human resource management in research confronts theory

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6 Organization Theory and HRM

Tony Watson is Emeritus Professor at Nottingham University Business School.

• Published: 02 September 2009
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This article aims to identify the contributions that have been made by ideas from organization theory to our understanding of the organizational activity of human resource management — and its earlier ‘personnel management’ manifestation. Attention is also given to ways in which greater use might be made of organization theory in the analysis of HRM activities and processes in the future. HRM processes are organizational processes. They occur within all work organizations and they cannot be understood separately from the way in which organizations themselves are perceived.

6.1 Introduction

Human Resource Management is an activity that occurs in work organizations across the industrialized world. HRM is also an academic ‘subject’ that is taught and researched, primarily in higher education in those same industrialized societies. However, this latter ‘HRM’ is not an academic activity which has a clear body of theoretical ideas of its own. There is almost no literature on the ‘the theory of HRM.’ This is not to say, however, that theories are absent from academic HRM. Use is made of theoretical concepts from areas such as psychology, sociology, employee relations, economics, and strategic management. And, to some degree, use is made of ideas from organization theory. The purpose of the present chapter is to identify the contributions that have been made by ideas from organization theory to our understanding of the organizational activity of human resource management—and its earlier ‘personnel management’ manifestation. Attention will also be given to ways in which greater use might be made of organization theory in the analysis of HRM activities and processes in the future.

HRM processes are organizational processes. They occur within all work organizations and they cannot be understood separately from the way in which we understand organizations themselves. The same can be argued about management more broadly. In effect, any ‘theory of management,’ like any ‘theory of HRM,’ has to be grounded in a ‘theory of organization.’ Managerial work generally and human resourcing work specifically is ‘organizing work.’ And it occurs in formally structured enterprises which utilize human labor. These work organizations constitute the topic of organization theory.

6.2 Organizations and Organization Theory

Organization theory can be characterized as an intellectual activity which utilizes methodological and conceptual resources from social science disciplines such as sociology, social psychology, and anthropology in order to provide explanations of how things happen in the sphere of authoritatively co-coordinated human enterprises . The wording ‘authoritatively coordinated human enterprises’ is a more sociologically sophisticated way of referring to work organizations. It recognizes that the social arrangements under consideration—companies, schools, churches, armies, public administrations, and so on—are all characterized by their use of bureaucratic ways of coordinating task-based activities. And Max Weber's classic characterization of bureaucracy emphasized the centrality of ‘authority’ (legitimized power) in these organizing processes (Weber 1978 ). Bureaucracy, in the seminal Weberian formulation, involves the control and coordination of work tasks through a hierarchy of appropriately qualified office holders, whose authority derives from their expertise and who rationally devise a system of rules and procedures that are calculated to provide the most appropriate means of achieving specified ends. This characterization comes from Weber's ‘ideal type’ of bureaucracy (a construct of what a bureaucracy would look like if it existed in a pure form— not a description of what an bureaucracy ideally should be). Managers in work organizations are ‘appropriately qualified office holders’ in this sense. An HR manager is thus appointed, in principle, on the grounds of their experience and qualifications as the best person available to do the HR tasks specified in a formal organizational ‘job description.’ Their ‘right’ or their authority to appoint people, instruct staff, or make workers redundant derives from their technical HR expertise and its linking, through their formal role in the managerial hierarchy, to specific organizational tasks.

Whilst recognizing the necessity of organization theory's attending to the formal aspects of organizational life, we must remember that the formal or ‘official’ aspects are always in interplay with the informal or unofficial within the ‘negotiated order’ of every organization (Strauss et al. 1963 ; Strauss 1978 ; Day and Day 1997 ; Watson 2001 a ). And we must also remember that organizations are ‘sites of situated social action’ which are influenced not only by ‘explicitly organized and formal disciplinary knowledges’ such as marketing, production, or HRM but also by ‘practices embedded in the broad social fabric, such as gender, ethnic and other culturally defined social relations’ (Clegg and Hardy 1999 : 4). The fact, for example, that HR managers occupy a different class position from those occupied by many of the workers with whom they deal inevitably influences manager–worker interactions. And it has been observed that gender factors can significantly color the interactions between HR and other managers (Miller and Coghill 1964 ; Watson 1977 ; Gooch and Ledwith 1996 ).

