This article was downloaded by: [Universita degli Studi di Torino] On: 01 May 2013, At: 21:10 Publisher: Routledge Informa Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registered office: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK Human Resource Development International Publication details, including instructions for authors and subscription information: http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhrd20 Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmas for Theory and Practice Tara Fenwick Dr a Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta, Canada b Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta, Education North 7-104, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2G5, Canada E- mail: Published online: 17 Feb 2007. To cite this article: Tara Fenwick Dr (2005): Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmas for Theory and Practice, Human Resource Development International, 8:2, 225-238 To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13678860500100541 PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and- conditions This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Any substantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing, systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden. The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representation that the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of any instructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primary sources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings, demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly or indirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
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This article was downloaded by: [Universita degli Studi di Torino]On: 01 May 2013, At: 21:10Publisher: RoutledgeInforma Ltd Registered in England and Wales Registered Number: 1072954 Registeredoffice: Mortimer House, 37-41 Mortimer Street, London W1T 3JH, UK
Human Resource DevelopmentInternationalPublication details, including instructions for authors andsubscription information:http://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rhrd20
Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmasfor Theory and PracticeTara Fenwick Dra Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta,Canadab Department of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta,Education North 7-104, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2G5, Canada E-mail:Published online: 17 Feb 2007.
To cite this article: Tara Fenwick Dr (2005): Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmas for Theory andPractice, Human Resource Development International, 8:2, 225-238
To link to this article: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/13678860500100541
PLEASE SCROLL DOWN FOR ARTICLE
Full terms and conditions of use: http://www.tandfonline.com/page/terms-and-conditions
This article may be used for research, teaching, and private study purposes. Anysubstantial or systematic reproduction, redistribution, reselling, loan, sub-licensing,systematic supply, or distribution in any form to anyone is expressly forbidden.
The publisher does not give any warranty express or implied or make any representationthat the contents will be complete or accurate or up to date. The accuracy of anyinstructions, formulae, and drug doses should be independently verified with primarysources. The publisher shall not be liable for any loss, actions, claims, proceedings,demand, or costs or damages whatsoever or howsoever caused arising directly orindirectly in connection with or arising out of the use of this material.
Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmasfor Theory and Practice
TARA FENWICKDepartment of Educational Policy Studies, University of Alberta, Canada
ABSTRACT Critical human resource development (HRD) appears to be a newly emerging interestin HR study. Informed by literatures in critical management studies and critical pedagogy, thisarticle proposes foundations and practical implications towards further developing critical HRDas one stream among existing theories and practice of HRD. Precepts for critical HRD mayinclude purposes of workplace reform aligned with equity, justice, and organizational democracy;knowledge treated as contested, political, and non-performative; inquiry focused on denaturaliz-ing organizational power and knowledge relations, and methods of reflexivity and criticalchallenge to prevailing conditions. Both theoretical and practical dilemmas of critical HRD areexplored. Finally, drawing from existing examples, possible configurations of a critical HRD arepresented as these might play out in contexts of organizational practice, academic study, andprofessional education.
Conceptions of Critical HRD: Dilemmas for Theory and Practice
Critical management studies as a field of study has gained recognizable momentumin business schools since the mid-1990s, particularly in the UK (spurred by thepublication of influential texts, such as Alvesson and Wilmott, 1996). However, acritical stream of human resource development has only just begun to stir. Mostwriters acknowledge HRD as study and practice related to workplace developmentof individuals, careers, and organizations (De Simone et al., 2002), but thetheoretical bases of HRD have been highly contested. Lee (2001) suggested that thefield resists being known as a static ontology for it moves constantly in a state of‘becoming’. However Chalofsky declared flatly in 1998 that HRD had yet to reachthe level of a mature profession because practice was still based on guesswork,outdated thinking, or ‘what the client wants’ rather than on research-based theories.
In summarizing the most popular theoretical paradigms of HRD, Swanson (2001)found psychological, intervention, complex systems, and economic perspectives –but nothing reflecting critical social science. Not until 2003 did the UK Critical
Correspondence Address: Dr Tara Fenwick, Department of Educational Policy Studies, Education North
7-104, University of Alberta, Edmonton, Alberta, T6G 2G5, Canada. Email: [email protected]
Human Resource Development International,Vol. 8, No. 2, 225 – 238, June 2005
ISSN 1367-8868 Print/1469-8374 Online/05/020225-14 ª 2005 Taylor & Francis Group Ltd
DOI: 10.1080/13678860500100541
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Management Studies Conference open for the first time a critical human resourcesstream. The call for papers expressed puzzlement that ‘this area has largely slippedoutside the gaze of critical management analysts’, particularly given ‘its multifacetedand ubiquitous nature’ (CMS, 2002). Presenting at that conference, Sambrook(2003) argued the importance of bringing discourses of ‘being critical’ to bear amongcurrent conflicting eclectic discourses of HRD, without privileging the criticaliconoclast pitted against the HRD ‘other’.
