliance, it is not possible to enforce consent.” But, they argue, this is never sufficient because our daily experience work invariably falls short of these rhetorical promises and managers are continually impelled to produce new rhetorical artifacts and, in the process, “they become ever more detached from reality”. This highlights the intrinsic limitations of language as a symbolic system of control and emphasizes that—and this is the best we can hope for—the transient “truths” of any discourse depend upon the historical context in which they are produced (and reproduced by local actors to legitimize action). Following Derrida, they note that in the contemporary “capitalist regime of truth,” rhetorics such as HRM are sustained and legitimized through politics, the media and academia. They summarize their interpretation by suggesting that “Understanding the (Foucauldian) concept of discourse, the analysis and history of particular discourses tell us why a particular regime of truth is developed and sustained. Understanding the mechanisms of rhetoric helps to tell us, not only why, but also how this has been achieved.’ Floating signifiers are sometimes called “empty signifiers”—an indication that they are filled with whatever objects or meanings the user (or reader) deems plausible. This “essential vacuity” of HRM is necessary in order to sustain its discursive legitimacy for it permits managers to adopt any practice which can be projected as “valuing human resources.” Given this, it is unsurprising that the discourse of HRM both refracts and reinforces the neoliberal objectives of the “new managerialism” in the global economy. The challenge for CMS scholarship is twofold. First, there is a need to further elaborate plausible discourses (or theories) which render the contemporary norm of “individualized performativity” problematic for mainstream HRM thinking. And, secondly—in order to demonstrate clearly that “HRM” is a highly variable enacted social practice—there is a parallel need to expand the range and depth of empirical research which situates the HR phenomena in the context of how managers and employees make sense of, impose meaning on and act in relation to this essential vacuity of HRM (see also Alvesson 2009). This will be no easy task.

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