6.3 The Emergence of Organization Theory

Although bureaucracy has existed for a long time, the prevalence of bureaucratized organizations across both public administrative and industrial spheres has been a more recent phenomenon, coming about over the last two centuries of human history. Over this period, various writers made contributions which might be seen as attempts to theorize these organizational developments, most notably Adam Smith (1776), Charles Babbage ( 1832 ), Andrew Ure ( 1835 ), Karl Marx ( 1867 ), Frederick W. Taylor ( 1911 ), Max Weber ( 1922 ), Elton Mayo ( 1933 ), Chester Barnard ( 1938 ), and F. J Roethlisberger and W. J Dickson ( 1939 ). Although these writers cannot all be directly identified with a growing social scientific way of thinking and writing about organizations they are all people who have been taken up as sources of ideas or as inspirations by social scientists over the last half-century or so—the period in which the recognized academic subject of organization theory has existed (sometimes as ‘organization studies,’ sometimes as ‘organization science’). But there were other very significant and previously neglected strands of organizational thinking that went into the subject which emerged as organization theory in the USA in the middle of the twentieth century. These were produced by the mechanical engineers who moved beyond an interest in solving technological problems to an interest in solving organizational dilemmas (Jacques 1996; Shenhav 1994 , 1995 , 1999 ; Shenhav and Weitz 2000 ). At first sight, we might not expect these engineers to have a great deal of relevance to what we these days call HR issues. But as we shall see later (pp. 113–14) this is anything but the case.

For present purposes, we simply need to note that engineers had a significant influence on the ‘new’ subject of organization theory. Their contributions fit into one of the two themes which Starbuck identifies as ‘motivating’ the birth of organization theory: the theme of finding ways in which ‘organizations can operate more effectively’ (Starbuck 2003 : 171–4). This theme can be identified with the ‘opportunities’ that organizations were perceived to be offering mankind. The second theme, however, was one identified with perceived ‘threats’ presented by bureaucratic organization. This was the theme of ‘bureaucracy and its defects’ (Starbuck 2003 : 162). A key role in bringing these two themes into a single organization theory was played by Selznick ( 1948 ) who, influenced by various managerial writers like Chester Barnard, ‘departed from the sociological focus on “bureaucracy” and framed his discussions in more general language about “organizations” and “formal organizations”’ (Starbuck 2003 : 170). And, says Starbuck, by the 1960s organization theory had ‘arrived’—but with that arrival and the subsequent ‘expansion and affluence’ of the subject (coming about with the massive expansion of degree programs in business) there has been significant fragmentation ( 2003: 174 ). This is a matter with which we must now come to terms. Organization theory is anything but a unified subject and, in examining its relevance to and connection with HRM, we have deal with the fact that, in effect, there is more than one organization theory that HRM has or to which HRM might relate.

6.4 Varieties of Organization Theory

Anyone wishing to turn to organization theory as a resource for the analysis of activities like HRM faces the difficulty that there is no single coherent OT framework readily available to them. Instead they find themselves presented with a variety of theoretical perspectives. One recent overview of organization theories covers over thirty of these (Vibert 2004 ) whilst another assembles the variety of approaches into three main perspectives: the modern, the symbolic, and the postmodern (Hatch 2006 ). And things have perhaps been made even more daunting by the arguments among organization theorists themselves about the extent to which the main paradigms (the clusters of assumptions about the world and about scientific knowledge adopted by different theorists) allegedly underlying these various approaches are compatible with each other. Some argue, for example, that the different theoretical, methodological, and political orientations of the various sets of theorists are fundamentally incompatible with each other. Thus, it is argued that any given researcher needs to locate themselves within one particular paradigm —a functionalist, an interpretative, a radical humanist, or a radical structuralist paradigm, say (Burrell and Morgan 1979 ; Jackson and Carter 2000 ). An alternative approach is to switch back and forth between these various paradigms to find insights pertinent to the area being analyzed. Hassard ( 1993 ) has demonstrated the advantages of this strategy for organizations generally and Kamoche ( 2000 ) for HRM—analyzing recruitment and training within the functionalist paradigm before looking at HRM generally within the terms, first, of a radical paradigm and, second, an interpretative paradigm. Other writers, however, argue for the development of a single frame of reference for studying organizations (Pfeffer 1993 ; Donaldson 2001 ).