In the US, the Academy of Human Resource Development held its first explicitly‘critical’ session at an AHRD conference in 2002, with the intent of unpickingassumptions and challenging ‘the predominantly performative and learning-outcomefocus of the HRD field’ (Elliott and Turnbull, 2002, p. 971). This complementedprevious claims that the profession was beginning to incorporate ethics, integrity,and sustainability into its theory bases (Hatcher, 1999; Lee, 2001). However in theirreview of 600 papers presented previously to the Academy of Human ResourceDevelopment (AHRD) through 1996 – 2000, Bierema and Cseh arrived at ratherdepressing conclusions:
HRD focuses little on issues of social justice in the workplace or larger socialcontext. Women’s experiences as well as those of other diverse groups is ignored,as are asymmetrical power arrangements. Gender/race/ethnicity is not used as acategory of analysis – even when data are collected by gender. Organisational‘undiscussables’ such as sexism, racism, patriarchy, and violence receive littleattention in the literature yet have considerable impact on organisationaldynamics. Finally, HRD research has only weakly advocated change.
(Bierema and Cseh, 2003, pp. 23 – 4)
Like Sambrook in the UK, Bierema and Cseh in the US are clear that criticalperspectives are needed in HRD practice and research. In particular, they call forgreater critical analysis of how HRD reproduces power relations in organizations,for questions about ‘who benefits’ from HRD, and for strategies that address genderand equity issues. Alongside these urges from within the field, the push towards acritical HRD may be affected by other professional disciplines now establishing acritical stream (critical accounting, law, economics, management, and so on).
Critics of current HRD practices also may spark some urgency towards morecritical frameworks for understanding. Some have challenged HRD practices asregulatory ‘technologies’ that ‘discipline’ employees to comply with particularlimited notions of what is ‘normal’, in a form of cultural engineering withquestionable ethics (Fenwick, 2001; Schied et al., 2001; Townley, 1994). Practicessuch as job classification, performance appraisals, standardized competency systems,employee development, and ‘learning organization’ programs discipline throughsurveillance and ‘soft power’, say these critics. Their effects include emphasizingemployee deficits, repressing diversity, increasing employee stress, and subjugatingworkers to control in ways that everyone involved accepts as utterly natural. Humanlearning becomes, inappropriately, a commodity in the human capital orientationunderpinning much HRD practice (Baptiste, 2001). Even human hearts and,increasingly, souls are treated as raw capital to be harnessed for organizational gain,claim HRD critics.
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But when, despite their commitments to ethical engagement and socially responsibleworkplaces, HRD professionals are more than ever pressured to focus on deliveringshareholder value through employee performance (Short et al., 2003), how can acriticalHRDbe conceived that adequately articulates theory inpractice?The followingdiscussion proposes principles and examples to help advance dialogue towards a‘critical HRD’ space that might invite participation of researchers, theorists, andpracticing professionals in HRD. Clearly there exist theoretical dilemmas and deepcontradictions in enacting critical HRD in contemporary organizations. Thesedifficulties largely may be anticipated in what some (e.g. Schied et al., 2001) argue tobe the incommensurable interests of critical orientations (privileging social justice,human rights and environmental sustainability) and organizations/management(maximizing productivity and capital). But critical orientations are far fromhomogeneous. Considerable theoretical work has opened useful conceptions thatmove beyond rigid ideological dichotomies of management/labor or false conscious-ness/emancipation. Furthermore some critically oriented development work is evidentnow in organizations, suggesting that sites of critical HRD already exist in practice ifnot in name, however peripherally. Meanwhile, recent work in critical managementstudies suggests radical shifts underway in re-thinkingmanagement,work, knowledge,and organizations. A critical HRD might contribute a necessary perspective to thiswork, and derive strength from it. This discussion proposes precepts for a criticalHRDand explores dilemmas in theory and practice. The position taken here is that a criticalorientation need not supplant existing conceptions of HRD, but that a critical HRDmight establish itself as one among multiple paradigms coexisting in a pluralistic field.
