Are humans resources?

The Authors

Kerr Inkson, Waikato Management School, University of Waikato, Hamilton, New Zealand

Acknowledgements

This article is adapted from K. Inkson, “Are humans resources? A view from career studies”, a paper presented at the Australian and New Zealand Academy of Management, Canberra, December 2005, where it won the Best Paper Award in the stream of Human Resource Management, sponsored by Latrobe University Faculty of Law and Management. The author is grateful to Ken Parry for his encouragement of the development of this paper, and to Michael Arthur for a commentary that enabled substantial improvements to be made.

Abstract

Purpose – This paper aims to offer a critique, from a career studies perspective, of the common term “human resource management.”

Design/methodology/approach – Provides a literature review and critique.

Findings – The term “human resource management” is a metaphor that presents employees as passive commodities or assets rather than as active agents, and thereby potentially de-humanizes them. In an alternative view based on career studies, individual employees are active agents utilizing the resources of employing organizations to pursue personal goals. Alternative terms to “human resource management” are suggested.

Research limitations/implications – There is scope for study of the effects of “human resources” terminology on employees' and others' view of and attitude to the human resource management function.

Practical implications – Examination of “human resources” discourse may promote examination of the implications of current discourse for practice, facilitate moderation of practice, and stimulate the search for new discourse and new practice, by both organizations and individuals.

Originality/value – This paper questions a prevailing and widely accepted form of discourse in management and advocates change.

Article Type:

Viewpoint

Keyword(s):

Human resource management; Careers; Metaphors.

Journal:

Career Development International

Volume:

Number:

Year:

2008

pp:

270-279

Copyright ©

Emerald Group Publishing Limited

ISSN:

1362-0436

Introduction

“Human resource management” has really caught on as a burgeoning area of management and as a favorite topic of business students, many of whom, in their early 20s, are very keen to become what they call “aitch-arr managers”. I feel my skin crawling slightly. Is that what we are – resources?

A resource is:

The means available to achieve an end, fulfill a function or a stock or supply that can be drawn on (Allen, 1996).

In common usage of the term, therefore, resources are passive objects to be utilized by superior agents. Thus:

… to call a person a resource is already to tread dangerously close to placing that human in the same category with office furniture and computers (Greenwood, 2002, p. 261).

Unlike office furniture and computers, of course, employees are often free to negotiate their terms of employment with the employer, and free to leave and join competing organizations if they choose. So why do we term them “resources”?

The term “resource” is a metaphor. And since Morgan's (1986) seminal work on Images of Organization, metaphors have enjoyed increasing use as a means of organizational analysis (e.g. Cornelisson, 2005). Multiple metaphors denote multiple shades of meaning, multiple realities. Conversely, a single metaphor – such as human resource – employed consistently in discourse can lead to stereotypical images of its referents. But “resource” is only one metaphor among many that one might apply to people working in organizations. Alternatives frequently heard in organizational discourse are “troops”, “team”, “family”, “loyal company servants”, and “labor force”. Each of these, like “human resources”, refers to the employees of an organization. Yet each has quite different connotations from the others. Why has the organizational world chosen to standardize around the “resource” metaphor, and what are the implications?

The point is not trivial. Some might argue, “what does it matter what we call it, as long as everyone knows what it means?” But the words we use substantially influence our perceptions of the world, and our actions. The notion of “resource” creates its own discourse both at work and across society. The discourse of employees as integrated components in a broad mass of “human resources” is now commonplace, in academic as well as in business and popular media. The more we are told we are resources, the more managers – the users of resources – and employees may come to accept it, and to behave accordingly. While I have anecdotal evidence that some HR managers are concerned about the issue and often discuss it, the academic community, surprisingly for the supposed “critic and conscience of society”, has had little to say about it. The purpose of this short paper, therefore, is to question the human resource metaphor and associated discourse, and to seek alternatives.