The organization theory paradigm debate continues in the organization theory literature (Burrell 2002 ; Keleman and Hassard 2003 ). Tsoukas and Knudsen try to cut through all of this, however, by observing that when it comes to investigating ‘particular topics, in particular sites,’ organizational researchers do not so much ‘apply’ or ‘follow’ paradigms as ‘explore’ what is available to them and, ‘having to cope coherently with all the puzzles and tensions stemming from the complexity of the phenomena they investigate, they extend, synthesize, and/or invent concepts (cf. Rorty 1991 : 93–110)’ (Tsoukas and Knudsen 2003 : 13). This corresponds to a strategy of pragmatic pluralism (Watson 1997 ) which similarly follows the basic principle of Philosophical Pragmatism (Putnam 1995 ; Mounce 1997 ; Rorty 1982 ) in which knowledge is assessed in terms of how effectively it informs the projects of the human beings who make use of it, as opposed to judging it in terms of how closely it ‘mirrors’ or represents objectively existing realities (Rorty 1980 ). The pragmatic pluralist investigator, in producing an analysis of a particular aspect of social life, such as HRM, or of a particular set of social events or circumstances, draws upon elements from various disciplines or perspectives to produce an analytical framework which can stand as the conceptual foundation for that particular investigation. Concepts are selected on the criterion of relevance to the issues arising in the investigation. The framework which emerges must, nevertheless, have its own ontological, epistemological, and methodological integrity. It cannot, for example, jump from an ontological assumption at one stage of the analysis that organizations are pluralistic patterns of interaction involving varying goals of a multiplicity of organizational actors to an assumption, at another stage of the analysis, that organizations are entities possessing ‘organizational goals’ of their own (Watson 2006 ).

6.5 Four Strands of Organization Theory Relevant to HRM

Having established how we might bring together for purposes such as analyzing HRM practices ideas from different ‘approaches’ within organization theory, we need briefly to map out some examples from this variety of perspectives and note briefly how they have played a part in the emergence of HRM so far. To do this, it is helpful to identify several ‘strands’ of thinking. This mapping, it must be stressed, is produced, once again, in the spirit of Philosophical Pragmatist thinking. It has been devised in order to help the traveler proceed on their journey, as opposed to producing a totally ‘correct’ or accurate representation of the nature of the ground over which that journey is to occur.

6.5.1 The Functionalist/Systems and Contingency Strand

In this strand of thinking, organizations are viewed as systems: as social entities which function as self-regulating bodies which exchange energy and matter with their environment in order to survive. They ingest ‘inputs’ which they convert into ‘outputs.’ The approach has some of its roots deep in historical social thought and, at a level nearer the surface of the soil in which it grew, in the ‘structural functional’ style of sociological thinking which set out to explain various social institutions and aspects of social institutions in terms of the functions that they fulfill for the overall social ‘whole’ (or ‘system’) of which they are a part (Abrahamson 2001 ; Colomy 1990 ). Thus, to take a very simple example, one would explain the high rewards paid to senior managers, relative to the wages paid to ordinary workers, by arguing that the organizational system in which these people are employed, in order to continue in existence, needs the expertise that can only be obtained if those relatively higher incomes are provided. Relative differences of class or organizational power are not considered and neither are the deliberate efforts of managers to give themselves a relative material advantage in the organizations which they run. In spite of the danger of removing human initiative or agency from explanations of what happens in organizations, systems analyses have the advantage of making us constantly aware that organizations are more than the sums of the parts from which they are made: they are patterns of relations which need constantly to be adapted to allow the organization to continue in existence. It also stresses that what happens in one part of an organization (in one ‘subsystem’) tends to have implications for what happens in other parts or ‘subsystems.’