Sources for Conceiving Critical HRD
A logical source to inform a critical approach to HRD is critical management studies(CMS) (e.g. Alvesson and Wilmott, 1996; Fournier and Grey, 2000). CMS challengesfundamental inequities, oppression, and violence in organizations wrought throughthe apolitical, economically focused, instrumental and unitarist reasoning ofmainstream management science. CMS remains marginalized in the US, argue Greyand Willmott, pointing to the historical ‘grip of positivism’ (2002, p. 414) andaversion toMarxist thought in USmanagement research. But outside the US, notablyin the UK, Europe and Australia, CMS is becoming a distinctive institutionalizedmovement, ‘witnessed by a proliferation of conferences, workshops and textbooksutilizing the banner of CMS’ (ibid., p. 411). CMS offers strategies for theoreticallyreformulating concepts of management, encouraging dialogue for pluralistic criticalperspectives committed to organizational democracy, and exploring viable criticalpractices of management within existing organizational constraints.
Other useful sources to inform a critical HRD include critically orientedcontributions in organizational studies (e.g. Clegg, 1989; Coopey, 1996; Fenwick,2001; Gherardi and Nicolini, 2000); feminist workplace studies (Calas and Smircich,1996; Howell et al., 2002; Meyerson, 2001); critical workplace learning (Foley, 2001;Lakes, 1994; Nash, 2001; Simon et al., 1991); as well as a voluminous literature ofcritical pedagogy offered by adult education. Finally, critical literature beginning toappear in HRD offers helpful observations and questions (Lee, 2001; Rigg andTrehan, 2003; Sambrook, 2003; Valentin, 1999).
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These literatures point immediately to tensions about where, exactly, a criticalHRD can be located. CMS suggests that organizational critique such as a criticalHRD can survive if it is located in the academy as a field of study. But, given HRD’sprimary existence as a field of practice, a critical HRD stream must also maintainclose links with organizational contexts and commitments. Otherwise critical HRDmight relegate itself to railing, elitist disregard for practitioners’ knowledges,platitudinous solutions, or research that but swipes the surface of real complexity.
The location of critical HRD amid the pluralism of critical perspectives is alsodifficult. Discussing this pluralism in CMS, Fournier and Grey (2000) observe two‘lines of tension’. One lies between understandings of power as material classinterests or as discursive circulations, and the other between pragmatic and ‘purist’academic orientations. While these tensions are irresolvable, a starting point forconceiving ‘critical’ as an expansive site to accommodate multiple positions is offeredby CMS theorist Antonacopoulou (1999). She synthesizes common themes in diverseCMS orientations in the following definition of critical practice: providing voice forthe ‘repressed and marginalised’, exposing assumptions and values, revealing the useof power and control, challenging inequities and sacrifices made in the name ofefficiency, effectiveness and profitability, and adopting a self-reflexive critique ofrhetoric, tradition, authority, objectivity (1999, p. 5). This position obviously drawsfrom the tradition of ideology critique, but also reflects feminist and poststructuralistemphases on difference, equity, and language, and pursues organizational democracyrather than revolutionary social change.
Working from this general definition of a critical orientation, a foundation for acritical HRD as a site for study as well as practice might be comprised of preceptssuch as these:
1. Purpose of critical HRD is reform of both workplace organizations anddevelopment practices directed towards individuals and groups. While this is notunique within HRD studies and conduct, a critical HRD would work towardsreform aligned with purposes of justice, equity, and participation. Specificpurposes might advance social transformation through naming mechanisms ofcultural power, fostering resistance, and supporting collective action. A first stepin such reform is to expose and challenge human capital and other theories takenup in HRD theory that critics (e.g. Baptiste, 2001) claim perpetuatecommodification of human learning and unfair inequities.
2. Knowledge in critical HRD is understood to be contested, just as workplaceorganizations are conceptualized as contested terrains of relations and knowl-edges. These are often concealed by illusions of homogeneous identities, alignmentbetween worker/manager interests, and false naturalization of imperatives such asglobalization, competition, and performativity. Social and organizationalpositions criss-crossed by different genders and sexes, knowledges, ethnicities,generations, histories, and cultural commitments require careful examination.Diverse knowledges are not treated as a problem to bemanaged, but as a source oforganizational ingenuity and sustainability as well as suffering and oppression.