The resource-based view of the firm

The idea that people can and should be managed by organizations as resources is best embodied academically in the theoretical position known as the resource-based view of the firm (Wright et al., 2001; Boxall and Purcell, 2003). According to this view, a firm's competitive advantage is based on the strategic accumulation and deployment of unique bundles of resources. While a firm's physical resources, such as finance and plant, are part of the mix, in a knowledge-based economy its people-based “core competencies” are critical. Note, however, that it is not the person that is the real resource, but the knowledge and expertise the person possesses:

Capabilities evolve and must be managed dynamically in pursuit of above-average returns … core competencies developed, nurtured and applied in the firm may result in strategic competitiveness (Hill et al., 2004, p. 20).

Metaphorically, employees are therefore the compost in a kind of hothouse in which the employer can grow, or perhaps breed, competencies for profit. It is knowledge, skills, and capabilities that are the real resources:

Employees are viewed as a capital resource that requires investment … people are perhaps the only sustainable source of competitive advantage … when human capital investments are successful … continuous learning and leveraging the firm's expanding knowledge base are linked with strategic success … viewing employees as a resource to be maximized rather than a cost to be minimized facilitates the successful implementation of a firm's strategies (Hill et al., 2003, pp. 397–398).

Being recognized as an asset rather than a cost is, for ordinary employees, admittedly a step in the right direction. But somehow the quote above attributes all power to the mighty, knowledgeable investor-organization, and none to the energy, innovation and enterprise of employees. Maybe employers invest in employees, and shareholders have a legitimate expectation of maximization of value from the investment. But employees invest in their organizations too. If I am to contribute to the competitive advantage of my employing organization, I want to do so not as an asset invested in, but as an investor who actively chooses to do so for my own profit, intrinsic as well as material.

The use of the term “human resource” suggests that the employee is part of the company's stock, which can be drawn on, and developed, for organizational ends. The focus in management texts is on the development of a system – “HR planning”, “HR development” etc. – to access, mobilize and process the combined resources embodied in employees and direct them towards meeting organizational goals. The competencies managers seek to capture and develop by these means extend to the integration of different employees' capabilities within the broader organization, for example through teamwork, managerial systems, and company culture (Leonard, 1998), and the fostering of social capital through employees' networks (Fernandez and Castilla, 2000). Thus individual employees become conceptualized not even as resources in their own right, but as components integrated within a broader resource.

As far as implementation is concerned, Marchington and Wilkinson (2005) compare the “hard” and “soft” models of HRM (see also Legge, 1995). In the “hard” model:

The human resource is seen as similar to all other resources – land and capital for example – being used as management sees fit. Under this scenario, which stresses the “resource” aspect of HRM – there is no pretence that labor has anything other than commodity status … (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005, p. 6).

Some commentators argue for the “soft” model of HRM, which “requires managers to engender commitment and loyalty in order to ensure high levels of performance” (Marchington and Wilkinson, 2005, p. 6). But even here the language bespeaks passivity by the employee. It is managers who “engender” commitment and “ensure” performance, not employees who actively commit and perform. Many models and practices of HRM, of course, focus on improving organizational performance while simultaneously bettering the lot of employees (e.g. Pfeffer, 1998). But Greenwood (2002) notes that “many skeptical commentators have suggested that ‘soft HRM’ is just ‘hard HRM’ in disguise” (p. 264), and argues that the question is “not whether HRM is ethical, but whether it can be ethical” (p. 261). And there is plenty of evidence to suggest that HR experts themselves have considerable concerns about the utilitarian and depersonalizing aspects of their underlying philosophies, rhetoric and practice (Storey, 2001).

A view from career studies

In recent years I have focused my research on career studies. As I have shown elsewhere, careers too can be considered as resources, but there are many other metaphorical formulations of career underpinning different career theories and practices – for example one's career can be considered as an inheritance, a cycle, action, fit, a journey, a series of roles, a set of relationships, or a story (Inkson, 2004, 2007). Some of these alternative metaphors – for example action, journey, story – enable the individual to conceptualize him or herself as playing a more active part in the creation of the career than does the resource metaphor.