Systems approaches to organizations have roots other than those in social thought and social science. They have also been influenced by biological thinking and by ‘general systems thinking,’ a cross-disciplinary scientific way of thinking about a whole range of different phenomena (Boulding 1956 ; Von Bertalanffy 1972 ; Emery 1969 ). But systems thinking in the organizational sphere has also been significantly influenced by the contributions made by engineers (above p. 110). The outcome of this is that a powerful metaphor in management thought, which has been of immense attractiveness to managers, has been that of the organization as a system, as a big social machine which takes in raw material, knowledge, and human effort and outputs various goods and services, with this whole apparatus being designed and controlled by the expert ‘human engineer’ managers who are appointed to fulfill the organization's ‘goals’ (Watson 2006 ). Such a conception inevitably has a powerful attraction for people trying both to explain and give legitimacy to the personnel management or HR ‘function’ in an organization: its role is portrayed as one of dealing with the human ‘input’ to the organizational system, not just recruiting the labor that the system needs but also administering and developing it so that it most effectively plays its role in producing the system's outputs. Personnel matters played a central part in the work of the engineering ‘systematizers’ who were, in effect, the proto-organization theorists who did so much to shape both organization theory and management practices in the twentieth century. These people, Shenhav tells us, applied mechanical engineering methods, not just to the administrative restructuring of firms and their accounting procedures but also to the determination of wages and the selection criteria in employment ( 2003: 187 ). Among the magazines that helped disseminate this systems ideology was the periodical Personnel and, as Shenhav notes, ‘many of the subsequent scholars of organizations were readers and writers for these magazines’ and the articles, often collected in book form, provided ‘the seedbed from which discourse on rational organizations grew’ (2003: 191).

The discourse on rational organization and personnel management that emerged and is most clearly made manifest in the textbooks used across the English-speaking world was not just rooted in a systems view of organizations, it was also normative and prescriptive, as Legge's ( 1978 ) analysis of those texts shows. In reaction to this tendency, Legge took a significant step forward by arguing for a non-prescriptive organization theory approach to personnel management. The prescriptive approach, she argued, led to confusions about organizational goals and personnel objectives which, in turn, led to further confusions ‘about the nature of the personnel function itself’ ( 1978: 16 ). Also, the ‘prescriptive intention of these books’ succumbed to ‘stilted generalizations that neglect both the complexities and dynamism of real organizations’ ( 1978: 16 ). This move is significant because it marks the point—alongside the present author's sociological study of the personnel occupation (Watson 1977 and below, p. 117)—where personnel/HR matters began to be studied in a social scientific style where the priority is given to analysis, explanation, and understanding of employment management phenomena as opposed to seeking ‘best practices’ that managers might adopt. Legge's research focused on the tensions and ambiguities with which personnel managers have to deal and she pointed to contingency theory as a resource which personnel managers, acting as applied social scientists within their own organizations, might use to overcome some of these tensions and conflicts. The contingency theory version of systems thinking (Donaldson 2001 ) is concerned with how the contingent circumstances of organizations (their size, technology, business environment, and so on) ‘influence the organization's internal structures and processes’ (Legge 1978 : 97). The ‘contingency insight,’ as we might call it, has been brought forward into a non-functionalist style of analysis (i.e. one in which contingencies are given no ‘determining’ role) by Child ( 1972 , 1997 ), who links contingent circumstances to strategic managerial choices , an insight that can valuably inform how we understand the ways in which different HR strategies are chosen in different circumstances (Watson 2004 , 2005 ).