3. Inquiry in critical HRD is focused on power issues, seeking to understand howsocio-political processes constitute elements that appear to comprise develop-ment: human cognition, activity, identity, and meaning.
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4. Methods of critical HRD are practices that expose and challenge prevailingeconomic ideologies and power relations constituting organizational structuresof inequity. Familiar critical questions about whose interests are served bydevelopment, how knowledge is constructed, what knowledge counts and whoinfluences its assessment would underpin pedagogical activities. Reflexivity, bothphilosophical and methodological, is central to critical perspectives to challengethe ironies of those committed to equity imposing emancipatory efforts on theso-called oppressed. Reflexivity also can encourage more thoughtful analysis ofHRD ‘technologies’ exercising regulatory control of employees, such as thosedescribed by Townley (1994) and Schied et al. (2001).
These four precepts themselves do not exist in isolation but can be expected tointertwine dynamically in organizational and academic practices. Therefore, in thesubsequent discussion the four precepts are treated holistically, as an integratedfoundation proposed for critical HRD. This foundation invites many questionsabout its pragmatic and theoretical feasibility. The following sections explore thesedilemmas through examples of research and theoretical argument.
Dilemmas of Practice in a Critical HRD
The site of HRD practice focused on individual development, organizationaldevelopment, and career development within workplace organizations is perhapswhere the most difficult questions emerge about the viability of critical HRD. InCMS, this dilemma is voiced in debate between those advocating the development ofa practical critical agenda and those worried that such engagement dilutes the criticalproject. Among those seeking a practical agenda are Grey and Willmott (2002) whomaintain that the point is to transform management practices in tandem withtransforming business schools to encourage managers and students of managementto think critically about organizations and leadership. Alvesson and Willmott (1996)argue that engaging critical theory within organizations helps avoid replacing ‘old’instrumental unitarist management dogma with ‘new’ critical ideology. Criticalprojects worked through messy organizational realities also avoid, write Alvessonand Willmott, a theoretical tendency towards simplistic iron cage depictions oforganizations or broad utopian visions that ignore micro-problems and possibilitiespersisting in organizations.
In addressing the difficulties of actually enacting a critical theory of learning/development in sites such as workplaces, Brookfield (2001) suggests re-engaging theideology critique of critical theory with pragmatism: focusing on experimentalimprovement of contemporary conditions. Pragmatism is contingent and open tocontinuous reformulation. A pragmatic approach, writes Brookfield, helps ensurethe flexibility and responsiveness of critical practice to its circumstances: it neitherestablishes a new orthodoxy nor neglects its own reflexivity (2001, p. 19). Whilecritics worry that the contexts of practice are problematically either conservative orpromiscuously eclectic, eroding the power and integrity of critical practice,Brookfield counters that a critical pragmatism offers a ‘flexible pursuit of beautifulconsequences’ (ibid., p. 20). In the context of work, these consequences might includedemocratized production and a workplace reconfigured for freedom and human
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creativity, constructed through multiple experiments, ways of reflecting, and focusesof critique.
However, the question of how to conceive an integration of critical theory withorganizational practice continues to trouble. Fournier and Grey (2000) suggestthree principles for organizational practice derived from critical perspectives. Non-performative intent is the first, challenging and interrupting the conventionaltendency to focus on ‘the production of maximum output for minimum input’(2000, p. 17), and subordinating knowledge to efficiency. Second is de-naturalizingmainstream management theory and mainstream understandings of existing socialand organizational arrangements, division of labor, and management authority asnatural and inevitable. Third is reflexivity, which, when exercised continuallyby critically educated managers, may help germinate more liberating practicesand more widespread critical cultural analyses of existing conditions.Specific possible enactments of these three in HRD activity will be discussedfurther on.