Considering and researching careers within a business school environment is therefore a satisfyingly subversive activity. Whereas organizational behavior and HRM typically construct a view of individuals from the perspective of the organization (e.g. how do we, the organization, motivate and lead individuals to contribute to our company goals?), career studies encourages construction of a view of organizations from the perspective of the individual (e.g. how do I, the individual, motivate and influence organizations to contribute to my personal goals?).

Careers are important in relation to human resource management, because examining careers over time enables one to see how resources can accumulate for organizational benefit as a result of learning. An organization that hires a new employee or contractor gains access to capabilities that that person has assembled over a series of prior educational, work and other life experiences. Organizations therefore hire and manage people as repositories of knowledge with learning capabilities (Bird, 1996). They seek to protect those resources by offering employees long-term organizational careers, to grow those resources by providing them with organizationally-relevant learning, and to deploy those resources for organizational benefit. Thus:

A career does not exist in a social vacuum but is in many ways directed by the employer's staffing priorities (Sonnenfeld, 1989, p. 202).

This formulation epitomizes the resource-based view of careers, asserts managerial control over employees and potentially disempowers them by attempting to expropriate their careers from them.

Here, there is a disjuncture between two careers literatures (see Gunz and Peiperl, 2007, for discussion). On one hand, the extensive HRM literature already referred to employs corporate notions about “career management” (i.e. organizational management of individual employees' careers) and the use of committed human resources to secure competitive advantage. It is written in business schools, from the perspective of the organization, for a clientele of managers (e.g. Baruch, 2004).

On the other hand, there is a considerable, and in fact much larger, literature about career choice and career development produced in schools of psychology, education and counseling, from the perspective of the individual, for a clientele of educators and career counselors (e.g. Brown, 2002). The latter literature focuses on the psychology of careers and the empowerment of the individual to appraise the world of employment (just as strategic managers appraise the world of business), and to use rational choices in pursuit of personal satisfaction and success. In this latter view of careers, organizations scarcely rate a mention. Instead the assumption is made that individuals control their own careers. Employees believe this too (Arthur et al., 1999).

Nowadays the business school literature in career studies is increasingly influenced by theories of self-directed “protean careers” (Hall 2002) and “boundaryless careers” (Arthur and Rousseau, 1996). These theories are based on their own metaphors of human behavior within and between organizations (Inkson, 2006), and provide a good account of career behavior in prototypical “new economy” situations such as project-based enterprise, contract work, and self-employment, and also show how workers can use their self-directed acquisition of valued skills and wide networks to develop new forms of career independently of employing organizations (Arthur et al., 1999). It is not that individuals are resources, more that they possess resources, which they may or may not choose to share with the organization and develop within it.

Changing views of HRM

There are signs that the field of human resource management is also beginning to recognize the new realities. For example, in successive editions of his textbook of HRM, Cascio (1995, 1998, 2003) has moved from:

A career is not something that should be left to each employee: instead it should be managed by the organization to ensure the efficient allocation of human and capital resources (Cascio, 1995, p. 310, italics added)

to:

A key feature of the new concept is that the company and the employee are partners in career development (Cascio, 1998, p. 308, italics added).

And then to:

A career is not something that should be left to chance. Instead, in the evolving world of work it should be shaped and managed more by the individual than by the organization (Cascio, 2003, p. 373, italics added).

The changing formulation suggests some rapid reconsideration of the issue of who should be in charge of the career. And in another standard HR textbook Stone (2005, pp. 370-407) reduces the “HR department's responsibility” for career planning and development to eight lines of text, and then devotes 10,000 words or so to individual strategies (including golf!) for promoting career success. But if each individual is in such active management of his or her own work life, is it any longer possible to consider that person as a passive resource?

