OWT.

223 2016

The Origins and Cultural Vitality

of “Human Resource Management”
THE ARGUMENT
In a sense, the story of Human Resource Management (HRM) is one of the simplest and most
predictable of all: HRM grew over the last thirty years not as a result of some intellectual or
conceptual breakthrough by management ‘scholars’, but rather because it has been one of the
best, most subtle, and most effective vehicles of cultural communication and exchange
between ‘management’ (in the sense of a quasi ‘technical’ profession concerned with
administering the affairs of productive systems – in other words, management as ‘business
administration’), and the explosive growth of pop-culture from 1980s onwards.

Thus, despite being yet another one of vacuous contributions of management ‘thinking’,
HRM is one of its most spectacular cultural successes. From the most modest conceptual
beginnings, HRM has grown into a discursive formation with the broadest and most
sophisticated diffusion of all managerial idioms, both within organisations and outside them.

The question is, of course, how was/is this possible? What is underway in this process? The
preliminary and incomplete answer is simple: because HRM became one of the most
effective public communications dimensions of managerialism. In other words, through
HRM, management vocabularies can reach most directly the most sensitive part of the
contemporary economy: the exchange of ‘work’ between subjects and institutions. Put even
more simply, in directly Foucauldian terms, HRM crystallised as the most effective
promissory engine of managerialism in its most sensitive and fragile arenas: the valuation of
the human subject through work. It is able to pose, open up, answer, as well as allow for the
contestation of the simple but central question of our age: Who are we when we work?

HOW DID IT ALL HAPPEN? A BRIEF HISTORICAL OUTLINE

A. BEGINNINGS: THE LATE 1970S AND THE 1980S

HRM was originally an eminently American-British product – it really came out of two
regions in which the struggle over the value of ‘labour’ took a critical turn at the end of the
1970s. In genuine decline, both US and UK managerial frameworks stuttered and faltered
faced with the advance of both Germany and Japan, quickly followed by other Asian
economies. A real double blow, in fact: not only seeming to lose economic ground very
rapidly, but also to the recently vanquished mortal enemies of the second world war. Insult
and injury at once…

Scrambling for an answer, top academic management circles in the US felt the pressure to
explain and respond to this process of decline. More or less grudgingly, academics from top
business schools began to produce some kind of programmes for the re-articulation of
America’s ability to manage production productively, to regain some sense of direction
towards survival and, possibly, growth. The outcome was that management thinkers
(Harvard was the first place to go public) felt that they had to speak in new ways, to invent

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new managerial objects and new modes of intervention. They began to accept that the
rationalist fantasies and obsessions of management academic construction in the 1950s and
1960s, the fantasy of being ‘like the engineers’ 1, had to be pushed into the background of
managerial discourse (they are still central but less obvious), and that new motifs had to
become central and visible. In this, they turned to a sort of mimesis. If Japan cannot be
defeated, it has to be joined. So, what does Japan do so well? Now, that was not an easy
question to answer – especially for the Americans. Japan resembled nothing of the cultural
style of American business, nor did it share much of the overall economic history of America
and its European satellites. So how does one imitate a source that is entirely strange? The
answer is: always badly. Except that in this case the poor, indeed utterly mistaken, Western
interpretation of Japanese work, management, and institutional life and culture was not going
to lead to a bad outcome. Quite the contrary. What happened was not unpredictable:
Western interpretations of the ‘Japanese Miracle’ locked onto a theme that was not in itself
mistaken: the core factor of success was understood to be a specific culture in Japanese
organisations. That much was, in fact, right. But here the misinterpretation began: Japanese
work cultures were seen to place the human subject at the centre of all systems of production,
from the micro-controls of details of work, to the general macro-institutional framework, it
seemed to Western eyes that these businesses had focussed on placing the self, or subjectivity,
at the centre of management. And not just any sense of ‘self’, but an empowered,
participative, committed, expressive self. In Total Quality Management, in Kaizen, or
Quality Circles, the participative-committed subject seemed to be the key ingredient – and of
course this struck the Anglo-American West as a radically new kind of relationship in the
workplace.