However, in some organizational environments that are particularly non-conducive to critical questioning, managers may invoke punitive measures. Further,Valentin (1999) observes that, for workers at lower ends of the hierarchies,routinized work and rigidly prescribed training opportunities may be difficult toreconcile with critical practice. Or critical practices may be subverted, domesticatedthrough soft management to become tools of subjugation that reinforce workers’positions while espousing purposes of continuous learning. Empowerment as aconcept has long been co-opted in popular management literature for purposes ofbuilding human capital: those exercising empowerment outside core values andprescribed procedures soon discover the constraints undergirding rhetoric calling fororganizational transformation. As Gee et al. (1996) point out, workers are usuallyquite constrained in terms of the actions they could take, the decisions they couldmake, and the influence they could have, despite organizational resolves forempowered, self-directed teams and a thinking workforce. Radical calls for changeare lost when confined to spaces for so-called worker voice without substantiveavenues for change
On the other hand, critical HRD may experience fewer contradictions and peerdisparagement than CMS in practice. After all, human resource developers are in adifferent position than management in most organizations – they often have moreimmediate formal commitment to worker well-being and their interests are notdirectly tied to preserving control or current hierarchical relations. Furthermore, thetradition that HRD has established for itself in its brief history is a fluid coupling ofacademy-based theorizing and knowledge production with the knowledge enact-ments of practitioners. This intimacy with people’s everyday learning may enable theflexibility that can generate Brookfield’s ‘critical pragmatism’.
Dilemmas of Theory in a Critical HRD
In the tradition of HRD, human development is driven by organizational needsthrough which individual needs may be constituted and conducted throughtechnologies of control wielded upon workers by persons appointed to do so(Townley, 1994). Consequently there exist ideological contradictions between certain
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radical orientations and the managerialist alliance of much HRD practice. Hence,theoretical dilemmas abound in constructing a critical HRD stream.
First, some might argue that emancipatory educative practice within capitalistinstitutions is completely untenable. What emerges would always be a domesticatedshadow of critical struggles against oppression, exploitation, and inequity (Schied etal., 2001). It is all very well to say that critical studies and practice should be married.But without further theorizing of fundamental contradictions and their political playin workplace organizations, little may be gained except perhaps further disillusion orduplicity. A critical HRD might address these very contradictions by drawing fromcritical studies already flourishing in professional fields of economics, management,law as well as social sciences. At the same time, critical HRD must continue to alignitself with people’s needs and experiences working in organizations, understandingthe complex relations and needs of workers and moving beyond naıve prescriptions.
Second, critical perspectives themselves have been reproached for simplisticconceptions of managers as homogeneous, intentionally wielding domination andcontrol over ‘workers’ as if both occupied unitary, fixed positions. Such assumptionsare insupportable amid complex variations in interests and power produced byoccupation, education, language, race, gender, sexual orientation, and so on. Clearcenters and peripheries rarely exist in organizations nor is power situatedunambiguously in any one position. The critical portrait of fixed rational agent-subjects has been persuasively contradicted, both by theoretical postmodern critique(Edwards and Usher, 2000) and by the increasing workplace flexibility of jobs,identities, and knowledge.
Finally, the presumptive position of emancipatory developers is widely recognized.As Alvesson and Deetz point out, ‘the irony of an advocate of greater equalitypronouncing what others should want or how they should perceive the world‘‘better’’ is not lost on either dominant or dominated groups’ (1996, p. 195). Feministeducators in particular, such as Ellsworth (1989), have shown how patriarchalrelations are reproduced in critical prescriptions.
Given the theoretical and practical dilemmas, how might critical practice bedefined and constructed within the workplace? What might notions of social justice,organizational democracy, non-performative intent and reflexivity actually look likewhen linked with individual, career and organizational development? The danger ofweakening fundamental critical premises in this coupling may be unavoidable. Yetthere also may be possibilities here to re-conceptualize critical approaches to fosterhuman well-being and meaningful work in ways that also support organizationalwell-being and sustainability.
Emerging Directions: Practicing Critical HRD in Organizations
As a practice, critical HRD is difficult to envision without dissolving into idealisticprescriptions. Without some space within real living workplaces where criticalresearch and critical cultural analyses can be grounded, critical HRD is at risk ofbecoming empty ideas about ideas. However, there exist some examples that signal apossible way forward, of which a small sample are discussed below: emancipatoryaction learning, small local projects in concert with management and labor, andreflexivity of HRD professionals. All of these integrate the four precepts suggested
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earlier for a critical HRD foundation: purposes of workplace reform aligned withequity, justice and organizational democracy; knowledge treated as contested,political, and non-performative; inquiry focused on denaturalizing organizationalpower and knowledge relations; and methods of reflexivity and critical challenge toprevailing conditions.