In the 1980s, the employment management aspects of organizations began to be examined in a new way, one which saw a relabeling of the activity as HRM rather than as personnel management or personnel administration. The factors behind this and the key characteristics of the ‘new’ HRM are discussed in Chapter 2 . The renewal of scholarly interest in employment management processes and practices might have been a point at which organization theory resources were turned to. But this did not happen. And HRM has continued to ‘follow a different lead’ theoretically (Morgan 2000 : 860). Why was this the case? On the one hand, there was the fact that organization theory had moved firmly away from its earlier managerial origins, with its re-engagement with the more critical version of Weberian sociology that was now available (below pp. 116–17), the revisiting of Marxian labor process thinking (below pp. 117–19) and the growing ‘interpretativist’ interest in human agency, language, and meanings which followed from the broad sociological rejection of functionalist theorizing (this clearly signaled by Silverman 1970 ; see also Reed 1996 ). This meant that organization theory was moving quickly away from its earlier systems-thinking base. But, on the other hand, systems ideas were too valuable to the HRM project for them to be abandoned in the way organization theory had largely done. Systems thinking had what might almost be seen as a natural affinity with the new HRM. ‘HRM’ thinking therefore tended to follow its own direction. This was one more consistent with the earlier, more managerially engaged, systems-based, organization theory. As Jacques observes, the three themes of the new thinking—‘comprehensive as opposed to patchwork direction of the human function in organizations; linking operational HR issues to the firm's strategy and structure; learning to regard expenditures on labor and worker-embodied knowledge as an investment rather than an expense’—represented a clear continuity with earlier managerially oriented American social science ( 1995: 202 ). The message of the new HRM, to put it at its simplest, was ‘integrate, integrate, integrate’ and, theoretically, this tends to mean in the social sciences ‘systems, systems, systems.’ What Greenwood calls a ‘mainstream HRM’ thus takes a ‘systems maintenance or functionalist approach, viewing HRM as a mechanism for the attainment of organizational goals’ (2002: 262).

The main theoretical thrust within HRM research and writing is clearly in the area of the relationship between HRM practice and corporate strategies (Tichy et al. 1982 ; Schuler et al. 2001 ). This work is covered in Chapters 3 , 5 , 26 , and 27 . There is a considerable input here from economics, a discipline which, as Guest notes, is very much ‘theory-led,’ and therefore has the potential to help overcome the general theoretical inadequacies of HRM (2001: 1093). But a systems emphasis plays a significant role in this work (Sanchez-Runde 2001 ) and systems ideas are advocated, beyond this, as a means to better integrated management performance (Broedling 1999 ), as a means for analyzing different national models of HRM (Hendry 2003 ), and as a means for linking HRM to general management (Ghorpade 2004 ).

6.5.2 The Weberian Strand

As has already been implied, Max Weber is a key figure, if not the key figure, in organization theory. It has often been commented that much of the six-or-so decades of the history of organization theory has been a debate with Weber's ideas on bureaucracy. But the ‘Weberian’ ideas that were brought into early organization theory in mid-twentieth-century America were a particular version of those ideas that were selected and ‘framed’ in a way that resonated with the dominant managerial interests of the time in overcoming the problems inherent in bureaucracy and finding ways of improving the effectiveness of organizations. In this early organization theory writing, scholars such as Blau ( 1955 ), Gouldner ( 1954 ), and Thompson ( 1967 ) ‘assumed that Weber equated rationality with efficiency’ (Shenhav 2003 : 196), with the effect that ‘bureaucracy was reified and was used as an ahistorical framework for effective functioning implying a performative intent in his scheme’ (Shenhav 2003 : 197). This strand of thinking in organization theory, which we might cheekily label the ‘counterfeit-Weberian’ strand, has to be contrasted with a much more sociological, critical, and theoretically sophisticated version of Weber's contribution to the field which scholars subsequently found themselves able to make in the light of newer translations and readings of his work (Albrow 1970 ; Beetham 1996 ; Eldridge 1971 ; Kalberg 2005 ; Ray and Reed 1994 ; Ritzer and Goodman 2003 : ch. 4; Turner 1996 ).

The newer appreciation of Weber's work recognizes that his key contribution is to locate bureaucratized organizations in their historical and political context and to acknowledge that, alongside whatever significant advantages they offer human beings, they also present problems for human freedom and expression. The contemporary, non-managerialist, Weberian strand of thinking in organization theory, then, is one that recognizes that organizations are sites of rivalries, conflicts of interest, and power in which a ‘paradox of consequence’ typically comes into play: a tendency for the means chosen to achieve ends in the social world to undermine or defeat those ends. A simple example of this, in practice, might be the well-known tendency for performance indicators or metrics (often introduced by HR managers to monitor certain organizational behaviors with a view to encouraging people to perform better) to set minimum standards of performance in practice, thus actually discouraging improved performances (‘We have fulfilled our quota of job upgradings for this month, why should we do any more?’). The means chosen to achieve a certain end has become an end it itself—thus undermining the achieving of the purpose for which it was designed.