Used to the conflictual setup of industrial relations (IR), in which labour and management
where always enemies with regard to the employment contract, Western observers thought
that what they saw in Japan was the very opposite. Let me go back once more to the Western
economic crisis and the reactions to it. As management systems in the West could no longer
cope with the different facets of the downturn in productivity and competitiveness, it seemed
that the ‘Japanese miracle’ had turned the economic world order on its head. The work
atmosphere in the US and UK was marked by a pincer movement against trade unions
(clearly marked in the UK) on the one hand, and by explicit calls from figures such as
Margaret Thatcher for managers to reclaim the ‘right to manage’ on the other. Len Collinson
(then Managing Director of Financial Times) voiced this predicament on the 5th of January
1981:

Managers for twenty years have had a buffeting and beating from government and
unions and we have been put in a can’t win situation…we have an opportunity now
that will last for two or three years. Then the unions will get themselves together
again; and government, like all government, will run out of steam. So grab it now. We
had a pounding and we are all fed up with it. I think it would be fair to say that it’s
almost a vengeance.

I chose this expression because its tone is so aggressive and so uncompromising. It may give
the impression that what was to be expected was a major confrontation between employers
and workers with the power balance reversed in management’s favour. It became clear that
the most forceful imperative for overcoming the Western business decline was to find new

1
Yehouda Shenhav, Manufacturing Rationality: The Engineering Foundations of the Managerial Revolution
(Oxford University Press, USA, 2002).

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modes of engaging human subjects in work. But this was no simple question: should controls
be tightened Tayloristically, or should there be space for people to freely express themselves
in work? The interesting dynamic here was that, despite calls for revenge, work
organisations were turned into conduits for human self-expression as the proper
determination of human resourcefulness, as opposed to structures of control, confinement and
restriction of labour within tight systems of production.

What emerged in actual fact was paradoxical: the antagonism prefigured in calls to
managerial ‘vengeance’ for years of trade unionist power did not materialise as a struggle
between ‘classes’ within the workplace. Quite the contrary: management circles reinterpreted
the critical situation as one calling for unity – new and ‘strong organisational cultures’
became the mantra. The discursive register in which the overcoming of crises was
conceptualised in management did not go down the route of a new culture of confrontation.
A new tone was adopted: organisations, as social-cultural bodies, had to find a new common
core of meanings, a new cultural rationality, in which work ought to no longer be seen as a
rather meaningless and adverse participation in a soulless production machine. The emphasis
fell on mobilising work in its human form, on overcoming the view that labour is simply an
abstract ingredient of Tayloristically rationalised mass-production systems.

This was the new kind of ‘management thought’ that went into making HRM what it is today.
This link lies in the way in which the authors of the original HRM models, the circles of
practitioners who adopted them, and the consultants who continued to disperse them reached
(in their search for an answer) to the cultural context that had already made self-expression
the crucial value of life in post-war Western societies and which was already central to the
cultural sphere of consumption. In fact, what aided management circles in this process was
not really the need to overcome the economic or business crises in the West, but two more
powerful cultural crises that were as visible and yet unnoticed in management thought. On
the one hand, what was taking place at the very same time was a crisis of legitimacy of
collective labour movements (the UK case is very illustrative in this sense – especially visible
in the strikes of the winter of 1978-79). Trade unions had overextended their claims and their
power – much of the cultural instinct in Western societies was no longer sustaining such
claims to power. And, on the other hand, something much deeper compounded this process:
a profound crisis of legitimacy of the ‘working class’ lifestyle – the coming of age of mass-
consumerism had allowed the genuine aspirations of the working classes to be expressed.
The desire to overcome an ‘inferior position’ became historically manifest (especially in the
1980s) as a very powerful social and cultural movement towards the middle-class, towards
bourgeois ground.

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Management circles were not explicitly aware of the complex cultural affinities between their
response to the ‘problem of work’ and the culture
from which they drew the resources for their
answer: the turn to subjectivity and self-
expressiveness in work. The cultural economy of
work which ensued and led to the consolidation of
HRM thrives however on this affinity:
organisational performance relies on the self-
expression of working subjects – once again the all
too well-known and sinister motto “Work makes
free” came to the surface. But this time it was
demanded as a cultural necessity in order to make
sense of a new sense of freedom as the freedom to
demand not just work, but the power of the self in
work.

This provided a new legitimation of the managerial ‘right to manage’

after the crises of the 1970s. New cultural resources enter the managerial
arsenal and a dispersion of its cultural boundaries ensues. The human
subject and its attributes become the backbone of managerial
vocabularies and practices: organisational cultures, participation, Quality
Circles, TQM, empowerment, commitment, teamwork, organisational
learning and self-development, creativity, knowledge, talent, self-
actualisation and self-realisation, excellence or wellness, to mention but
a few, became central to the new management idea that there is a deep
equation between performance and personal affirmation through work.
When organisations began to affirm ‘People are our most important asset’
this was not an empty slogan; rather it led to the emergence and
development of a sophisticated system of managing the employment
relationship whose centre of gravity was (and is) the increasing
importance given to attributes of subjectivity.