Examples of emancipatory action learning as a method of organizational andindividual development have been debated for some time in management, labor, andadult education literature (Alvesson and Willmott, 1996; Fenwick, 2003; Foley,2001; Rigg and Trehan, 2003). Loosely based on a combination of Freirian-likeproblem-posing and ‘action learning’ (where groups learn through collaborativeproblem-solving processes of naming, analyzing, exploring action-based solutions,and critically reflecting), emancipatory action learning aims to promote individualworkers’ critical analysis of oppressive or unfair work conditions as well asorganizational improvement, through action to address these conditions. Facilitatorshelp workers collectively to question practices and relations, examine their historicalroots and formulate alternatives. This flips the gaze and participation of HRD awayfrom what Townley (1994) describes as disciplinary assessment and prescriptiontowards collaborative process. Caution is important, because the protocols of actionlearning were originally formulated to serve organizational purposes of performa-tivity and efficiency, sometimes even employing manipulative techniques akin toworkers’ public confession. Rigg and Trehan (2003) found that emotion, power, anddiversity in critical action learning could foster critical learning but also had thepotential to disempower workers. Without fundamental transformations withinexisting systems of control and inequitable power relations to allow avenues forspecific changes, action learning protocols are unlikely to promote anything morethan illusory worker participation. Yet, with reflexivity and careful attention to itstraps, writers such as Foley (2001), Valentin (1999), and Willmott (1997) argue that anon-elitist version of emancipatory action learning is possible and desirable inworkplace organizations, if fraught with tensions. If so, it might fall to a criticalHRD professional to explore ways to achieve these, working – as Brookfield (2001)suggests – flexibly and reflectively through multiple experiments and varyingcollaborations.
Other writers have offered various suggestions for small, local projects that do notattempt radical transformation of existing structures. These approaches tend tocombine pragmatic action and critical analysis, denaturalizing existing conditionsand promoting more just, life-nurturing organizations. For example, Lowe (2000)suggests HRD professionals mediate unions and management in joint decision-making about job design, training, and conditions. Critical HRD professionals couldhelp counter a management push for new HRM practices that undercut the unionand champion a people-centered agenda. Furthermore, HRD professionals mightplay a valuable role in leveraging authentic labor-management collaborations(Drinkuth et al., 2001). Too often, as Drinkuth et al. point out, such collaborationsare so polarized in discourse and norms of oppositional interaction that even genuinedesire to work towards common objectives is thwarted. But as intermediaries, albeitcritically oriented, critical HRD professionals might serve as translators or processinterpreters. In this role they might draw explicit attention to the conflictinglanguage, identity reinforcers and norms of engagement between management and
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labor, even suggest alternative modes of dialogue. This role is not unproblematic:HRD professionals, particularly those with a critical orientation, are certainly not‘neutral’.
Further, HR does not often enjoy much power within the organizationalhierarchy. Viewed too often as supporting (even dependent upon) rather thandriving the organization’s success, HRD practitioners may find themselvescompletely marginalized if they attempt to challenge ideologies and practicesthat are generally accepted as core. A critical HRD may need to explore stealthstrategies or even, as one reviewer of an earlier draft of this article suggested,invent entirely new forms of practice. Meyerson’s (2001) work on ‘small wins’ and‘tempered radicalism’ may be helpful here. She reports many instances of covertradical actions launched by individuals or small groups of individuals, such asquietly challenging meeting protocols that favor dominant voices. These smallwins effectively interrupted everyday organizational events, challenged naturalizedinequities and brought forth change without risking severe consequences toindividual jobs and well-being. Alvesson and Willmott (1996) argue that this sortof ‘micro-emancipation’ targeting specific oppressive practices does catalyzechange towards more just organizational structures. As an example of thecomplexities of such work, Meyerson and Kolb (2000) describe a participatoryfeminist project they undertook both to promote gender equity and to increaseorganizational effectiveness. While they experienced difficulty in sustaining theircritical gender focus, the researchers achieved partial success in their three-layeredapproach of critique (of dominant gendered discourses and processes), experi-mentation (with concrete changes to interrupt gendered practices and improvework effectiveness), and narrative generation (constructing collective stories of thechange process). Both workers and some managers participated in criticalquestioning of these collective narratives, then generated subversive narratives andalternative scenarios that moved toward some initial changes in genderedorganizational structures.
Tosey and Nugent (1997) offer another example of a ‘micro-emancipatory’project. Their study showed how a shift from problem-focused to critical inquiry-focused forms of action learning helped transform the management team of a failingsmall manufacturing company to think creatively about strategy, and to change theway they related to one another to be more supportive, caring, and challenging.These examples do not attempt radical transformation of existing structuresapproaches, but suggest that critical practice may require selective trial in smallspaces of particular organizations.