The present author's study of the personnel management occupation (Watson 1977 ) set the work of personnel managers firmly in this context of handling conflicts and contradictions in social life, at the societal, organizational, and departmental level. The personnel occupation was shown to have come about, not because of the ‘system needs’ which required it (which would be a functionalist analysis) but—following Weber's focus upon the interaction of ideas and interests in processes of social change (Bendix 1966 )—because particular historical actors came forward and created an occupation to handle some of the unintended consequences of processes of rationalization. Personnel management is thus shown to be both an outcome of the rationalization process of social life and employment and a reactor to it—in the sense that it takes on many of the tensions, conflicts, contradictions, and ambiguities that come about in the modern bureaucratized enterprise.

New institutionalism is a development of broadly Weberian thinking. It is increasingly being applied to HRM (Purcell 1999 ), in part to counter an overemphasis on economic rationality of the ‘resource-based view’ of the firm which plays a key role in economic/strategic management analyses (Boxall 1996 ). The new institutionalism follows Weber in putting alongside economic rationality factors ( zweckrationalität ), normative or value-based ( wertrationalität ) factors. It puts particular emphasis on the various pressures on organizations to become similar to each other. Paauwe and Boselie ( 2003 and this Handbook, Chapter 9 ), for example, suggest ways in which the three institutional mechanisms influencing organizational decision-making identified in DiMaggio and Powell's ( 1983 ) seminal article can be related to HRM. Coercive mechanisms include trade unions and government legislation; mimetic mechanisms include the imitating of the strategies of competitors and the various management fads and fashions; normative mechanisms include such things as occupational HR training and links through HR managers' professional bodies (Paauwe and Boselie 2003 : 60). And Boxall and Purcell point to the pursuit of ‘social legitimacy’ (one of the ‘three key goals for HRM’, 2003: 33 ; cf. Lees 1997 ) as a significant factor pressing organizations to become similar to each other.

6.5.3 The Marxian Strand

The notion of unintended consequences of deliberate human actions that plays a key role in the Weberian strand of thinking also arises in Marxian thinking in the notion of the contradictions within capitalism. Modern institutions of employment, of which ‘HRM’ is a part, are central to the capitalist mode of production. But these institutions are part and parcel of a class system, given that they are based on a logic in which a capital-owning class, through a managed ‘labor process,’ extracts surplus value from members of an employee class. And within this set of relations lie the seeds of the capitalist political economy's eventual destruction. The people working for a wage or salary eventually come to realize that they share the objective position of being exploited. They reject the ideologies that misled them into accepting their situation and they abandon a ‘falsely conscious’ appreciation of their place in society. They consequently ‘rise up’ and throw off their oppressors. This may seem so unlikely to any observer of the contemporary scene that they are tempted to dismiss out of hand such a way of looking at organizational structures and class processes. However, the underlying insight may still be valid: just because contradictions do not seem likely to lead to capitalist failure in any foreseeable future, it does not mean that the underlying fault lines are not there and do not need to be taken account of in any realistic organization theory. And as Desai ( 2002 ) has pointed out, there are characteristics in the dominant forms that capitalism is coming to take in the twenty-first century that are far from inconsistent with the long-term analysis in Marx's writing.

Marxian thinking has perhaps had its greatest impact on organization theory in the analysis of trends in the shaping of labor processes in modern organizations (Grugulis et al. 2000 –1; Spencer 2000 ; see also Chapter 8 below). This analysis of trends in the design, control, and monitoring of work activities by managers (acting as agents of the capital-owning class to extract surplus value from the labor activity of employees) was stimulated by Braverman's ( 1974 ) argument that the logic of capitalist employment relations has led to a general trend towards the deskilling, routinizing, and mechanizing of jobs across the employment spectrum. In his influential book, he wrote of the role of people like personnel managers as ‘the maintenance crew for the human machinery:’ ‘personnel departments and academics have busied themselves with the selection, training, manipulation, pacification and adjustment of “manpower” to suit the work processes’ ( 1974: 87 ). Subsequent thinking, however, whilst working within the same radical tradition as Braverman, has recognized that capitalist interests are better served by upgrading work in some circumstances and by downgrading it in others (Friedmann 1977 ; Edwards 1979 ). This insight can be incorporated into broader critical thinking about HRM by considering ways in which HR strategists will tend to lean towards ‘low commitment, direct control, human resourcing practices when employee constituencies are perceived as creating low strategic uncertainty ’ and towards ‘high commitment, indirect control, human resourcing practices when employee constituencies are perceived as creating high strategic uncertainty ’ (Watson 2004 : 458).