The functional aspects of people management (recruitment and selection, control and
motivation, training and development, strategy and planning) began to revolve around a new
foundational logic in HRM: productivity, profitability, efficiency, effectiveness have become
dependent upon a new economy of subjectivity (a new sense of the ‘H’ in ‘HRM’). Only if
human subjects intensify their contribution as selves can human resources enhance the
production process and lead the organisation to success – this is behind the omnipresent
slogan ‘people are our most important asset’ (which itself becomes institutionalised in
initiatives such as ‘Investors in People’ – look for the certificate in visible places in
organisations). Arguably, control migrates (through the codification of subjectivity in
endless managerial idioms) from organisational structures toward self-control: does this
represent a new kind of tyranny though, a tyranny of ‘self-work’? Or is ‘self-work’ an
entirely different kind of engagement with work, life and identity?

What emerged from the crucible of the 1980s was a new ‘mix’ of principles and techniques
of people management that grew steadily and substantially. What does this mix look like?
As a mere list, it is very long and keeps growing: managing organisational cultures,
participation, Quality Circles, TQM, empowerment, teamwork, commitment, motivation,
self-actualisation and self-realisation at work, continuous learning, continuous personal

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development, Human Resource Management, Human Resource Development, core

competences, organisational learning, BPR, Total Performance Systems, Lean Six Sigma, the
knowledge economy, knowledge work and knowledge management, talent and talent
management, organisational citizenship, excellence, emotional intelligence, programmes for
‘wellness’, and indeed for ‘happiness at work’, ‘work hard/play hard cultures’, work as fun,
etc.

B. CONSOLIDATION: THE 1990S

The 1990s marked a new stage in the development of HRM. It began to produce in
accelerated fashion new responses to the new context of engagement between self and work.
HRM began to speak more confidently and rapidly found a good enemy for itself, an
asymmetrical counterpart – to use Koselleck’s analytic framework. HRM found itself in a
process of fighting against, and reoccupying what was already a viable system of existing
institutional structures: the domain of ‘Personnel Management’. ‘Personnel Management’,
the old label, functioned as an effective antagonist for HRM. Following a long period of
suspicion and struggles between capital and labour in the West, Personnel could easily be
represented as the mere administrator of that suspicion, as a domain of confrontations,
conflicts, and therefore of irrelevance for the new imperatives of organisational performance
combined with personal fulfilment. Personnel Management functioned well as a paradigm to
be overcome and HRM offered precisely the necessary premise of that overcoming: a
unitarist, vibrant set of cultural themes reframing the engagement between employees and
organisations on the basis of a new cultural bond between subjectivity and work. The history
of HRM as a new way of thinking about, and structuring, people management cannot be
separated from its original antagonist. The very existence of an antagonist allowed a clearer
mapping of HRM’s novelty. The contrasts between HRM (as a ‘new’ programme) and
Personnel (as an ‘old’ variety) made possible several key distinctions whose appeal shaped
the HRM agenda in an essential way.

The first was the incorporation and integration of HRM with strategic management. From a
cultural viewpoint, HRM was successful in projecting subjectivity (in the form of
commitment, culture, or congruence) into a strategic position. This was to prove an essential
gain in HRM’s viability as a long-term approach to management.

A second fundamental dimension of HRM’s consolidation by contrast to Personnel was that

its integration into overall corporate strategy led to a reconsideration of expenditure on
human resources as investment in human capital rather than mere expense. The relationship
between company performance, strategy and ‘people’ (‘our greatest asset’, as the mantra
goes) became a dominant theme within HRM. It led to the emergence of new structures of
involvement, participation, evaluation, development and care. If maximising productivity
was a function of intensifying the contribution of people’s committed efforts then new ways
of organisation-wide human integration were required. HRM became the legitimate site for
finding the ‘fit’ between strategy, competitive advantage, and human performance.

Thirdly, HRM rapidly intensified this logic of organisational expansion and justified itself as
a component of every kind of management system: HRM was no longer simply the job of the
‘HR manager’, but the job of every manager – and mainly the job of line-managers. How
could it be otherwise? To recruit, motivate, develop, train, socialise, control, reward,
promote people: who could do this better than the direct line managers of any organisation?

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Everybody is an HR manager now! But better still: everybody ought to be her or his own HR
manager now!