Finally, reflexive examination of their own practices is the prominentrecommendation for HRD professionals urged by Townley (1994), in her in-depthfeminist poststructural analysis of the subjugation wielded by contemporary HRpractices. Townley calls HRD professionals to remain critically attentive, in theirinitiatives for individuals’ and organizational development, to issues of voice,equity, differential interests, and the manipulative power embedded in their ownpractices.
The real question to be confronted by those who develop a critical HRD is not if itcan be done – examples abound showing that radical participatory development maybe undertaken anywhere – but what might be its consequences, and whether these
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are ultimately beneficial. The weighing of consequences is an ethical-moralundertaking, not an instrumental one. So to decide if a practice of critical HRD ispossible or sustainable, one must determine how to judge what purposes are mostworthwhile, what costs are bearable for these purposes, and exactly what counts as abenefit, for the few as well as for the many.
Implications: Critical HRD as an Academic Discipline
As a discipline of professional education, critical HRD ought then to foster moralreasoning to examine the purposes of individual, career, and organizationaldevelopment, as well as strategies of critical thinking that challenge dominant HRpractices and organizational structures perpetuating unfairness, unhappiness,coercion, or violence. The point should not be to undermine or destroy the practiceof workplace education and organizational development, but to expand its ethicalaccountability for human complexities and conflicts. Within classrooms, criticalpedagogy approaches might challenge prospective HR practitioners to considercritical cultural analysis of both the organizational dynamics and the moralconsequences of their own interventions in these patterns of politics and knowledgeproduction. Indeed, much critical education of workplace educators is no doubtcurrently conducted in academic programs.
An ally for such education is growing in critical management streams of businessschools. Deetz (1998), one of many advocates for critical management education,argues that even to cultivate the ‘voicing’ of active resistance to consent processes is apowerful seed for change: ‘Voicing opens both the corporation and individuals tolearning through reclaiming differences and conflicts overlooked or suppressed bydominant conceptions and arrangements’ (Deetz, 1998, pp. 159 – 69). This voicing orde-naturalizing of the inevitable is akin to the ‘critical literacy’ envisioned by Gee etal. (1996), enabling individuals to ‘synthesise from ideal possible worlds whileunveiling textual representation of reality and their interest-serving consequences’(1996, p. 124). Education in critical HRD, following Gee et al., would work beyond‘negative critique and textual analyses’, to help ‘advance positive visions and agendasfor progressive change’ (ibid., p. 124) located within or between current differencesand conflicts.
Tisdell (1998) and others advocating feminist poststructural orientations tocritical education show how the action of the classroom itself can be turned intoa powerful site of critical learning: reflexively examining the power relations, thelegitimation of knowledge, the discourses at work, the subjugations andexclusions – subtle or not – that are played out among a community of learners.Possibilities for critical HRD education are signaled by existing examples ofcritical workplace education. Nash, for example, writes, ‘Use every opportunity toinquire about how the workplace runs and how it affects our lives’ (2001, p. 190);for example, when mapping workplace processes, have learners investigate whywork is organized the way it is, what history and priorities it reflects, and whatimaginative alternatives might be generated. Lakes (1994), another criticalworkplace educator, shows ways of politicizing vocational education in schoolsas well as work organizations, empowering youths and workers as critical learnersand thus as potential catalysts for the democratic transformation of industry. A
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frequently referenced resource among these and other radical workplace educatorsis Learning Work, in which Simon et al. (1991) describe critical education throughwork-based projects and internships rooted in Freirian pedagogy. Tensions areinevitable. Nash describes her approaches to questioning structures withinorganizations focused on measurable outcomes, and the resistance to questioningfrom those footing the bills for workplace education, as ‘delicate’ negotiations –but not impossible.
