Is HR in trouble?
   ‘After over two decades of extensive research, we are still 
    unable to answer core questions about the relationship 
    between human resource management and performance’ 
    (Guest 2011: 3)
   ‘The human resource management profession faces a crisis 
    of trust and a loss of legitimacy in the eyes of its major 
    stakeholders.  The two-decade effort to develop a new 
    “strategic human resource management” (HR) role in 
    organizations has failed to realize its promised potential of 
    greater status, influence, and achievement’.  (Kochan 2006)
   Ripe for critique, but on what basis?
   Delbridge: HRM research can address ‘its conservatism and 
    its irrelevance’...’through engagement more directly and 
    productively with proximate social science disciplines and, in 
    particular, critical management studies’ (2010)
   Critical Management Studies 
   and HRM: the culture burden
   Legge: Most HRM models emphasise the organisation’s culture 
    as the central activity for senior management – with HR 
    departments as primary agents of change 
   HRM is treated as a cultural construction seeking to refine the 
    meaning of work relations between employees and the 
    organisation: ‘a medium for manufacturing meaning in the 
    process of culture management’ (Keenoy and Anthony 1992: 
    237) 
   Alvesson and Karreman – a cultural-symbolic perspective
     HRM works not because it is technically efficient, but as a rationality 
     surrogate that creates ascription of positive meaning and suspension 
     of disbelief
   ‘From the mid-1980s onwards, the increasing emphasis on 
    culturally-based forms or organizational control – in which 
    symbolically-mediated bodies of regulation, monitoring and 
    disciplining at work became the major concern…’ (Reed 2010)
    The Foucauldian twist
    Soft HRM and corporate culture were linked to the shaping of employee 
     subjectivity and production of various ‘designer’ (Casey, 1995); 
     ‘engineered’ (Kunda, 1992) or ‘enterprising’ selves (du Gay 1996) 
    Emphasis on new disciplinary regimes ‘founded on the internalization of 
     self-regulation, calculation and control in which externally imposed 
     authority and discipline becomes much less significant’ (Grant et al, 
     1998: 202).
    Townley and HRM as a power-knowledge discourse: ‘HRM’s role in 
     providing a nexus of disciplinary practices aimed at making emplyees’ 
     behaviour and perfromance predicatble and cacluable..’ (1993: 538)
    Moving on from culture change, but the cultural techniques associated 
     with soft HRM continue to be associated with the supposedly successful 
     regulation of employee identity
      ‘Identity regulation encompasses the more or less intentional effects of social 
      practices upon processes of identity construction and reconstruction. Notably, 
      induction, training and promotion procedures are developed in ways that have 
      implications for the shaping and direction of identity’ (Alvesson and Willmott, 
      2002: 621).
   What’s wrong with this 
   critique?
   HRM does have a symbolic dimension, e.g. adoption or 
    promotion of ‘best practices’  or being a ‘good employer’ 
    can have an effect on share price (Palmer and Hardy 42)
   Assumes that the functioning of HRM can be found in its 
    discourse, and those discourses and technologies are 
    largely disconnected from context – as a will to 
    knowledge : the ‘re-reading of HRM’ (Townley 537) is 
    largely new languages for old practices
   One result – a complete lack of interest in the actual 
    effectiveness of  the ‘tools’ of HRM or the ‘truth or falsity 
    of discourse’ and therefore with ‘mainstream HRM’
   Limited engagement does not mean absence of 
    connection to mainstream HRM
   The terms of trade: HRM and the
   commitment model
  ‘Soft HRM’ and mutuality models, where commitment and 
   investment in human capital is seen as central to competitive 
   advantage (Appelbaum et al, 2001; Pfeffer 1994, 1998)
  Universalistic, best practice models - commitment model the 
   defining feature of HRM. It replaces the control or compliance 
   model: ‘’create the conditions for employees to display 
   internally self-driven initiative and take more responsibility for 
   monitoring their own behaviour’ (Wood 1995: 216). 
  Culture declines, branding emerges; geared primarily towards 
   corporate reputation, but employees encouraged to ‘live the 
   brand’
    ‘The identity of the firm as an employer. It encompasses the firm’s 
    value system, policies and behaviours toward the objectives of 
    attracting, motivating, and retaining the firm’s current and potential 
    employees’ (Ainspan and Dell, 2001: 3).