C. TRIUMPH: THE 2000S AND THE CULTURAL DIFFUSION OF HRM THROUGH, AND
IN, POPULAR CULTURE

‘Who is not an HR manager today?’ – so could ask any sensitive observer of the kinds of
vocabularies through which HRM has grown and through which it has consolidated its grip on
the managerial imaginary. Except it might be that its grip goes beyond the managerial
imaginary. Let me put this in a scheme:

The outcome has become more and more intense. Over these three decades, HRM has
become increasingly subtle and supple. If we take any concrete aspect of HRM today,
literally any aspect, immanent in every part, every theme, and every key word of HRM (as a
regime of producing an ideatic outline of work) is to be found a whole. Close word-for-word
reading of any HRM text or image will bring out this whole to which these fragments belong.
This whole offers up one constant image: HRM stands for the attempt in contemporary
managerialism to outline work as a process of self-realisation – in other words, to link work
and life in a specific way. This is the main cultural function of HRM – to give form to work

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today. In essence, HRM provides a synthesis, an original one, which brings work forth in the
form of self-realisation – in other words, it gives work a ‘vitalistic’ character.

The core ideas of this synthesis are:

a. First, HRM has put the subject in its concrete positivity

at the centre of work/labour. What do we mean? The
subject of HRM, the ‘Self’, is reconceptualised as a
source of immanent forces and energies, of
potentialities, energies which make the ‘self’ in itself a
store of human resourcefulness. The relationship
between work and subject is thus configured and
presented as an ‘opportunity’ for the subject to work
upon itself, in order to release its own inner potential.
How are the subject and its interiority predicated? They
are predicated as infinite resources. Creativity,
innovation, knowledge, talent (to mention but a few) are
always immanent possibilities for the subject to
‘actualise’. These possibilities may change thus giving
the appearance of ‘fads and fashions’ but the movement
of the subject in its attempt to command these
possibilities is their underlying principle.

b. Secondly, HRM has made work into a positive

opportunity for self-expression and self-realisation rather than self-renunciation. If the
interiority of the subject is such a rich and unlimited source of potential, the subject
cannot but be invited to express and realise it. This interiority of course is not confined
to the work organisation. HRM has made work part of the whole life of the modern
subject and it has abolished the irreducible contradiction of work and life as it was
largely perceived until its emergence.

c. Thirdly, HRM has made work virtually therapeutic. Work is presented as a service to
oneself, not a disservice. As the now ubiquitous systems of ‘performance appraisal’
(or developmental reviews) illustrate, work is forced to become therapeutic – you must
want to improve, you must seek to perfect yourself – and this is nothing else than a
claim to the release of ‘your inner energy’, as expression of life itself. This is in a sense
how management comes to the fore as a form of justice – “righting” things up, curing,
and improving.

d. Fourthly, the expression of individual energy is not presented as a form of social

isolation but rather as a direct element, a direct participation in the expression of the
force of a collective whole: the ‘organisation’. This is why organisations are
obsessively presented, and conceived of, as cultural systems managed in order to
facilitate human self-expression both individually and collectively – as receptacles of
‘love’ or ‘care’, as conduits of that horrible word ‘synergy’.

e. Finally, HRM has opened up managerialism to the entire range of popular cultural
sensibilities and concepts – that it has allowed its conceptual extension into the entire
realm of contemporary culture.

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CONCLUDING NOTES
What is then the success of this aspect of management discourses today – HRM? Is there a
core condition that made possible its rise and increased cultural power? The answer is not to
be found in HRM as such, but in stepping out, and back, from it into a broader historical
context. The core condition for its appearance and evolution is something deeper that
belongs to the ground of modernity, to the ‘spirit of our time’. It is the strange, ambiguous
and contradictory relationship to work of modern ‘man’. Work is the centre of the modern
condition, but it is an uncomfortable centre: does work make free? Is work the condition of
human freedom? Surely work must be the very denial of freedom in the name of a servitude
to the demands of the production of things – but production and more production is what
delivers ‘man’ from servitude… how are we to orient ourselves in this set of contradictory
but equally legitimate questions?

The answer is not simple. There is no final orientation to be found in any programme. But
there are always the questions of work and of freedom, relentless, and forever generating
excitement and suspense. Their power lies in the fact that they have no answer: we expect
both work and freedom to increase their range, to deliver ‘more’ of themselves, to always
find a ‘better’ balance – to not demand too much of us, but also to excite us more and more.
It is precisely from this conceptual strength of the indeterminacy of the relationship of work
and freedom that HRM draws its vitality. The indeterminacy of the value of ‘work’, from its
most minute details to its whole ‘meaning’ (whatever that is for any of us), provides HRM
with its space of managerial action.

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