Practical implications

Individuals

Organizations often provide their employees with massive opportunities for personal development, for example through strategic staffing, systematic selection and training, promotions, staff development, appraisal and assessment, and career development (Baruch, 2004). Thus, in an era of growing employee control of scarce career-based knowledge resources, the counterpoint of the employee's career being a resource available to the organization in reaching its organizational goals, is that the organization is a resource available to the employee in reaching his or her personal goals. This is true even if the career is destined eventually to move outside that particular organization. If organizations insist on considering employees primarily as resources rather than as partners, then they cannot complain if employees take the same approach to them.

HR management

The typical HR response to the growing power and energy of knowledge workers is one of accommodation. HR texts nowadays advocate the organization providing a supportive context for careers within which individuals may make their own choices. Organizational interests are protected through a unitarist perspective that asserts a comforting convergence of employer and employee interests. Thus:

Ideally, career planning and development should be seen as a process that aligns the interests and skills of the employee with the needs of the organization. This means careers must be managed strategically so the skills demanded by the organization's business objectives are understood (by the employee) and a workforce with a matching profile of skills is developed (Stone, 2005, p. 372).

But even this apparently even-handed statement subtly tilts toward acceptance of organizational control of the relationship. It is the employee who must bend his or her career to match the corporation's superior plans. In the knowledge economy, employees with scarce skills do not have to accept such a contract and might seek to rewrite it thus:

Ideally, personal planning and development should be seen as a process that aligns the activities and competencies of the organization with the needs of employees. This means career opportunities must be managed strategically (by individuals) so the experiences demanded by their career goals are understood by the organization and a business with a matching profile of opportunities is developed.

This statement means that managers may increasingly have to structure organizations around the careers and objectives of the people they want, not the other way round (Miles and Snow, 1996).

Three recent books support such a view. Rousseau's (2005) I-Deals focuses the power that individual employees have to utilize their own power to negotiate personal arrangements for their working conditions and development, spells out the notion of idiosyncratic deals (or “I” deals), and explores the implications for workplace justice and for HR management. At a more macro-level, Higgins' (2006) Career Imprints shows how a single organization – Baxter – spawned a whole generation of biotechnology companies by imprinting in its employees a conceptualization of entrepreneurship, strategy and structure that they carried with them in their ongoing boundaryless careers and used in the spawning of new companies: a classic case of careers creating organizations structures rather than the other way round. And in sharp contrast to the conventional picture of organizations utilizing their own staff and competing aggressively against each other in the management of knowledge, DeFillippi et al.'s (2006) Knowledge at Work puts forward the notion of a “knowledge diamond” consisting of four parties – community, industry, organization and individual – such that each interacts interdependently with the others in knowledge creation, development and utilization. Strategic and HR managers would do well to read such books and consider the implications of such concepts for their theory and practice.

There has been recent speculation about the relationship between organizational career management (OCM) and career self-management by the individual (CSM) (Sturges et al., 2002), with one suggestion being that far from being in opposition to each other the two can be combined, in well-managed organizations, into a “virtuous circle” of complementary career management activities (Sturges et al., 2002). Such a scenario, however, suggests that managers, including HR managers, need to become more conscious of the proactivity and idiosyncrasy of much current career behavior. While the need for organizations to conduct strategic planning in terms of considering long-term resources and to implement actions in pursuit of these plans is accepted, so too must be the reality that employees have an equal right of control over their own lives. In this scenario, the HR manager is not a manger of resources, but of relationships.

Research

A weakness in this critique is that it is impressionistic. Neither I nor, to my knowledge, others, have conducted studies on the prevalence and nature of human resource discourses or its effects on managerial or employee perceptions of their roles and relationships. Given the burgeoning popularity of studies of various forms of organizational discourse (Grant et al., 2004), this is somewhat surprising. Similarly the field of career studies contains only a few studies that comment critically on the pervasive discourses of career in everyday life (Gowler and Legge, 1989; Hirsch and Shanley, 1996). The prevalence of competing rhetorical discourses in everyday life, advocating on the one hand orderly organizational careers mediated by human resource management, and on the other liberated boundaryless careers pursued by autonomous individuals, is surely worthy of further investigation.