Marxist thinking has perhaps not had as significant a direct impact on theorizing about HRM as it has had on academic industrial relations (Hyman 1989 ). But its indirect influence is there in all those approaches which pay attention to the indeterminacy of employment relationships and to the structural conflicts of interest which pervade them (e.g. Boxall 1992 ; Coff 1997 ; Evans and Genadry 1999 ; Purcell and Ahlstrand 1994 ). Marxist thinking also informs the ‘currently popular distinction between the rhetoric and reality of HRM in contemporary debates’ which ‘essentially replays an identical relationship between ideological practice and the truth’ to that seen in Marxist discourse (Barratt 2003 : 1071). Legge illustrates this Marxian tendency when she analyzes HRM rhetoric, for example, as ‘masking the intensification and commodification of labor’ ( 1995 : 325). Although it was recast in Weberian terms as an example of the paradox of consequences, there was an echo of Marx in the Watson ( 1977 ) account of the societal role of personnel management as one caught up in managing some of the ‘contradictions of capitalism.’

6.5.4 The Post-Structuralist and Discursive Strand

The post-structuralist element of social thought, closely connected to ‘postmodern’ thinking, treats human and social reality as if it were a text—a set of signs which are not tied into any kind of pre-existing reality. The implication of this is that there is no basic truth outside language and that there is no reality separate from the ways in which we write and talk about the world. Thus, as Westwood and Linstead put it with regard to organizations, ‘Organization has no autonomous, stable or structural status outside the text that constitutes it’ ( 2001: 4 ). This means, Reed observes, that any ‘quest for universal, scientific generalizations or principles of organization and management, that has played a dominant role in organization theory's historical and intellectual development, is firmly rejected in favor of a much more relativist and political conception of knowledge production and diffusion’ (2005: 1623). The post-structuralist theorist who has had the greatest impact on organization theory has been Foucault, and central to the parts of his work that have been taken up by writers on work and organization has been his emphasis on ‘decentring the human subject.’ This entails rejecting any concept of an autonomous thinking and feeling human subject with an essential and unique personality or ‘self.’ The human being's notion of ‘who and what they are’ is shaped by the discourses which surround them. These discourses exert power over people by creating the categories into which they are fitted: ‘the homosexual,’ ‘the criminal,’ the ‘mentally ill,’ for example (Foucault 1980 ). Such categories not only define for people ‘who they are’ but lay down the ways in which people are to be treated by others.

The relevance of these insights to issues of human resourcing is fairly obvious. Discourses are society's statements of ‘truth and knowledge’ and, as McKinlay and Starkey ( 1998 ) put it, these are the means whereby ‘society manages itself.’ There is a potential, then, for theorizing HRM in these terms: as a set of statements of truth and knowledge through which people's subjectivities are managed in modern societies. This has been taken up by Townley who analyzes HRM as a ‘discourse and technology of power that aims to resolve the gap inherent in the contract of employment between the capacity to work and its exercise and, thereby, organize workers into a collective, productive power or force’ ( 1994: 138 ). Findlay and Newton ( 1998 ) focus on appraisal practices to demonstrate the insights that Foucauldian thinking has to offer and Barratt ( 2003 ) puts forward a spirited defense of Foucauldian perspectives on HRM and HRM-related issues in response to its critics. Legge ( 1995 ) looks at the discourse of HRM in a similar manner and has also utilized post-structuralist ideas of deconstruction (Derrida 1978 ) to enable readers of HRM to ‘take apart the texts and stories of the advocates of human resource management’ to bring out their paradoxes, contradictions, and absences (2001: 53).

Discourse analysis, it should be noted, is not only used by organization theorists following a post-structuralist line of argument (see Alvesson and Karreman 2000 ; Grant et al. 1998 , 2004 ). Watson ( 2001 b ) used a concept of discourse to identify two rival ways in which human resourcing issues were understood and acted upon in a large business organization and Francis and Sinclair have applied it to cases of ‘HRM-based change’ ( 2003 ).