Reflexivity is especially important in critical education. As Ellsworth (1989)pointed out long ago. the so-called dialogic process of critical pedagogy itself, withits tendency to self-righteousness and to ignoring complex power relationsoperating within any group, can actually produce students’ repression rather thantheir ‘empowerment’. Perriton and Reynolds (2004) have suggested thatessentialized ideals of emancipation can ‘straitjacket’ those educators seeking aposition of pedagogical resistance. Particularly for disciplines such as managementand HRD education, the paradox of continually deconstructing the disciplineforming the core of the curriculum leaves critical educators ‘caught reflexivelybetween a rock and a hard place’, as Perriton and Reynolds (2004, p. 70) put it.Embroiled in identity tensions, critical HRD educators must negotiate resistance todominant ideology while promoting it, but without colonizing learners throughnew repressive hegemonies of ‘empowerment’. Perriton and Reynolds suggest ateaching position of critical refusal of dominant management values and ideologies,without attempting to fashion an emancipatory pedagogy. Refusal is combinedwith reflexivity and a commitment to modeling reflexive resistance in criticalteaching.
As a field of study, an academy-based critical stream of HRD study affords animportant site for articulating and affirming questions that may be dismissed asheretical in practice. Critical study also is required to support radical education andpractice in HRD, and sustain difficult links between critical theory and organiza-tional life. Through research employing approaches such as critical ethnography andcritical action inquiry, critical HRD can continue the tradition of current HRDresearch: to explore possibilities and limitations for naming, practicing andregulating different interventions associated with individual, career, and organiza-tional development.
But such research must also critically interrogate the world of practice. Criticalempirical workplace studies already exist that examine complex issues underpinninginequitable practices, unjust structures, dominant barriers to work-life quality forany group, and limited conceptions of workplace learning and development (e.g.Howell et al., 2002). Critical organizational studies analyzing power and knowledgecirculations (e.g. Clegg, 1989; Coopey, 1996; Fenwick, 2001) might help developanalytic constructs for a critical HRD stream. Theoretical tools developed in otherdisciplines have already been employed productively for critical workplace research,such as Farrell’s (2001) deconstructions of new textual work practices followingFairclough’s critical discourse analysis and Gherardi and Nicolini’s (2000) usage ofactor network theory to examine knowledge production through networks of jointaction among people and objects.
These studies helping to dissolve controlling orthodoxies and binaries (worker/manager, individual/organization, practice/reflection, tacit/explicit, psyche/system),
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opening further possibilities for critical HRD research to understand the complex-ities of workers’ lives, learning and workplace development. Research needs to assessthe usefulness of these other disciplinary contributions, and to explore the apparentcontradictions in ontology offered by different radical approaches to organizationalpractice. A starting point for critical HRD theory might be questions about itself:what does it mean to be human in an organization? What is wrong with thepresumption of developing or managing the development of humans? Who isnaturally excluded in such practices? What other ways can humans and their work beunderstood than as resources for organizations?
Conclusion
Clearly theoretical and practical dilemmas arise in developing critical HRD as alegitimate stream of human resource development. Here it is argued that criticalHRD, as a field of study, an approach to practice, and professional education, istenable despite these dilemmas. Foundations for a critical HRD may includepurposes of workplace reform aligned with equity, justice, and organizationaldemocracy; knowledge treated as contested, political and non-performative;inquiry focused on denaturalizing organizational power and knowledge relations;and methods of reflexivity and critical challenge to prevailing conditions. CriticalHRD must navigate a difficult meld between these precepts and commitments toindividual, career, and organizational development, cautious of Fournier andGrey’s (2000) warnings about becoming a token voice or ‘degenerating’ into(uncritical) activism, leading to quick dismissal from wider HRD worlds of theoryand practice.
The dilemmas provide openings for a rich future of study and experiment. Thetask for further theorization will be to explore apparent fundamental contradictionsbetween managerialist and radical orientations. Traps to avoid include representingmanagers as the unequivocal oppressors, slipping into naturalized illusions ofunitary worker/manager interests, or presuming that dialogic spaces in workplacesare unproblematic. Particular vigilance might be needed to avoid current softhumanistic management recipes for empowerment, what Alvesson and Willmottdisparage as ‘a fatally crippled, ideologically polluted version of ‘‘emancipation’’that merits harsh critique’ (1996, p. 229). Sustenance can be drawn from criticalmanagement studies and critical adult education, as well as abundant literature inthe broad field of critical organization studies.
Living out a critical orientation to HRD in organizational practice as well as inacademic study and education is clearly complex. Yet, despite the dilemmas anddifficult negotiations, these complexities appear to provide an important site for thefurther evolution of organizational, career, and individual development as part ofthe radical shifts already under way in the intersected worlds of work, organization,management, and knowledge.
Acknowledgements
The suggestions of three anonymous reviewers of an earlier draft of this article aregratefully acknowledged.
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