Nomenclature

Should the name “human resource management” be changed? Indeed, is it an issue worth spending time on? A reviewer of a previous version of this paper states that “this is a topic I have heard discussed at HR conferences for years”, indicating that at least some practitioners think so. What is more surprising is the almost universal and totally unquestioning acceptance of the term and its underlying discourse and practice by the academic fraternity, the supposed “consciences and critics of society”, in texts and journals of HRM.

One view, echoing Juliet's famous statement that “that which we call a rose, by any other name, would smell as sweet”, might be “what does it matter what we call it, as long as we all know what we mean?” Such a view is naïve, and ignores the huge and increasingly recognised power of discourse to reflect and shape business and organizational life (Grant et al., 2004).

A second view might recognize that a name sometimes live on institutionally, even if it now has connotations far removed from its origins[1]. In the case of HR management, presumably the label “personnel management” was not well entrenched in formal structures or attributed much status, and the notion of “human resources” with its link to the notion of top-level strategy making had overwhelming appeal. In support of this, another view would be that the most important thing about a name is accuracy of representation: if an organization adopts a thoroughgoing resource-based approach as its basic strategic stance, then to call its HR function, say, “team member relationships management” would be hypocritical. But I have anecdotal evidence that some members of the HR profession themselves feel uncomfortable with the label, for the reasons I have detailed in this article.

If HR management needs a new name, what should it be? Personally, I thought the predecessor term “personnel management” was fine, but I recognize that nowadays it may carry connotations of being a fringe, welfare-oriented, operational activity. “Knowledge management” is possible, but the notion of “knowledge” is much wider than the knowledge embodied in employees, and in any case the term has been appropriated by the IT fraternity (e.g. Rao, 2005). “Expertise management” would tie the knowledge idea more closely to individuals' skills, but paradoxically has a sterile, non-human feel to it. The currently popular term “talent management” (Lewis and Heckman, 2006) is better, particularly in its focus on higher-level workers; but articles with this label tend to use it as a new bottle to serve the old HRM wine.

Going back to the idea of alternative metaphors for the workforce of an organization – probably including the contractors as well as the employees – the concept of partnership appeals. The employee or contractor is a partner of the organization assisting it to meet its operational and strategic goals: conversely, the organization is a partner of employees and contractors assisting them to meet their personal and career goals. The idea of employees being partners with the organization rather than resources of it suggests, perhaps, “human partnership management” (HPM – note that it is the partnership not the partner that is managed). Another possibility, which places the term squarely in the employment arena and separate from, for example, personal relationships or customer relationships, is to use the term “employment partnership management”, or EPM. It is true of course, that such a label also has the potential to be used quite cynically by organizations to make relationships appear like partnerships which in actuality are much more one-sided. On the other hand, such a formulation is, I suggest, more in keeping with the continuing emancipation of workforces worldwide and the type of management which increasing numbers of today's organizations seek to practice.

Conclusion

I conclude, then, that the terms “human resource” and “human resource management” and the way of thinking about people at work that they embody and encourage appear to be increasingly dissonant with the new, non-hierarchical, network organizations and knowledge-based workers with self-directed careers of the twenty-first century. The result may be to encourage a depersonalized and dehumanized view of employment relationships and a presumptuous attempt by management at appropriation of control over individuals' careers.

Because of the public imagery involved, this issue affects not just employers, managers and employees, but the whole community. Mine is a very personal view of the matter: as a lifelong academic I have always felt that one of the key benefits of academic life was the fact that I have not been treated as a resource, but have been able to pursue my work and career as I wished, in the knowledge that my employing universities would be willing to work with me to find mutual benefit from my initiatives. It may be more difficult in other industries. Debate on this topic is welcomed.

References

Allen, R.E. (Ed.) (1996), Concise Oxford Dictionary, 8th ed., Clarendon Press, Oxford, .