6.6 Conclusions: Theorizing HRM with Resources from Organization Theory

It was suggested earlier that the way forward in the relationship between organization theory and HRM might be one in which pragmatic pluralist principles are followed. This would mean that, within an ontologically and epistemologically consistent framework, concepts are drawn from the various theoretical traditions or ‘strands’ to deepen our understanding of HRM practices. Table 6.1 summarizes the above analysis of the various strands of organization theory which have had an impact on HRM. And, in its right-hand column, the table identifies some of the ideas that can be brought together from the four strands to analyze HRM practices and events.

The theoretical resources set out in the right-hand column of Table 6.1 do not constitute a complete ‘theory of HRM.’ What is provided here is nevertheless inevitably informed by the broader theorizing of personnel and HR institutions developed by the present author. That theorizing has occurred in the context of attempting to make sense of and explain events observed in detailed case-study research on the shaping of HR strategies in ‘real life’ (as opposed to textbook idealizations) practices of employing organizations. The analysis of strategic changes in a case study business (Watson 2004 , 2005 ) attempts to go beyond what is typically produced in the mainstream HRM literature and handles—and relates to each other—both the ‘micro’ and the ‘macro’ aspects of HRM processes. Attention is paid to the detailed roles played by specific organizational actors with their particular personal values, career interests, and organizational situations. But these issues in the case study business are analytically located within and related to a global political economy and a broader societal culture in which matters like class, gender, and occupation are shown to play an important part. Similarly, the theorizing pays attention to the interplay between material interests and structures of domination, on the one hand, and matters of language and discursive practice on the other. And, further, the theorizing is sensitive to the interplay between constraining/enabling circumstances and contingencies, on the one hand, and managerial and personal choices on the other.

The style of organizational theorizing advocated here is a critical and a social scientific one. This fits with the general trend whereby organization theory has broken free from its earlier managerialist anchor and its concern with making organizations more competitive or effective. HRM writers, it would seem, have been reluctant to sever these ropes (Watson 2004 ). Hence, it can be argued that there needs to be more utilizing of critical social science thinking generally and non-managerialist organization theory specifically in the study of HRM. But in no way whatsoever is this to argue for HRM research and writing which lacks relevance for people with a practical involvement in HRM. Nobody at all is helped by analyses that confuse the ‘is’ and the ‘ought’ of HR practices. In the final analysis, good theory tells us about ‘how things work in the world.’ And if organization theory can help us produce ‘good theories’ about how HRM processes ‘work’ in practice then it will be of equal relevance and value to everyone involved with HRM. It will equally inform the thinking and the actions of people who want to develop HRM skills, people who want to challenge HRM institutions, and people who simply want to reflect in a detached and scholarly manner upon HRM institutions and practices.

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Human Resource Management Theory and Its Inspiration

• Yanping Liu 3 , 4 &
• Yongzhong Tang 4  
• First Online: 02 November 2023

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The enterprise’s view as a living organism is a fundamental assumption of evolutionary economics and a basic premise of Enterprise organization engineering. Considering the enterprise organization as a living organism, the seed cells that constitute the most basic unit of the enterprise organization are necessarily the various talents in the enterprise organization. Therefore, human resource management theory, which specializes in the research of skill and its role, have also become critical theoretical sources of Enterprise organization engineering. This chapter of this book introduces human resource management theory and its inspiration to enterprise organization engineering, includes history of human resource management development (human resource concepts, background and origin, establishment, development status, development prospects), main premise assumptions (X-hypothesis, Y-hypothesis, Z-hypothesis), main research content (strategic human resource management, multinational human resource management, research on human resource management performance measurement methods, human resource management process design), inspiration of human resource management theory for Enterprise organization engineering (inspiration of key elements, inspiration of research objectives, inspiration of application methods).

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Drucker, P.F. The Practice of Management [M]. New York, NY: Harper Business, 1954.

Mc Gregor, D. The Human Side of Enterprise [J]. Academy of Management Review, 1957, 11.

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Liu, Y., Tang, Y. (2023). Human Resource Management Theory and Its Inspiration. In: Enterprise Organization Engineering. Springer, Singapore. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-981-99-1094-6_6

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